Foreword: A Guide to the Chapters (up to Chapter 6)
Establishment or imperial economics claims that progress occurs when societies are ready for it. By this logic, imperial rulers can keep society from advancing beyond their power to control it, with the excuse that conditions are not right, or not yet right, for the people in question to have a decent life. They demand that the wealthy must decide how to invest society’s resources, and society must never interfere with their decisions.
Left out of such logic is the element of intent by humane and talented leaders to cause sweeping progress. Imperial economics says such intent, even if it were conceded to exist, could not be effective in causing positive economic change.
This book shows that only such intent has caused human progress in the past several centuries. This story of fundamental economic advances of the modern era confronts and dispels many deep misconceptions and outright lies.
The first phase of industrialization, in late 18th Century England, was led by British friends and collaborators of Benjamin Franklin, the American political strategist and scientist. There were no “capitalists investing strictly for profit” in this initiative, which resulted in the steam engine, Britain’s canals, the modern steel industry, precision machinery, and the discovery of fundamental bio-chemical secrets of nature.
The men who made these breakthroughs paid good wages and sided with the American rebels (supplying crucial artillery). But under the British imperial system, cruel low-wage factory owners went on to use innovations that they had no part in devising.
Industrialization gave new strength to Britain, and its imperial rulers determined that other nations should be prevented from acquiring the newfound powers over nature. Lord Shelburne led London’s most predatory elements, the financier-looters of India, Africa and Ireland, in a virtual coup d’etat for a new regime and a new British Intelligence system – the forerunner of today’s Anglo-American establishment.
Promoting “free trade,” the new British Empire would seek to prevent foreign industrialization and sabotage the consolidation of sovereign nation-states. We are introduced to shocking riots staged for political purposes, whose real authors can “plausibly deny” responsibility.
The Shelburne-steered British regime was immediately pitted against Irish rebels, guided by Franklin, who demanded the right to build up industry under independent Irish government protection. Though Ireland was at length crushed, this fight resonated with nationalists overseas.
Franklin, Washington and their close associates formed a nationalist core, sustaining the American Revolution and establishing strategies for a strong nation-state. James Madison was allied to them.
But Thomas Jefferson began to betray the ideals he had expounded in the Declaration of Independence. Having sullied his reputation in a disastrous term as Virginia’s governor, he took to defending “Southern interests”—which coincided with British imperial interests -- as a route to restoring his political fortunes. In France, Jefferson affiliated himself with Shelburne’s liberal British imperial leaders who had mocked the Declaration and its ideals; they imposed a free trade treaty that demolished the French economy, leading to chaos and insurrection.
The American nationalists, seeking to build up transport and industrialize the new country, wrote a Constitution that could serve that purpose. The supposed “free-trade” basis of America’s founding is thoroughly debunked in this chapter.
We are introduced to Genevan oligarch Albert Gallatin (later the Treasury Secretary for Presidents Jefferson and Madison), here attempting to incite American opposition to adoption of the Constitution.
This account is thought to be the first ever publication of the details of the British hand in turning the French Revolution to anarchy and mass bloodshed. British intelligence operations, led by Shelburne and his lieutenant Jeremy Bentham, employed French agents and a set of operatives from Geneva, Switzerland. Some among the British-aligned cast of characters are well known to history, such as the Terror leader Marat and the banker Necker.
The instigating British role was widely known at the time and was denounced in detail in a history written by a Franklin collaborator. Jefferson at the time denied the British intrigue, but denounced it in his old age.
Just as Shelburne’s crew were setting themselves in place to blow up France, Jefferson himself went into an intense conference over many months, in Paris, with Dugald Stewart, the leading British expositor of anti-nationalist economic strategy. Stewart had been sent to him by Lord Shelburne, to prepare Jefferson for the perfidious role he was to play when he returned home to fight against the founding American economic development program.
The previous chapters have prepared the reader to understand America’s founding nationalist economic program, as set forth by Alexander Hamilton, and the British-inspired attack against that program, led by Jefferson.
Here is presented the sequence of events in this showdown, which had enormous consequences for all subsequent history.
Among the highlights:
- The essential points in Hamilton’s plan, which were later implemented to industrialize the USA and other great nations;
- the meeting at Jefferson’s plantation, where he turned Madison into an opponent of the nation’s sovereignty;
- the deep affiliation of Jefferson party leaders Albert Gallatin and Aaron Burr with the enemy Shelburne-Geneva apparatus that was blowing up France;
- and the terrible predicament that led away from Hamilton’s leadership to a system of two rotten political parties, that caused important nationalists to join the anti-nationalist Jeffersonian party, and that aborted, for a time, the plan for America’s industrial development.