(bright music) - [Presenter] The School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership presents "The Civic Discourse Project: Sustaining American Political Order in History and Practice."

This week: - People use the past as building blocks for political debate.

Munich, Suez, Vietnam, Iraq.

They don't necessarily work, though, as an operative, intelligent, contingent, informed, and contextually aware analysis.

And we need to offer better if we want to try and understand the crisis of those years.

- [Presenter] "The Civic Discourse Project" is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

Now, Jeremy Black, a history professor from the University of Exeter, explores Britain's imperial crisis, imperial overstretch, accidental failure, or both?

- I want to rather point out some of the questions about the issue of imperial overreach so-called, or accidental failure and ask how far that is a accurate formulation and what relevance it has in the present day, a day in which obviously one can see incipient or actual imperial behavior in a number of parts of the world.

Overreach.

The very term overreach carries with it the connotation that there was a correct reach as it were, that empire, or indeed any other form of politics, is like an elastic band.

That if you leave it in the correct form of tension, it will do fine.

If you overstretch it, it will in fact either snap or be distorted out of shape or be unable to reconcile its differences.

And that is one way of looking at empires or any other form of governance.

But I think it's fairer to say that all forms of government, apart from utopian ones or ones maybe of a household or an immediate community, inevitably have tension and inevitably are in a process of both formation of and dissolution.

And when I use the term formation, one could actually change that slightly and add the term formulation.

And that the formulation is related both to the supposed nature and purposes of the imperial or other governmental project, and in fact also to the way it implements itself.

But of course, it's worth bearing in mind that this generation of policy makers and public had a much harsher, more difficult legacy to consider.

Because if you are thinking about those people who were in charge in the 1760s and 1770s from the sovereign George III, born in 1738, and a relatively young man, to older figures such as Frederick Lord North, or for example Lord George Germain, they of course were all well aware of what I have called in one of my books the mid 18th century crisis.

Britain in the mid 18th century had absolutely no confidence in the direction things were going.

After all, if one puts aside for a minute the absolute terrifying situation on December the 4th, 1745 when Jacobite forces entered Derby just over a hundred miles from London at the same time that the government was well aware that the French were preparing an expedition, an invasion force near Beloit.

If one runs through from that, you will see protracted problems and anxieties in the 1740s and early and into the mid 1750s.

These were both problems in the imperial periphery, if you wish to use that term.

I think it's a pejorative term, but I can't think of a better one.

Whether, for example, the repeated defeats at the hands of French and Native Americans in North America in 1754 to '57, for example, there was a sense of complete amazement as to what happened in '59 and how this was turned over.

Britain's sole major ally was Frederick the Great of Prussia who was fighting off the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, and most seriously the Russians.

The survival of Prussia was referred to by contemporaries at the time as the miracle of Prussia.

Well, in British terms, there was a miracle of Britain.

The miracle of Prussia was in 1762, the miracle of Britain was in 1759.

But looking forward into the 1760s, this did not create any sense of obvious security, superiority, or stability.

In fact, far from it.

Anxiety was written strongly in British public culture in the 1760s.

And this anxiety helps very much to condition and affect the terms of public debate, including I would argue, the public debate that washes around both sides of the Atlantic.

What kind of factors can I think about if I want to talk to you about anxiety in the 1760s?

First on the diplomatic situation, or we can call it diplomatic, it was in some respects the opposite of diplomacy.

It was politics by megaphone in a way that would be inconceivable in the much more advanced nature of the modern world.

Disputes over the implementation of the peace treaties are followed by renewed crises over the allocation of pieces of imperial territory running right through the 1760s.

And Britain prepares for a war, which it doesn't look in a great situation for.

Remember, Britain doesn't have a single continental ally.

The Anglo-Prussian alliance had collapsed in 1762.

One might think that the imperial overreach is most pertinently used in the fact that Britain unusually didn't have a single ally.

And that was very serious and was of course to affect it during the War of American Independence but it also meant that it had to be entirely reliant on its own resources.

In the case that the Falklands Islands near war in 1770 after everybody had mobilized, the French blinked, Choiseul is sacked by essentially his rivals, both sides agree to leave the Falkland Islands unoccupied, sort of face saving deal.

But what this does is underline the extent to the British government about the need for preparation for war.

Indeed, I think this is an important point.

It is not primarily when one is talking about money in the imperial or indeed domestic relationships politically, that one is talking about paying the debt off for the Seven Years' War.

The debt is bearable, it's not pleasant, but it's bearable.

The real problem is dealing with issues of current liquidity and creating the confidence that those issues of current liquidity could be settled and addressed so that one can continue to be credit-worthy and credit ready.

And neither of those are clear cut for Britain throughout this period.

Again, you might call that if you like imperial overreach.

Again, you might point out that states often have credit problems, but the fact of the matter was that the succession of near wars helps to put this at the top of the government's agenda.

And we play on.

In 1772, Prussia, Austria and Russia partition Poland.

Unusually, the French foreign minister, the Marquis Aiguillon who'd replaced Choiseul, approaches Britain secretly to ask if the British and the French can cooperate in putting pressure on the partitioning powers essentially to stop them going on doing this elsewhere.

The British government is split about this and only a certain number of ministers know about it.

And indeed I think, well, I've written about it, I think it's unlikely that they would've pushed it further.

But in '72-3, the crisis spins in a new direction when Russia threatens to attack Sweden.

Just to complicate matters, the Swedish age of liberty comes to an end in 1772, Gustavus III overthrows the Constitution.

I mean, it's laughable to read the Declaration of Independence and to think what Jefferson would've made of a monarch like Gustavus who really did want to do trouble and who really was a would be tyrant.

The Russians who had relied on constitutional government in Sweden to keep Sweden weak, the Russians threaten war.

The French decide to come in on the Swedish side.

The British decide that they might have to fight the French and back the Russians.

Again, after military preparations, it doesn't lead to a war.

By the way, every so often people say to me, "Why didn't the British government pay more attention to what was going on in the 13 colonies?"

If you actually look at what was having to cross their desks, you will realize that that was not actually a very sensible way to think about things.

And in fact, if I might briefly comment on that last point, one of the best political biographies of recent decades in Britain is Charles Moore's major work on Margaret Thatcher.

And it's a very impressive work.

He's incidentally a very nice man.

But he gets it wrong.

And the reason he gets it wrong, and I've told him this and he doesn't disagree with me, the reason he gets it wrong is he, well, he was a contemporary of mine at university.

I know him quite well.

The reason he gets it wrong is he writes in sequential chapters about problems.

Problems with the unions, problems in Northern Ireland, problems with foreign policy.

Of course, it's not like that.

If you are the prime minister or a senior minister, you are dealing with a vast mass of differing material that crosses your desk or is thrown in your face in meetings every single day.

You can't say, "Right chaps, we're going to spend the next week thinking about what we're going to do about, let's say, if we are in 1772, thinking about what we're going to do about North America" 'cause it just doesn't work like that.

You've got at the same stage to be dealing with lots of other problems.

And one of the difficulties is in part we over intellectualize as a result what we call British policy.

And the same with other states.

What one has to think is not that government has a kind of bureaucratic system in which we are talking about defined policy.

You have to think much more of inchoate things in which individuals often maneuvering in terms of their own particular views, inclinations, or economic interests are seeking to exert influence on many people who simply don't know what's going on or don't always necessarily prioritize it.

The first of course was satirized frequently.

Tobias Smollett, for example, who of course was one of the great journalists of the age, writes about the Duke of Newcastle not having the faintest idea of the geography of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia when Britain is fighting there against the French.

Or you have the problem, the Duke of Newcastle again, great example of this, and of course Newcastle for many years was in theory as Secretary of State for the Southern Department in charge of whatever you mean by imperial policy, then going on to be first Lord of the Treasury, to have the same position in theory for eight years.

Newcastle of course regularly spent his summer going electioneering.

He was a great borough monger.

In fact, government as a whole, generally packed up in the summer.

Parliament itself usually only sat from January to May.

You might sometimes have a quick session before Christmas.

And when I say generally sat between January and May, the key business was usually done in January and early February, after which most MPs went home.

And most of the legislation in parliament is not trying to implement some policy created by some ministry.

Most legislation in parliament is private acts, which in sense provide the authority to impose costs for turnpikes, harbors, and canal improvements.

So what I am trying to argue is you have to be very cautious in assuming that there is a coherent process of policy decision making, which we can then castigate either to say that they got it right or they got it wrong.

And indeed, linked to that, one ought to be aware that the language that is used in documents of that period is the standard form of political language.

It is rhetorical.

It is determined in order to make points rather than necessarily being what we might consider, however one means by this, a more objective, free floating outside time and context account.

And the rhetoric that is being used about imperial matters in the 1760s and early 1770s is much stronger coming from the American colonies than it is in the imperial metropole.

The imperial metropole has got lots of problems.

They doubtless get it wrong.

They used, to think of a modern term, a modern term that's used to describe great powers and minor powers, is the idea of sustainability.

Not sustainability in terms of have you got some green power plant, but sustainability in the terms of what is called resilience.

How resilient is a state if it is going to fight?

Now, in one respect, what the British are trying to do when they think about it in the 1760s and early 1770s is build up resilience for the next war with France and Spain.

Understandably so.

They're right, there is gonna be one.

They're right, they have very good spy networks.

They're right, the last one went eventually well, but the early stages were disastrous and the previous one didn't go well.

So you need resilience.

Now, what resilience is going to mean is something that is much harder to determine and it's there that politics comes into play.

The politics of particular ideas, the politics of factional interest, the politics of personal as it were, drives and such like.

And that is complicated in the 1760s and early 70s because we go through a period, particularly in the 60s of frequent change of governments, which is rather reminiscent of Britain in the 2010s and early 2020s.

It only settles down a bit after 1770 as the north system is more stable and as north is able to deliver a victory in the general election of 1774.

But that is all clear in retrospect, it wasn't clear in prospectus.

It was not clear in prospectus that if Britain was going to get involved in another war as it did unexpectedly in the 13 colonies, it was not clear that the country would be essentially domestically stable, which it was.

The government then wins the 1780 general election and doesn't really have a serious political crisis till '82.

It's not clear that it won't have to fight anybody else for a while, which is true.

'75, '76, '77, first few months of '78, very unusual.

Britain's not at war with anybody else.

And indeed, you could argue, I would argue, that the only reason they're able to send so many troops to America in '76, 'cause in 75 they hadn't expected trouble, is precisely because of the unexpected nature of the fact that the French at that stage are sitting on their hands as are the Spaniards.

So it is the unexpected nature that calls into question any attempt to say that X is overrated, overreached, overwrought, or whatever we want to say of the imperial project.

It's very hard to do so because those appear clear cut in retrospect, they would've appeared far less clear to contemporaries.

Last point, I comment in my paper on Edward Gibbon in that the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

And of course that's a happy coincidence for an historian, that the British Empire was in trouble.

It's a happy coincidence.

But it's worth bearing in mind that people will often deploy in retrospect, or even at the time, examples that need to be used with enormous care.

We've seen this most recently.

I don't like making analogs to the present, but we've seen this most recently in talk about Munich and so on and so forth with reference to 1938.

People use the past as building blocks for political debate.

Munich, Suez, Vietnam, Iraq, and whatever else you would've said and each generation has their own.

They don't necessarily work, though, as operative, intelligent, contingently informed and contextually aware analysis.

And we need to offer better if we want to try and understand the crisis of those years.

Thank you very much.

(audience applauding) - The question of public virtue and those specialists in the American founding is a great concern about public virtue.

Again, John Adams, I'm not setting myself up as a great Adams admirer or setting everything around Adams, but he's famously said the American Constitution, this constitution is for a virtuous and religious people.

It will work for no other.

And I paraphrase.

What you're pointing to is that that concern with virtue in America is very much an issue within the British elite- - Yes.

- And in British public culture.

- I mean, give you an example with George III, one of his most astonishing reforms, which really flummoxes his ministers is this, under GI and GII, essentially the ministers chose the bishops.

You know, obviously the king signed off on it.

And who did they choose?

Well, what a surprise, Whigs and often relatives of theirs.

GIII has the astonishing idea that he wants to appear to appoint as bishops men of sort of known probity and known devotion.

And he's got no interest in being told that X's brother will bring through.

And this is a kind of really radical step.

I mean, you know, there is a kind of moral re-armament from the king in some respects that reflects, but also it's worth bearing in mind that it's not just the king.

I mean, what is the great movement here?

Question time.

As you know, I wrote a book on James Bond.

Press the button, if you don't answer it, you get 3000 volts as in the start of "Thunderball."

What is the great movement, the new movement of the mid 18th century in Britain?

And actually in the American colonies as well.

- Methodism.

- Methodism.

It's not just the king who wants moral re-armament, there is a widespread sense that things are going wrong.

Methodism is far more successful in terms of spanning the political world in Britain and the social world than the Wilkite Movement.

- Question.

- Since you spoke of sort of George III and his sort of efforts to revivify sort of morals in Britain, I was just wondering if you could speak to the group a little bit about sort of the political side of that here.

- That's a really interesting question because in a way, as as you know, Thomas Jefferson meets George III in 1786 and it isn't a meeting of minds.

But the interesting thing is there is a similarity in many respects between the two men, not just in their personal interests in science, they're very educated people, but also because they are both committed to what they understand as patriotism.

George III believes very strongly as a result, not just of the influence of his father, Frederick Prince of Wales, not just as a result of the readings that he had done and he was very well read, but also as a result of the essays he'd written.

George III believed there was a corrupt political system in Britain and that had to be improved and the way to improve that is from the, as it were, the classic classical idea of a philosopher king.

You know, they called it a patriot king, but it's not a new idea.

It's not that George III created this new idea.

He believed that.

And in a way, this again captures a similarity with those in the 13 colonies who are pressing also for a form of political improvement, moral re-armament, clarity of vision.

George also had personal failings in which like many people who believe in being the philosopher king, he wasn't used to the idea that people would shout boo.

You know, he was so convinced of his own moral virtue and purpose with reason, that he did have moral virtue and purpose, but he was so convinced that he didn't know how to cope with opposition.

He really didn't.

Many Americans conceptualized George as a bad father.

George himself was apt to conceptualize the American patriots as disobedient children.

That's very sad, isn't it?

Because both sides meant well.

There's no two ways about it.

They meant well.

And you end up the most appalling state of affairs.

Which American patriot in 1773, 4, or 5 would've believed that it was really necessary to cooperate with France or Spain?

Would've welcomed things like much of New York being burnt?

You know?

It was an appalling mess.

Which Brit would've actually welcomed the idea of shooting, as it were, cousins fighting them in large numbers?

It's a very tragic war.

It's not as tragic on its scale as the second American Civil War, the one that breaks out in 1861.

But it is, it's a civil war within the empire.

It's tragic.

Now since the person who had most power in this context was George III, he bears in my view, a proportionate role for the mistakes that were made.

And I'm not trying to extenuate him when I try and explain him.

- Professor Black, given your extensive work on British political history and cultural identity, how would you compare the British skepticism towards centralized authority, particularly in the context of historical parliamentary power struggles?

- Hmm.

Well, that's very interesting.

I mean, obviously one's talking there about essentially a diachronic comparison, a comparison across time, which is always interesting.

If you are looking at the specifically 18th century comparisons, I think it's fair to say that in Britain, although there was a standing army, there was really quite a lot of disquiet about a large standing army.

The confidence is in the Navy.

I think it's fair to say that that can be also seen in American concern about a large army and about what the powers of an army or a police force should be vis-a-vis the individual citizen.

I think what I would say is that the British believed, and obviously we can put question marks against it and all the rest of it, the British believed very strongly in the idea that they were under the rule of law.

They very strongly believed that.

And I would say that's also a characteristic of American public culture.

Now, what the law means in particular contexts and how it's implemented, therefore varies enormously.

But the idea that law rests in part on consent, that consent exercised through a jury system was very important in both the British and the American model, and very different to, for example, the situation on the continent.

- Please join me in thanking Jeremy Black.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) - [Presenter] "The Civic Discourse Project" is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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