The Cogency of Superpowers: Part II
This entry is presented in three parts:
Part I: content from others that can be data mined on the internet
Part II: Sir Glubb’s referenced Empires
Part III: The Cogency of Superpowers essay.
In this part, I will be covering specifics of Sir John Baget Glubb’s listed empires starting from Assyria and descending to Britain. There were important civilizations before Assyria, and clearly the current which is the United States. There are plenty of references within which discuss some of the missed civilizations some might argue deserve attention. The length of the entry is due to the study guide material which will be applied in the third entry.
This part is specifically to reference what Glubb Pasha covered in his essay (to include slight discrepancies in dates) expanding on some of his specific mentions of history. My third part will address these critical factors to respectfully discuss Glubb’s vision, and to develop a professional outlook moving forward on the topic.
Furthermore, this entry is largely pulled from Internet resources, mostly Wikipedia. As grueling as this may appear on the mind, as inaccurate for some who find other sources to be better suited for developing depth on a subject, I remind those reading I am developing a reference sheet from which to begin inquiry on the disbelief I will present in my own words in the third part. As a jumping off point to better understand Sir Glubb’s content in his essay, a location from which someone can easily data mine where I arrived at my conclusion, there is no better place to develop a foundation from where more information on a particular area can be lifted.
Admittedly, majority of this entry is pulled and linked word for word. Normally, I would post my essay without details of my background research. Due to the subject matter appearing so one-sided, parochial to a conservative taste for debate, I have decided to archive specifically the depth of Sir Glubb’s essay out of respect for the genuine authenticity I believe he was aiming to be received. In essence, I am writing to prevent an cognitive biases or misconceptions on my intent and purpose for writing a forward leaning essay due to the lack thereof online.
Before we begin, as explained in Sir Glubb’s The Fate of Empires, this list requires a few comments (abridged):
- Empires do not usually begin or end on a certain date. There is normally a gradual period of expansion and then a period of decline. Human affairs are subject to many chances, and it is not to be expected that they could be calculated with mathematical accuracy.
- There is sufficient resemblance between the life periods of these different empires to justify further study.
- The division of Rome into two periods may be thought unwarranted.
- Not all empires endured for their full lifespan.
- There is a tendency nowadays to say that this is the jet-age, and consequently there is nothing for us to learn from past empires. Such an attitude seems to be erroneous.
- It is tempting to compare the lives of empires with those of human beings; we are justified in saying that seventy years is a fair estimate of the average person’s expectation of life.
- We may perhaps at this stage be allowed to draw certain conclusions:
a. The periods of duration of different empires at varied epochs show a remarkable similarity
b. Immense changes in the technology of transport or in methods of warfare do not seem to affect the life-expectation of an empire.
c. The changes in the technology of transport and of war have, however, affected the shape of empires. But, although the shapes of the Assyrian and the British Empires were entirely different, both lasted about the same length of time.
ASSYRIA (911–609 B.C) duration: 302 yrs
Many estimates claim the civilization existed since 2600 B.C. developing at peak from 911–609 B.C. (entrance of Iron Age) during a period known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, named originally by the first capital city Aššur (located in the al-Shirqat District). During this time, 28 major cities with a large rural population established a dominant succession of reportedly 19 Kings, and one regent who was a Queen for a three year stint.
Ashurbanipal reigning between 669–627 B.C. (mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as Asenappar in Ezra 4:10) was a well educated king for his time who could speak, read, and write in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Aramaic. It is claimed at the height of the empire, Assyrians claimed the whole of the modern nations of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Cyprus, with large swathes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Sudan, Libya, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Upon Ashurbanipal’s death in 627 B.C. three rival kings feuded over the empire in a civil war splintering the Egyptian 26th dynasty from their Assyrian vassalage remaining friendly and removed from the infighting until the Persians arrive. For the next century, surrounding tribes, and smaller civilizations on all sides of Assyria invade taking advantage of the upheaval.
The Assyrian Empire provided future civilizations with innovative military technology, such as heavy cavalry, sapper units, and siege engines. Most importantly, Ashurbanipal’s collection of clay tablets and other inscriptions organized in what is believed as the first major library, provided future civilizations a model for organizing important archival texts.
PERSIA (550–330 B.C.) duration: 220 yrs
The Achaemenid Empire was the first Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great. Spanning 5.5 million square kilometers, it would be the first model of a centralized administrative bureaucracy developing and maintaining road and postal systems which would implement an official language. The professional civil services and military of so many separate cultures brought forth a synthesis of styles influencing subsequent empires.
Thirteen Kings reigned across the 220 year span of the empire. Most notable of them were Cyrus the Great, Darius I, and Artaxerxes II. Due to the Second Persian War where Athenian temples were burnt to the ground, the last of the Kings, Artashata (Darius III) was defeated in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela. Tyrant-like leaders ruling over Greece, a burdensome tax system, and a disloyal period during the empire’s age of influence of leaders assassinating one another for power disrupted an organized system revamped by Artaxerxes II 46 year reign.
GREECE (331–100 B.C.) duration: 231 yrs
“To derive any useful instruction from history, it seems to me essential first of all to grasp the principle that history, to be meaningful, must be the history of the human race. For history is a continuous process, gradually developing, changing and turning back, but in general moving forward in a single mighty stream. Any useful lessons to be derived must be learned by the study of the whole flow of human development, not by the selection of short periods here and there in one country or another.”
— Sir John Baget Glubb
The Aetolian League concluded a peace agreement with Philip V in 206 BC, and the Roman Republic negotiated the Treaty of Phoenice in 205 BC, ending the war and allowing the Macedonians to retain some captured settlements in Illyria. The Macedonian economy and state finances were mainly supported by logging and by mining valuable minerals such as copper, iron, gold, and silver.
Scholars and historians are divided as to what event signals the end of the Hellenistic era. The Hellenistic period may be seen to end either with the final conquest of the Greek heartlands by Rome in 146 BC following the Achean War, with the final defeat of the Ptolemaic Kingdom at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, or even the move by Roman emperor Constantine the Great of the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople in 330 AD. “Hellenistic” is distinguished from “Hellenic” in that the first encompasses the entire sphere of direct ancient Greek influence, while the latter refers to Greece itself.
ROMAN REPUBLIC (220–27 B.C.) duration: 193 yrs
Roman society under the Republic was a cultural mix of Latin, Etruscan, and Greek elements, which is especially visible in the Roman Pantheon. Its political organisation was strongly influenced by the Greek city states overseen by a senate. The top magistrates were the two consuls, who had an extensive range of executive, legislative, judicial, military, and religious powers. Whilst there were elections each year, the Republic was not a democracy, but an oligarchy, as a small number of large families (called gentes) monopolised the main magistracies. Roman institutions underwent considerable changes throughout the Republic to adapt to the difficulties it faced, such as the creation of promagistracies to rule its conquered provinces, or the composition of the senate.
The Republic was in a state of quasi-perpetual war throughout its existence. After the Gallic Sack, Rome indeed conquered the whole Italian peninsula in a century, which turned the Republic into a major power in the Mediterranean. The Republic’s greatest enemy was doubtless Carthage, against which it waged three wars. The Punic general Hannibal famously invaded Italy by crossing the Alps and inflicted on Rome two devastating defeats at the Lake Trasimene and Cannae, but the Republic once again recovered and won the war thanks to Scipio Africanus at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.
With Carthage defeated, Rome became the dominant power of the ancient Mediterranean world. It then embarked in a long series of difficult conquests, after having notably defeated Philip V and Perseus of Macedon, Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire, the Lusitanian Viriathis, the Numidian Jugurtha, the great Pontic king Mithridates VI, the Gaul Vercingetorix, and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.
At home, the Republic similarly experienced a long streak of social and political crises, which ended in several violent civil wars. At first, the Conflict of the Orders opposed the patricians, the closed oligarchic elite, to the far more numerous plebs, who finally achieved political equality in several steps during the 4th century BC. Later, the vast conquests of the Republic disrupted its society, as the immense influx of slaves they brought enriched the aristocracy, but ruined the peasantry and urban workers. In order to solve this issue, several social reformers, known as the Populares, tried to pass agrarian laws, but the Gracchi brothers, Saturninus, or Clodius Pulcher were all murdered by their opponents, the Optimates, keepers of the traditional aristocratic order.
Mass slavery also caused three Servile Wars; the last of them was led by Spartacus, a skillful gladiator who ravaged Italy and left Rome powerless until his defeat in 71 BC. In this context, the last decades of the Republic were marked by the rise of great generals, who exploited their military conquests and the factional situation in Rome to gain control of the political system. Marius (between 105–86 BC), then Sulla(between 82–78 BC) dominated in turn the Republic; both used extraordinary powers to purge their opponents.
These multiple tensions lead to a series of civil wars; the first between the two generals Julius Caesar and Pompey. Despite his victory and appointment as dictator for life, Caesar was murdered in 44 BC. Caesar’s heir Octavian and lieutenant Mark Antony defeated Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius in 42 BC, but then turned against each other. The final defeat of Mark Antony and his ally Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and the Senate’s grant of extraordinary powers to Octavian as Augustus in 27 BC — which effectively made him the first Roman emperor — thus ended the Republic.
ROMAN EMPIRE (27 B.C.-A.D. 350) duration: 377 yrs
The first two centuries of the Empire were a period of unprecedented stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”). It reached its greatest territorial expanse during the reign of Trajan (98–117 AD). A period of increasing trouble and decline began with the reign of Commodus. In the 3rd century, the Empire underwent a crisis that threatened its existence, but was reunified under Aurelian. In an effort to stabilize the Empire, Diocletian set up two different imperial courts in the Greek East and Latin West.
First epoch of Roman imperial history usually dated from 27 BC to 284 AD; they later awarded him the name Augustus, “the venerated”. The success of Augustus in establishing principles of dynastic succession was limited by his outliving a number of talented potential heirs: the Julio-Claudian dynasty lasted for four more emperors — Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero — before it yielded in 69 AD to the strife-torn Year of Four Emperors, from which Vespasian emerged as victor.
Vespasian became the founder of the brief Flavian dynasty, to be followed by the Nerva–Antonine dynasty which produced the “Five Good Emperors”: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and the philosophically inclined Marcus Aurelius. In the view of the Greek historian Dio Cassius, a contemporary observer, the accession of the emperor Commodus in 180 AD marked the descent “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron” — a famous comment which has led some historians, notably Edward Gibbon, to take Commodus’ reign as the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire.
“The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.”— Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“In 212, during the reign of Caracalla, Roman citizenship was granted to all freeborn inhabitants of the empire. But despite this gesture of universality, the Severan dynasty was tumultuous — an emperor’s reign was ended routinely by his murder or execution — and, following its collapse, the Roman Empire was engulfed by the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of invasions, civil strife, economic disorder, and plague.” — Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity
The crisis began with the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander by his own troops in 235, initiating a 50-year period during which there were at least 26 claimants to the title of emperor, mostly prominent Roman army generals, who assumed imperial power over all or part of the Empire. The same number of men became accepted by the Roman Senate as emperor during this period and so became legitimate emperors.
By 268, the empire had split into three competing states: the Gallic Empire, including the Roman provinces of Gaul, Britannia and (briefly) Hispania; the Palmyrene Empire, including the eastern provinces of Syria Palaestina and Aegyptus; and the Italian-centered and independent Roman Empire, proper, between them. Later, Aurelian (270–275) reunited the empire; the crisis ended with the ascension and reforms of Diocletian in 284.
Constantine was sent east, where he rose through the ranks to become a military tribune under Emperors Diocletian and Galerius. In 305, Constantius was raised to the rank of Augustus, senior western emperor, and Constantine was recalled west to campaign under his father in Britannia (Britain). Constantine was acclaimed as emperor by the army at Eboracum (modern-day York) after his father’s death in 306 AD. He emerged victorious in a series of civil wars against Emperors Maxentius and Licinius to become sole ruler of both west and east by 324 AD.
As emperor, Constantine enacted administrative, financial, social, and military reforms to strengthen the empire. He restructured the government, separating civil and military authorities. To combat inflation he introduced the solidus, a new gold coin that became the standard for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. The Roman army was reorganized to consist of mobile field units and garrison soldiers capable of countering internal threats and barbarian invasions. Constantine pursued successful campaigns against the tribes on the Roman frontiers — the Franks, the Alamanni, the Goths, and the Sarmatians — even resettling territories abandoned by his predecessors during the Crisis of the Third Century.
The age of Constantine marked a distinct epoch in the history of the Roman Empire. He built a new imperial residence at Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople (now Istanbul) after himself (the laudatory epithet of “New Rome” came later, and was never an official title). It became the capital of the Empire for more than a thousand years, with the later eastern Roman Empire now being referred to as the Byzantine Empire by historians.
ARAB EMPIRE (A.D. 629–976) duration: 347 yrs
In December 629, after eight years of intermittent fighting with Meccan tribes, Muhammad gathered an army of 10,000 Muslim converts and marched on the city of Mecca. The conquest went largely uncontested and Muhammad seized the city with little bloodshed. In 632, a few months after returning from the Farewell Pilgrimage, he fell ill and died. By the time of his death, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam. In Medina, Muhammad united the tribes under the Constitution of Medina.
He established a new unified polity in the Arabian Peninsula which under the subsequent Rashidun and UmayyadCaliphates saw a century of rapid expansion.
The resulting empire stretched from the borders of China and the Indian subcontinent, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe (Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees).
The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Fred McGraw Donner suggests that formation of a state in the Arabian peninsula and ideological (i.e., religious) coherence and mobilization was a primary reason why the Muslim armies in the space of a hundred years were able to establish the largest pre-modern empire until that time.
The estimates for the size of the Islamic Caliphate suggest it was more than thirteen million square kilometers (five million square miles).[6]Most historians agree as well that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another.
Under John Kourkouas, the Byzantines conquered the emirate of Melitene, along with Tarsos the strongest of the Muslim border emirates, and advanced into Armenia in the 930s; the next three decades were dominated by the struggle of the Phokas clan and their dependants against the Hamdanid emir of Aleppo, Sayf al-Dawla. Al-Dawla was finally defeated by Nikephoros II Phokas, who conquered Cilicia and northern Syria and recovered Crete. His nephew and successor, John I Tzimiskes, pushed even further south, almost reaching Jerusalem, but his death in 976 ended Byzantine expansion towards Palestine.
After putting an end to the internal strife, Basil II launched a counter-campaign against the Arabs in 995. The Byzantine civil wars had weakened the Empire’s position in the east, and the gains of Nikephoros II Phokas and John I Tzimiskes came close to being lost, with Aleppo besieged and Antioch under threat. Basil won several battles in Syria, relieving Aleppo, taking over the Orontes valley, and raiding further south. Although he did not have the force to drive into Palestine and reclaim Jerusalem, his victories did restore much of Syria to the empire — including the larger city of Antioch which was the seat of its eponymous Patriarch.
The wars drew near to a closure when the Turks and various Mongol invaders replaced the threat of either power. From the 11th and 12th centuries onwards, the Byzantine conflicts shifted into the Byzantine-Seljuk wars with the continuing Islamic invasion of Anatolia being taken over by the Seljuk Turks.
After the defeat at the Battle of Manzikert by the Turks in 1071, the Byzantine Empire, with the help of Western Crusaders, re-established its position in the Middle East as a major power. Meanwhile, the major Arab conflicts were in the Crusades, and later against Mongolian invasions, especially that of the Ilkhanate and Timur.
MAMELUKE (1250–1517) duration: 267 yrs
The Mamluk Sultanate was a medieval realm spanning Egypt, the Levant, and Hejaz. It lasted from the overthrow of the Ayyubid dynasty until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Historians have traditionally broken the era of Mamlūk rule into two periods — one covering 1250–1382, the other, 1382–1517. Western historians call the former the “Baḥrī” period and the latter the “Burjī” due to the political dominance of the regimes known by these names during the respective eras. Contemporary Muslim historians refer to the same divisions as the “Turkic” and “Circassian” periods in order to stress the change in the ethnic origins of the majority of Mamlūks.
The Mamlūk state reached its height under Turkic rule with Arabic culture and then fell into a prolonged phase of decline under the Circassians. The sultanate’s ruling caste was composed of Mamluks, soldiers of predominantly Cuman-Kipchaks (from Crimea), Circassian, Abkhazian, Oghuz Turks and Georgian slave origin. While Mamluks were purchased, their status was above ordinary slaves, who were not allowed to carry weapons or perform certain tasks. Mamluks were considered to be “true lords”, with social status above citizens of Egypt. Though it declined towards the end of its existence, at its height the sultanate represented the zenith of medieval Egyptian and Levantine political, economic, and cultural glory in the Islamic Golden Age.
OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1320–1699) duration: 379 yrs
The Ottoman Empire historically known in Western Europe as the Turkish Empire or simply Turkey, was a state that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. It was founded at the end of the 13th century in northwestern Anatolia in the town of Söğüt (modern-day Bilecik Province) by the Oghuz Turkish tribal leader Osman I. After 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe, and with the conquest of the Balkans, the Ottoman beylik was transformed into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was a multinational, multilingual empire controlling most of Southeast Europe, parts of Central Europe, Western Asia, parts of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. At the beginning of the 17th century, the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some of these were later absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries.
This period of renewed assertiveness came to a calamitous end in 1683 when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a huge army to attempt a second Ottoman siege of Vienna in the Great Turkish War of 1683–1699. The final assault being fatally delayed, the Ottoman forces were swept away by allied Habsburg, German and Polish forces spearheaded by the Polish king John III Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna. The alliance of the Holy League pressed home the advantage of the defeat at Vienna, culminating in the Treaty of Karlowitz (26 January 1699), which ended the Great Turkish War.
SPAIN (1478–1763) duration: 285 yrs
In 1469, the crowns of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united by the marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. 1478 commenced the completion of the conquest of the Canary Islands and in 1492, the combined forces of Castile and Aragon captured the Emirate of Granada from its last ruler Muhammad XII. That same year, Spain’s Jews were ordered to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion from Spanish territories during the Spanish Inquisition. As many as 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain.
This was followed by expulsions in 1493 in Aragonese Sicily and Portugal in 1497. The Treaty of Granada guaranteed religious tolerance towards Muslims, for a few years before Islam was outlawed in 1502 in the Kingdom of Castile and 1527 in the Kingdom of Aragon, leading to Spain’s Muslim population becoming nominally Christian Moriscos. A few decades after the Morisco rebellion of Granada known as the War of the Alpujarras, a significant proportion of Spain’s formerly-Muslim population was expelled, settling primarily in North Africa. From 1609–14, over 300,000 Moriscos were sent on ships to North Africa and other locations, and, of this figure, around 50,000 died resisting the expulsion, and 60,000 died on the journey.
The year 1492 also marked the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, during a voyage funded by Isabella. Columbus’s first voyage crossed the Atlantic and reached the Caribbean Islands, beginning the European exploration and conquest of the Americas, although Columbus remained convinced that he had reached the Orient. Large numbers of indigenous Americans died in battle against the Spaniards during the conquest, while others died from various other causes. Some scholars consider the initial period of the Spanish conquest — from Columbus’s first landing in the Bahamas until the middle of the sixteenth century — as marking the most egregious case of genocide in the history of mankind. The death toll may have reached some 70 million indigenous people (out of 80 million) in this period.
The decline culminated in a controversy over succession to the throne which consumed the first years of the 18th century. The War of the Spanish Succession was a wide-ranging international conflict combined with a civil war, and was to cost the kingdom its European possessions and its position as one of the leading powers on the Continent. During this war, a new dynasty originating in France, the Bourbons, was installed. Long united only by the Crown, a true Spanish state was established when the first Bourbon king, Philip V, united the crowns of Castile and Aragon into a single state, abolishing many of the old regional privileges and laws.
The 18th century saw a gradual recovery and an increase in prosperity through much of the empire. The new Bourbon monarchy drew on the French system of modernizing the administration and the economy. Enlightenment ideas began to gain ground among some of the kingdom’s elite and monarchy. Bourbon reformers created formal disciplined militias across the Atlantic. Spain needed every hand it could take during the seemingly endless wars of the eighteenth century — the Spanish War of Succession or Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–42) which became the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the Anglo-Spanish War (1779–83) — and its new disciplined militias served around the Atlantic as needed.
ROMANOV RUSSIA (1613–1917) duration: 304 yrs
The Romanovs achieved prominence as boyars of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and later the Tsardom of Russia under the reigning Rurik dynasty, which became extinct upon the death of Tsar Feodor I in 1598. The Time of Troubles was caused by the resulting succession crisis, where several pretenders and imposters (False Dmitris) fought for the crown during the Polish–Muscovite War. On 21 February 1613, Michael Romanov was elected Tsar of Russia by the Zemsky Sobor, establishing the Romanovs as Russia’s second reigning dynasty. Michael’s grandson Peter I established the Russian Empire in 1721, transforming the country into a great power through a series of wars and reforms.
The direct male line of the Romanovs ended when Elizabeth of Russia died in 1762 leading the House of Holstein-Gottorp, a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg that reigned in Denmark, to ascend to the crown under Peter III. Officially known as the House of Romanov, descendants after Elizabeth are sometimes referred to as “Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov”. The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 15 March 1917 as a result of the February Revolution ended 304-years of Romanov rule, establishing the Russian Republic under the Russian Provisional Government in the lead up to the Russian Civil War. In 1918, the Tsar and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks and the 47 survivors of the House of Romanov’s 65 members went into exile abroad.
BRITAIN (1688–1956) duration: 268 yrs
The Glorious Revolution ended the Restoration. The Glorious Revolution which overthrew King James II of England was propelled by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau (William of Orange). William’s successful invasion of England with a Dutch fleet and army led to his accession to the English throne as William III of England jointly with his wife Mary II of England, James’ daughter.
In April 1688, James had re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered all Anglican clergymen to read it to their congregations. When seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted a petition requesting the reconsideration of the King’s religious policies, they were arrested and tried for seditious libel. On 30 June 1688, a group of seven Protestant nobles invited the Prince of Orange to come to England with an army; by September it became clear that William would invade England. When William arrived on 5 November 1688, James lost his nerve, declined to attack the invading Dutch and tried to flee to France. He was captured in Kent; later, he was released and placed under Dutch protective guard. Having no desire to make James a martyr, William, Prince of Orange, let him escape on 23 December. James was received in France by his cousin and ally, Louis XIV, who offered him a palace and a pension.
William convened a Convention Parliament to decide how to handle the situation. While the Parliament refused to depose James, they declared that James, having fled to France had effectively abdicated the throne, and that the throne was vacant. To fill this vacancy, James’s daughter Mary was declared Queen; she was to rule jointly with her husband William, Prince of Orange, who would be king. The English Parliament passed the Bill of Rights of 1689 that denounced James for abusing his power. The abuses charged to James included the suspension of the Test Acts, the prosecution of the Seven Bishops for merely petitioning the crown, the establishment of a standing army, and the imposition of cruel punishments.
From 1700 to 1850, Britain was involved in 137 wars or rebellions. Apart from losing the American War of Independence, it was generally successful in warfare, and was especially successful in financing its military commitments. France and Spain, by contrast, went bankrupt. Britain maintained a relatively large and expensive Royal Navy, along with a small standing army. When the need arose for soldiers it hired mercenaries or financed allies who fielded armies. The rising costs of warfare forced a shift in government financing from the income from royal agricultural estates and special imposts and taxes to reliance on customs and excise taxes and, after 1790, an income tax. Working with bankers in the City, the government raised large loans during wartime and paid them off in peacetime. The rise in taxes amounted to 20% of national income, but the private sector benefited from the increase in economic growth. The demand for war supplies stimulated the industrial sector, particularly naval supplies, munitions and textiles, which gave Britain an advantage in international trade during the postwar years.
After the end of the Second World War in 1945, the UK was one of the Big Four powers (along with the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China) who met to plan the post-war world; it was an original signatory to the Declaration of the United Nations. The UK became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and worked closely with the United States to establish the IMF, World Bank and NATO. However, the war left the UK severely weakened and depending financially on the Marshall Plan. In the immediate post-war years, the Labour government initiated a radical program of reforms, which had a significant effect on British society in the following decades. Major industries and public utilities were nationalized, a welfare state was established, and a comprehensive, publicly funded healthcare system, the National Health Service, was created. The rise of nationalism in the colonies coincided with Britain’s now much-diminished economic position, so that a policy of decolonization was unavoidable. Independence was granted to India and Pakistan in 1947. Over the next three decades, most colonies of the British Empire gained their independence, with all those that sought independence supported by the U.K, during both the transition period and afterwards. Many became members of the Commonwealth of Nations.
The UK was the third country to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal (with its first atomic bomb test in 1952), but the new post-war limits of Britain’s international role were illustrated by the Suez Crisis of 1956. The international spread of the English language ensured the continuing international influence of its literature and culture. As a result of a shortage of workers in the 1950s, the government encouraged immigration from Commonwealth countries. In the following decades, the UK became a more multi-ethnic society than before. Despite rising living standards in the late 1950s and 1960s, the UK’s economic performance was less successful than many of its main competitors such as France, West Germany and Japan.
