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Scots played key role in British expansion + How Adam Smith became (surprising) hero

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Scots played a central role in expanding the British Empire
https://aeon.co/essays/from-tea-to-opium...k-on-china

INTRO: The history of the British empire in Asia cannot be told without the Scots. As loan sharks, drug smugglers, diplomats, generals and plant hunters, they played key roles in expanding Britain’s imperial reach. They kept the empire caffeinated via extortionate loans and opium; they smuggled the lucrative and much-coveted Camellia sinensis (tea plant) from China to India; they lent legitimacy to these efforts by planning and leading Britain’s first embassy to China; and, when this failed, they instigated war with China and looted its palaces. In the process, these Scots ensured that increasing numbers of British consumers could enjoy their daily cup of tea with the empire reaping the financial benefits, and increasingly disastrous consequences for China.

Scotland’s long tradition of migration and soldiering, its poverty and uncertain harvests, encouraged many young Scots to set sail for the East Indies. As far back as the Middle Ages, Scots were an unusually outward-looking group, travelling and settling across Europe, from the Netherlands to the Baltic. For centuries, they exported their martial expertise to Irish chiefs, English kings and European monarchs. By the 18th century, civil war and languishing family fortunes, as well as the promise of new ones, added urgency to the exodus of Scots out of north Britain. They left home very young, often as teenagers, to pursue new economic opportunities made possible by the East India Company’s conquests in India and its growing tea trade with China. But many of them, particularly the Highlanders, had few better options available to them in the aftermath of the so-called ’45. Their failed attempt to restore the Scottish Stuart line to the British throne in 1745 resulted in the devastation of local Highland communities by the British army, in addition to a long-term draconian project that restructured and assimilated the Highlands according to English economic, cultural and political norms.

The Scots’ relative poverty when compared with their southern neighbours, the resistance they faced obtaining administrative positions in London, and their experience and willingness to travel beyond the borders of the British Isles meant that Scots in Asia tended to be better educated and often better represented than their English counterparts in a range of professions across the empire, particularly the East India Company’s military. Towards the end of the 18th century, English observers commented, with a parochial dose of hyperbole, that everyone in India was either Scotch or Irish, or that you seldom saw more than five English to 20 Scotch in India; English traders complained about their clannishness, partiality to their own countrymen and national pride.

What these English observers perhaps could not see was that ‘colonisation’ of Britain’s empire by the Scots held the nascent British state together... (MORE)



How Adam Smith became a (surprising) hero to conservative economists
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-adam-smith-bec...economists

EXCERPT: People like to fight over Adam Smith. To some, the Scottish philosopher is the patron saint of capitalism who wrote that great bible of economics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Its doctrine, his followers claim, is that unfettered markets lead to economic growth, making everyone better off. In Smith’s now-iconic phrase, it’s the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, not the heavy hand of government, that provides us with freedom, security and prosperity.

To others [...] Smith is the embodiment of a ‘neoliberal fantasy’ that needs to be put to rest, or at least revised. They question whether economic growth should be the most important goal, point to the problems of inequality, and argue that Smith’s system would not have enabled massive accumulations of wealth in the first place. Whatever your political leanings, one thing is clear: Smith speaks on both sides of a longstanding debate about the fundamental values of modern market-oriented society. But these arguments over Smith’s ideas and identity are not new. His complicated reputation today is the consequence of a long history of fighting to claim his intellectual authority.

[...] Smith would soon earn a reputation as the father of the science of political economy – what we now know as economics. Initially, political economy was a branch of moral philosophy; studying political economy would equip future statesmen with the principles for making a nation wealthy and happy. From the 1780s to the mid-19th century, "The Wealth of Nations" was often used as a textbook in political economy courses in the US. Even when new textbooks and treatises on political economy were published, they were often compared with ‘the standard treatise on the Science of Political Economy’, in the words of one 19th-century American scholar.

That founding-father status took Smith’s ideas far. Politics became the arena in which his ideas – and economic ideas in general – were tried, tested and wielded. Politicians found much in Smith to support their beliefs, but the ‘invisible hand’ had yet to become a catchphrase of capitalism. [...] In popular imagination, Smith’s invisible hand has become so strongly associated with Milton Friedman’s openly conservative economic agenda that people often take for granted that is what Smith meant. Many scholars have argued the contrary.

Indeed, it is easy to forget that Smith – who he was, is, and what he stands for – has been invented and reinvented by different people, writing and arguing in different times, for different purposes. It can be tempting to dismiss some past interpretations and uses of Smith as quaint, superficial, misleading or wrong. But they also reveal something about how and why we read him. Smith’s value has always been political, and it’s often politicised... (MORE - details)
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