Britain's Meiji

Last year on Galveston Liberation Day, Rod Martin explained its merits.

Well: not the merits of this particular day. The ratification of Amendment XIII (always a lucky number for the Union) would have been a better day worth the annual memorial. But we happen to have this day off soooo...

It may be moot for me anyway inasmuch as I am pretty-much not American. My ancestors didn't keep slaves and didn't want 'em. They say my Jewish side might have been 'em, but they were slow to extend that as a principle for the Banu Noah. I might, however, speak to the Institution's retarded sibling Serfdom.

Throughout the Middle Ages, daimyos ruled England. The Magna Carta, whatever John promised us in AD 1215, had been rewritten. Serfdom was officially not the law of the land over the seventeenth century... but then, the Austrians claimed not to have serfs in the early nineteenth, also; and look how that went.

In AD 1688, the English lords called in the Dutch. Kara Dimitruk and Ben Southwood tell how landed lords became landowners, who could better use the land they'd held only in paper before.

Also as with the Dutch, owners of buggy swamp around the Wash reclaimed it for production - because they now legally could. Elsewhere canals were drilled. The England of the 1700s became much, much more powerful than that of the 1600s. (1690s Scotland might have benefitted too until they tried colonising the Darien Gap, like idjits.)

One narrative for the stagnation across Europe is to blame the Church. I'd credit that argument for the chilling days of Inquisition. To me also, however; that doesn't ring as true in the age of Newton, whose England didn't follow the Church. The only case of direct Church influence I see in the whole article is where they slapped down Fernando VI's income tax. Based on the other people who squealed: this tax would have befallen equally land-rentiers, capitalists, and high-wage-earners. Which means the tax by nature would have hurt innovation more than the code's simplification would have helped.

It may be that the English Civil War - which the English won - had reïntroduced the Magna Carta into the commonweal. As Yarvin points out, nobody cited "the rights of Englishmen" before Henry VIII. The Tudors (who were Welsh) had cast about for national myths before all that, touting the Arthur cult. Only after the break from Rome (per Opus 4.8) Henry VIII and Elizabeth touted the Saxons. We still don't really have a national epic, or didn't before Tolkien anyway.