Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  The Huguenots flourished in England, assimilating and intermarrying into English society over time. Some of the wealthiest Huguenot family names are now so Anglicized that they are no longer recognized as foreign. This is true, for example, of the Bernard, Janssen, Chamier, Pettit, and Olivier banking families. (Mistakes by English clerks often played a role too. The “English” names Ferry and Fash were originally Ferret and Fouache, respectively.) But as with the Jews, the most important contribution Huguenots made to Britain was in finance.

  Between 1740 and 1763, England's national debt almost tripled because of its wars with France, reaching roughly £121 million in 1763. A striking one-fifth of this sum came from the “Huguenot international,” including both Huguenots who had settled in Britain and others—in Holland, Switzerland, and Germany—with whom they were closely connected. For obvious reasons, these exiled Huguenots preferred to bank in (and on) England rather than France. With their financial and rentier backgrounds in France, well-to-do Huguenots were apparently more willing to invest in English public funds than similarly situated Englishmen themselves, who were more likely to keep their money in land—or even “in a strong box in a house.”

  Despite the important role played by Anglo-Jews and Anglo-Huguenots, it would be absurd to suggest that they alone were responsible for Britain's ascendance to global dominance. Instead, as one historian puts it, their contributions were part of the “leaven” in Britain's rise.” Moreover, these contributions pale by comparison to the tremendous injection of economic and intellectual dynamism brought to England by another minority: the Scots.

  EMPIRE BUILDERS FROM THE “SINK OF THE EARTH”

  William Paterson was a “fast-talking Scot” born in a farmhouse in Dumfriesshire around 1658.12 As a young man, he made a fortune traveling in the Americas and the West Indies—doing what it is not entirely clear. He has been variously described as a churchman, businessman, and buccaneer, and he was probably all of these things. He was also a financial visionary. In 1694, during a stint in London, Paterson developed the original proposal for the Bank of England and became, along with a number of London merchants, one of its founding directors. But whereas the bank, his brainchild, went on to become the linchpin of Britain's global ascendance, Paterson fell out with his fellow directors and eventually returned to Edinburgh.

  At the time, Scotland's economy was traditional and largely rural. England's economy, by contrast, was booming through trade with its colonies and outposts all over the world and through injections of capital and entrepreneurialism supplied by new institutions like the Bank of England and the East India Company. Having founded the former, Paterson threw himself into outdoing the latter. In 1695 Paterson conceived the Darien scheme, which led to one of the most tragic chapters in Scottish history.

  Paterson persuaded the Scottish parliament to establish a Scottish colony in Panama, on the isthmus of Darien. The new colony would serve as a trading center linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Instead of having to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America, ships from Europe would simply unload their goods in Darien. The goods would then be transported to the other side of the narrow isthmus and reloaded onto different ships bound for Asia. As the middleman, the Scots would naturally charge a hefty commission on both sides. At the same time, Scotland would control “this door of the seas, and the key of the Universe.”

  The Darien scheme seemed so promising that it originally attracted investors not only from Scotland but from England and Holland as well. However, the English parliament, strongly lobbied by the East India Company, threatened legal action, even charging Paterson and his co-venturers with high misdemeanors, causing English and Dutch subscribers to withdraw. In response, thousands of outraged, patriotic Scots, high and low, rushed in to make up the shortfall. Aristocrats mortgaged their estates while commoners turned over their meager savings. In just two months, Paterson's company raised the entire amount needed to finance the venture—£400,000, nearly half the total money then circulating in Scotland. On July 18, 1698, five Scottish ships set sail for the New World, with Paterson and his family among the 1,200 passengers.

  It would be hard to imagine a more disastrous outcome. The romantic Paterson had described Panama—although he had never been there—as a land of milk and honey, inhabited by friendly natives eager to trade. As a result, the colonists were utterly unprepared for what they found: a malarial morass, torrential rains, and soil in which their seeds would not grow. Instead of sufficient food, they had brought five thousand bibles, four thousand powdered wigs, and, for trading purposes, thousands more mirrors and combs (in which the Indians proved totally uninterested). Soon the settlers were down to a pound of moldy flour a week: “When boiled with a little water, without anything else,” one wrote home, “big maggots and worms must be skimmed off the top.” The same settler later reported: “Yet for all this short allowance we were every man…daily turned out to work by daylight, whether with the hatchet, wheelbarrow, pick-axe, shovel, fore-hammer…My shoulders have been so wore with carrying burdens that the skin has come off them and grew full of boils…Our bodies pined away and grew so macerated with such allowance that we were like so many skeletons.”

  Fever set in, along with alcoholism. The death rate rose to more than ten a day. The final blow was that the English refused to trade with the starving Scots, and Spain threatened to attack. In July 1699, just a year after sailing from Scotland, the colonists abandoned the settlement. Only one of the five ships made it home, with fewer than three hundred survivors. Paterson's own wife was among the dead.

  The Darien fiasco effectively bankrupted Scotland. Paterson and his co-survivors were treated as pariahs. In 1707, a demoralized, famine-stricken Scotland signed the Act of Union with England, creating a new entity called Great Britain. The drive for unification was led by a number of ruined Scottish nobles who, according to many, had been bribed by London with a secret slush fund. In any event, the Scottish parliament dissolved itself, and the Scottish Privy Council relinquished its power over taxes, customs, and military and foreign affairs. In return, England paid off approximately £400,000 in Scottish debts, principally covering the Darien losses. For the many Scots who bitterly opposed unification, the Act of Union was “an entire surrender,” a “devil's bargain,” and the death of their nation.13

  From the English point of view, the big question after 1707 was what to do with the Scots. Despite the Darien debacle, the Scots were famous for their ambition and commercial prowess. Many English were fearful of the Scots, whom they saw as shrewd, cunning, and aggressive. Highlander Scots were known for their bravery and belligerence. There were other, sometimes inconsistent stereotypes as well. “The principal part of the Scottish nobility are tyrants and the whole of the common people are slaves,” declared one Scotophobe, while others made just the opposite point, railing against the dangerous radicalism of “Scotch rebel buggers.” Through it all, the English maintained a firm belief in their superiority over their “poor and pushy” northern neighbors. As one grandee put it, Scotland was “the sink of the earth.”

  After the Act of Union, the English essentially had to decide whether to raise the Scots up or to keep them down: to try to incorporate, win the loyalty of, and utilize the Scots, or rather, as many in the north feared, to suppress them. The English chose the former path, and profited immeasurably from it.14

  As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unfolded, British dominions expanded at an astounding rate. Indeed, between 1815 and 1865, the British Empire grew by 100,000 square miles on average every year. An empire of this unprecedented expanse required, first and foremost, manpower: soldiers, settlers, farmers, clerks, tradesmen, doctors, officers, governors. There were not nearly enough Englishmen willing or able to fill these positions. Oceans away, in lands filled with tropical disease and not always friendly natives, Britain's colonies did not necessarily appeal to the English, whose domestic economy was thriving.

  The Scots, ho
wever, were differently situated. They were much poorer than the English. Many from the noble and gentry classes had been bankrupted by the Darien scheme. Scotland's relatively backward economy offered few prospects. Nor was it so easy for a Scot to advance in England, where the best jobs were likely to go to Englishmen. With everything to gain and little to lose, the Scots proved eager to seize the risks and rewards of empire building.

  For the English, it was a match made in heaven. British statesmen made a conscious strategic decision to recruit the Scots into imperial service. After unification, and contrary to doomsayer predictions about “slavery to the English,” the Scots experienced “an unprecedented freedom and mobility.” To the dismay of many English, Prime Minister Henry Pelham declared in 1747 that “[e]very Scotch man who had zeal and abilities to serve the King should have the same admission with the administration as the subject of England had.”

  Instead of being the enemy, the “hardy” Scots were suddenly actively recruited for the British army—particularly Highlanders, who were now prized for their valor and obedience. By the mid-eighteenth century, roughly one-quarter of the British army's regimental officers were Scots. At the same time, Scots farmed barley in Lower Ontario and raised sheep in New South Wales. They dominated the lucrative American tobacco trade, sailed ships to the Niger, and sold opium in the Far East. In the 1780s, some 60 percent of the British merchants in Bengal were Scots. Many Scots rose to high positions, including James Murray, who became Britain's first governor of Canada in 1760, and James Dalhousie, who served as governor-general of India from 1848-56. “In British settlements from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay,” wrote one nineteenth-century English statesman, “for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen.” Indeed, Scots were so disproportionately represented in Britain's colonial exploits and outposts that some (Scottish) writers have suggested that the British Empire should more accurately be called the Scottish Empire.15

  Scots not only provided manpower for the empire, but were also Britain's leading thinkers, writers, and inventors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most famous philosopher of eighteenth-century Britain, David Hume, was Scottish. So was Adam Smith, often called the father of economics. Hume and Smith, along with less well known Scottish intellectuals such as William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Francis Hutcheson, and Lord Kames, were products of Scotland's extraordinary universities, which, unlike Oxford or Cambridge, were relatively inexpensive and accessible to commoners. The Scots placed great value on education and erudition. By the end of the eighteenth century, Scotland boasted a higher literacy rate than any other country in the world, and even ordinary merchants could typically read Latin and Greek. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published in Edinburgh. The historian Thomas Carlyle, the poet Robert Burns, and the writers James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson were all Scottish.

  Remarkably, Scots were also the driving force in Britain's industrial revolution. By the 1830s, Scotland was the world's leading producer of iron, and Scottish firms were Britain's preeminent shipwrights. Moreover, the most critical invention of the era—the Watt steam engine—was perfected by the Scotsman James Watt in partnership with the English industrialist Matthew Boulton. The world's first source of independent power—no longer did factories have to be built next to a waterfall or gushing river—Watt's steam engine revolutionized modern economic life. Watt's invention eventually gave rise to the faceless industrial city epitomized by Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. The steam engine also spurred further Scottish innovations, including the integrated cotton mill, the steam hammer, the modern blast furnace, and standardized machine tools. Last but not least, it was a Scotsman, James Nasmyth of Edinburgh, who in 1839 invented that most beloved of modern instruments, the dentist's drill.16

  THE FRUITS OF TOLERANCE

  By the opening of the twentieth century, the British Empire covered more than twelve million square miles, or an astonishing 25 percent of the world's land surface. If one includes the oceans— over which Britain was supreme—the figure would be closer to 70 percent of the globe. As with the Dutch empire, the source of Britain's world dominance lay in its unrivaled naval, commercial, and financial power. With its titanic fleet of battleships, the Royal Navy was probably more powerful than the next three or four navies put together. Indeed, for eighty years after 1815, no other nation (or alliance of nations) came close to challenging Britain's control of the seas.

  In 1860, “over one-third of the world's merchant marine flew under the British flag, and that share was steadily increasing.” In addition, Britain became the world's banker, as well as the world's industrial and manufacturing giant. With just 2 percent of the world's population, mid-Victorian Britain had “a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45 percent of the world's potential and 55-60 percent of that in Europe and was alone responsible for two-fifths of the world's manufacturing output.”17

  How much did Britain's tolerance after 1689 assist its rise to world dominance? This of course is impossible to know. Lest the obvious be overlooked, it should be noted that, if only by dint of England's far larger population, the majority of Britain's most important bankers, merchants, magnates, generals, and governors-general in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were English. Not only Scots were responsible for Britain's technological breakthroughs. It was the Englishman Jethro Tuli, for example, who invented the seed drill, and other Englishmen who invented the fly shuttle, jenny, water frame, and spinning mule—all major factors in Britain's industrial revolution.

  Nevertheless, the contributions of the Jews, Huguenots, and Scots—which would not have been possible without Britain's turn to tolerance—were not only disproportionate but pivotal. Take, for example, the Bank of England, “the most powerful financial institution in the world's most powerful country” and a chief reason Britain was able to triumph over France. A Scot conceived the bank, Huguenots funded it, and Jews brokered its biggest loans. (Other Dutch capitalists invested heavily in it too.) Likewise, Jews founded the London Stock Exchange, brought diamond and bullion trading to Britain, and almost single-handedly made London, as opposed to Amsterdam, the world's financial center.18

  Without the steam engine and the iron-smelting hot blast furnace, both of which were Scottish inventions, Britain could not have built naval monsters like the HMS Warrior, described by Niall Ferguson as “the supreme expression of mid-Victorian might”:

  Steam-driven, “iron clad” in five inches of armour plate and fitted with the latest breech-loading, shell-firing guns, Warrior was the world's most powerful battleship, so powerful that no foreign vessel ever dared to exchange fire with her. And she was just one of around 240 ships, crewed by 40,000 sailors— making the Royal Navy the biggest in the world by far. And thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world's merchant tonnage. At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world's oceans.19

  In sum, while impossible to quantify precisely, the benefits that Great Britain gained from harnessing the talents, capital, and ingenuity of non-English groups such as the Scots, Jews, and Huguenots were immense and far-reaching.

  Tolerance in nineteenth-century Great Britain transcended purely strategic calculation. To a surprising extent, the English embraced and practiced the Enlightenment ideal of tolerance: They espoused principles of universal equality and, to a remarkable degree, permitted members of different ethnic and religious groups to become full citizens of Great Britain with the same social and political rights as native Englishmen.

  Indeed, the very idea of “Britain” overcame long-standing national and ethnic boundaries. Although a nation in its own right, Great Britain was created by incorporating at least three different peoples that could claim, and frequently did claim, national identities of their own: the English, Welsh, and Scots. Intermarriage among the
nobility was one powerful indication that age-old barriers were coming down. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the number of marriages between the daughters of Scottish aristocrats and Englishmen more than doubled, creating a new landed “British” upper class. When the Scottish heiress Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, married the Englishman George Granville Leveson-Gower, the latter gained 800,000 acres of prime real estate in Scotland. Whereas before 1770 reference books about British nobility had almost always treated the English, Welsh, and Scottish peerage as distinct entities and kept them in separate voiumes, between 1770 and 1830 most of the guides to the nobility published in Britain—and there were seventy-five such guides— treated the peerage of the United Kingdom as a single unit.

  As the nineteenth century progressed, Scots and Welshmen rose to the highest positions in government. Jews became knights and barons. Most remarkably, Benjamin Disraeli became prime minister of Great Britain, first in 1868 and then again in 1874. Although his family had converted to the Anglican Church, Disraeli was known to be of Jewish background. By the First World War, the humorist John Hay Beith was able to write in his spoof The Oppressed English:

  Today a Scot is leading the British army in France, another is commanding the British grand fleet at sea, while a third directs the Imperial General Staff at home. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot; so are the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister is a Welshman…Yet no one has ever brought in a bill to give home rule to England!20