M&D background: "a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush"

[pynchonoid]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,868586,00.html

" [...] At least Ferguson makes clear the petty,
squalid origins of the adventure. The Empire was not
acquired, as apologists used to pretend, 'in a fit of
absence of mind'; its earliest trophies were the
result of piratical plunder, stolen by Elizabethan
buccaneers from the Spanish (whose El Dorado the
British so rancorously envied). Later, a more
concerted campaign of expropriation set out to satisfy
the modish cravings of a new consumer economy.
Eighteenth-century England rapidly grew addicted to
'new, new things' like tea, coffee and tobacco, while
the national sweet tooth required imports of sugar
from the West Indies, where the cane was tended by
slaves.

Ferguson quite rightly treats these substances as
drugs, and says that they 'gave English society an
almighty hit; the Empire... was built on a huge sugar,
caffeine and nicotine rush', just as, it might be
added, the American Empire is founded on an apparently
universal appetite for slabs of greasy processed beef,
chunks of chicken concreted over with batter, and
blistery, lava-like oozings of pizza. Empires should
come with a health warning.

Ferguson is at his most startling when he deals with
the competition between British and American models of
empire. He chillingly regards the Pilgrim Fathers as a
breed of rabid 'religious fundamentalists', and admits
that the earliest British plantations in the New World
were an exercise in 'what is today known as "ethnic
cleansing".'

But he is disinclined to believe in the authorised
American view of 1776 as a 'struggle for liberty
against an evil empire'. The imperialists were already
experimenting with schemes for devolution, and
politicians at Westminster imagined that American
colonies might settle down into membership of 'a
prototype Commonwealth', with the monarch as a
unifying figurehead. The battles across the Atlantic
merely extended a conflict at home between Whigs and
Tories. 'This,' Ferguson argues, 'really was the
second British - or perhaps the first American - Civil
War.' [...] "


<http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,868586,00.html>

Toeing the Empire line 

Niall Ferguson's vision of the British Empire as a
'Good Thing' fails to address the perils of possession


Peter Conrad
Sunday January 5, 2003
The Observer 

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane £25, pp416


-Doug

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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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