Britain – Page 8 – artdiamondblog.com

James Morrison Was a “Retailing Genius”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Morrison was not an inventor-capitalist but a retailing genius, more Sam Walton than Steve Jobs. He catered to England’s growing consumer class by diversifying his wares and, in his ever-growing network of shops, introducing luxurious showrooms. He was a disciple of volume, seeking “high turnover, small profits, and quick returns.” He sent his traveling men not to find buyers, as was typical, but to find the best suppliers. Advantageously purchased in bulk, goods would sell themselves. Morrison’s buyers were specialists, anticipating the practices of later department stores. He kept his finger on the pulse of fashion and on “market making” events. Legendarily, he was never caught short of black crepe when a member of the royal family was ill. “The Duke of York has died most conveniently,” he once quipped while tallying profits.
The “Napoleon of shopkeepers” went on to found his own merchant bank and accumulate a prodigious investment portfolio, much of it in American bonds. Strategic lending to broke aristocrats greased Morrison’s way into Parliament, where he served as a “radical Whig,” championing political reform and free trade.
. . .
. . . Morrison conducted both his retailing and his banking business with impeccable transparency. The investments he sold were honestly structured, and the risks he ran were his own, backed by sufficient collateral. Morrison’s was an era before bailouts, an era of some moral luck but little moral hazard. Markets rose and fell with reasonably predictable effects. For him and many of his contemporaries, credit remained a personal matter of the highest consequence. In this, alas, a character such as Morrison now seems more alien than familiar.

For the full review, see:

JEFFREY COLLINS. “BOOKSHELF; King of the Shopkeepers; The lessons of a merchant prince and a brilliant retailer whose wool, linen, silk, thread and lace flew off the shelves.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 5, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Dakers, Caroline. A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

In 1800 the Life of a Peasant Was Not Pleasant

(p. 12) There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the (p. 13) simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window.
Oh please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 – not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbour’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is grey and gristly yet meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never travelled more than fifteen miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Father’s jacket cost him a month’s wages but is now infested with lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

Justice for He Who Taxed Unjustly

(p. 444) At the height of the agricultural crisis, the British government under the Liberals did an odd thing. It invented a tax designed to punish a class of people who were already suffering severely and had done nothing in particular to cause the current troubles. The class was large landowners. The tax was death duties. Life was about to change utterly for thousands of people, including our own Mr Marsham.
The designer of the new tax was Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, the chancellor of the exchequer, a man who seems not to have been liked much by anyone at any point in his life, including his own family. Known familiarly, if not altogether affectionately, as ‘Jumbo’ because of his magnificent rotundity, Harcourt was an unlikely persecutor of the landed classes since he was one of them himself. The Harcourt family home was Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, which we have visited in this book already. Nuneham, you may remember, was where an earlier Harcourt reconfigured the estate but failed to recollect where the old village well had been, fell into it and drowned. For as long as there had been (p. 445) Tories, the Harcourts had numbered themselves among them, so William’s joining of the Liberals was seen within his family as the darkest treachery. Even Liberals were startled by his tax. Lord Rosebery, the prime minister (who was himself a big landowner), wondered if some relief should at least be granted in those cases where two inheritors died in quick succession. It would be harsh, Rosebery thought, to tax an estate a second time before the legatee had had a chance to rebuild the family finances. Harcourt, however, refused all appeals for concessions.
That Harcourt stood almost no chance of inheriting his own family property no doubt coloured his principles. In fact, to his presumed surprise, he did inherit it when his elder brother’s son died suddenly, but heirlessly, in the spring of 1904. Harcourt didn’t get to enjoy his good fortune long, however. He expired six months later himself, which meant that his heirs were among the first to be taxed twice over in exactly the way that Rosebery had feared and he had dismissed. Life doesn’t often get much neater than that.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Karl Marx “Had Engels Embezzle Money for Him from His Father’s Firm”

(p. 419) One of the few figures who actively sympathized with the plight of the poor was also one of the most interestingly improbable. Friedrich Engels came to England at the age of just twenty-one in 1842 to help run his father’s textile factory in Manchester. The firm, Ermen & Engels, manufac-(p. 420)tured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman – eventually
he became a partner – he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London.
It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as Communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club – in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.
Engels’s patient support for Marx was little short of wondrous. In that milestone year of 1851, Marx accepted a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but with no intention of actually writing any articles. His English wasn’t good enough, for one thing. His idea was that Engels would write them for him and he would collect the fee, and that is precisely what happened. Even then, the income wasn’t enough to support his carelessly extravagant lifestyle, so he had Engels embezzle money for him from his father’s firm. Engels did so for years, at considerable risk to himself.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Black Death Microbe Same as in Middle Ages But Now Does Much Less Harm

Source of map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

If the Black Death microbe is the same today as in the Middle Ages, maybe the difference in effects is partly due to our better nutrition, health, hygiene, and housing?

(p. D4) The agent of the Black Death is assumed to be Yersinia pestis, the microbe that causes bubonic plague today. But the epidemiology was strikingly different from that of modern outbreaks. Modern plague is carried by fleas and spreads no faster than the rats that carry them can travel. The Black Death seems to have spread directly from one person to another.

Victims sometimes emitted a deathly stench, which is not true of plague victims today. And the Black Death felled at least 30 percent of those it inflicted, whereas a modern plague in India that struck Bombay in 1904, before the advent of antibiotics, killed only 3 percent of its victims.
. . .
If Yersinia pestis was indeed the cause of the Black Death, why were the microbe’s effects so different in medieval times? Its DNA sequence may hold the answer. Dr. Poinar’s team has managed to reconstruct a part of the microbe’s genetic endowment. Yersinia pestis has a single chromosome, containing the bulk of its genes, and three small circles of DNA known as plasmids.
The team has determined the full DNA sequence of the plasmid known as pPCP1 from the East Smithfield cemetery. But, disappointingly, it turns out to be identical to the modern-day plasmid, so it explains none of the differences in the microbe’s effects.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Hunting for a Mass Killer in Medieval Graveyards.” The New York Times (Tues., August 30, 2011): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 29, 2011.)

Reagan Fought “Tyranny” of Big Government

Former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, British Foreign Secretary William Hague and London statue of Ronald Reagan. Source of photo: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/7/4/1309780763409/London-statue-of-Reagan-u-001.jpg

The McCarthy mentioned in the passage quoted below is a California representative who also serves as majority whip.

(p. A9) The statue of a smiling Reagan, dressed in a crisp suit, was paid for by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation as part of a worldwide effort to promote his legacy, according to the organization’s executive director.
. . .
Though Mrs. Thatcher is in poor health and did not attend, she provided a statement that was read by Mr. Hague. “Through his strength and conviction,” she wrote, “he brought millions of people to freedom as the Iron Curtain finally came down.”
In a speech, Mr. McCarthy described Mr. Reagan’s fight not only against the forces of Communism, but against the “tyranny” of debt and big government. He and Mrs. Thatcher, he said, “did not move to the center to gather votes, they moved the center to them.”

For the full story, see:
RAVI SOMAIYA. “Finding a New Perch, Americana Takes a Stand in London.” The New York Times (Tues., July 5, 2011): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 4, 2011 and has the title “Statue of Reagan Is Unveiled in London.”)

Brits Sent Low Quality Goods to American Colonists

(p. 299) It was easy – and for many agents irresistibly tempting – to offload on to Americans clothes and furnishings that were unsold because they were no longer fashionable in England. ‘You cannot really form an idea of the trash that is to be found in the best shops,’ an English visitor named Margaret Hall wrote home to a friend. A cheerful catchphrase of English (p. 300) factories became: ‘It’s good enough for America.’ Being over-charged was a constant suspicion. Washington wrote furiously to Cary after one consignment that many of the products supplied were ‘mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had’.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Navigation Acts, Were “Insanely Inefficient, but Gratifyingly Lucrative to British Merchants and Manufacturers”

(p. 297) Many of Monticello’s quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson’s workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of home-grown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.
(p. 298) Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain’s export market. It took 80 per cent of British linen exports, 76 per cent of exported nails, 60 per cent of wrought iron and nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk, 11,000 pounds of salt and over 130,000 beaver hats, among much else. Many of these things – not least the beaver hats – were made from materials that originated in America in the first place and could easily have been manufactured in American factories – a point that did not escape the Americans.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

In Britain Ice Is Often Dispensed “as if It Were on Prescription”

(p. 73) In England, Wenham ice was more talked about than used. A few businesses took regular deliveries, but hardly any households (other than the royal one) did. By the 1850s not only was most ice sold in Britain not from Wenham, it wasn’t from America at all. The Norwegians – not a people one normally associates with sharp practices – changed the name of Lake Oppegaard, near Oslo, to Lake Wenham so that they could tap into the lucrative market. By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

“We Are All Dutchmen Now”

Source of the book image: http://yalepress.yale.edu/images/full13/9780300115475.jpg

(p. A15) Samuel Pufendorf, a 17th-century German historian, described the English people as “having been always inclined to rebellion and intestine commotion.” But England’s regime change in 1688–soon called “glorious”–was a revolution with a difference. Instead of overthrowing the existing order in violent upheaval, it put “government upon its ancient and proper basis, which the measures of a mad bigot had almost destroyed.” The “mad bigot” was, in this case, James II, the Stuart king (and a Catholic) who was deposed in favor of William of Orange, a Protestant from the Dutch Republic. Edmund Burke famously contrasted England’s balance of change and continuity in 1688 with the ferocity in France a century later.

In “1688: The First Modern Revolution,” Steve Pincus challenges this received account to argue that the Glorious Revolution marked a much greater break with history than Burke realized–and proved to be an emblem of the West’s future. James II, Mr. Pincus notes, sought to extend state power at the expense of Parliament and the privileges of local communities. James’s adversaries preferred the dynamism of commerce; they believed that wealth sprang from the limitless striving of human endeavor rather than the finite availability of land. France under Louis XIV provided James with a pattern for absolutism; the Dutch Republic provided his opponents with a commercial ideal. The Glorious Revolution is often seen as a clash between ”popery”–the term for authoritarian Catholicism–and ancient English liberties. But Mr. Pincus persuasively describes it as the collision of two ideas about the state in society. In a sense, he implies, we are all Dutchmen now.

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY. “Going Dutch; When a dynamic commercial ideal won out over centralized power.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., September 1, 2011): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated AUGUST 31, 2009.)

The book under review is:
Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale, 2009.

An alternative view is presented in a a book by Lisa Jardine (reference below). She argues that William of Orange was more interested in grabbing power than in promoting liberty. Her view is persuasively disputed in the following review by Andrew Roberts:
ANDREW ROBERTS. “A New William The Conqueror.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 28, 2008): A13.

The Jardine book is:
Jardine, Lisa. Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.