Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [104]
For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what is now Great Britain was a pit of vicious religious and ethnic warfare. Protestants massacred Catholics, Catholics beheaded Protestants, Anglicans persecuted dissenters, and Englishmen slaughtered Irish, Scots, and Welsh, all of whom retaliated in kind. Indeed, the Britons of this period could almost be compared to the Mongols before the rise of Genghis Khan: exacting revenge on one another, caught in seemingly unending cycles of bloodshed and mutual destruction. In the words of one contemporary, Britons had inflicted on themselves more “killing and cutting throats…spoyling, and ruinating one another (under the fair pretences of Religion and Reformation) with more barbarous inhumanity and cruelty, than could have been committed here by…millions of Turkes, Tartars, or Cannibals.”1
All this was to change dramatically, beginning with the reign of William and Mary. In 1689, the English parliament passed the Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration, two revolutionary documents. Notwithstanding significant limitations—for example, the Act of Toleration protected only Protestant dissenters, not Catholics—these two decrees marked the beginning of a new era. Although there would be continuing bigotry and brutality, particularly toward Catholics, Britain would over the next two centuries earn the reputation of the most tolerant nation on earth.
Indeed, the rise of Great Britain vividly exemplifies the thesis of this book. Because of England's marked turn toward tolerance after 1689, three groups in particular—Jews, Huguenots, and, most important, Scots—were able to enter into British society with unprecedented freedom. Collectively, these three groups played an indispensable role in the financial and industrial revolutions that catapulted Great Britain to world dominance.
But once it achieved global dominance, Britain found itself in a profoundly schizophrenic position. At home, Britain had triumphantly embraced the values of pluralism and tolerance. At the same time, in India, Rhodesia, Jamaica, and almost all its overseas domains, British governors ruled as Occidental despots, who presumed white, Christian superiority and openly practiced ethnic and racial discrimination.
In other words, for the British, a funny thing happened on the way to world dominance—the Enlightenment. This may sound flip, but in fact Great Britain differs from every preceding world-dominant power in the following respect: It reached the pinnacle of global power after the threshold of modernity—with its fundamental ideas of liberty, equality, and democracy—had been irreversibly crossed. Britain during its Victorian heyday thus confronted a dilemma that never faced Genghis Khan or even the burghers of seventeenth-century Holland, who never imagined that the tolerance they practiced at home might require them to view the Javanese as their equals. How could Victorian Britain, a nation increasingly coming to see itself as the freest, most tolerant, most moral in the world, rule an empire of conquered subjects?
In the modern world, the meaning of tolerance has changed. The purely instrumental tolerance of the ancient empires, in which skilled groups or talented individuals were “harnessed” in the service of the empire like good horses or mules, cannot satisfy modern ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government. Thus the history of Britain raises an intriguing question. Is it possible for a world-dominant power to be genuinely tolerant in the modern, “enlightened” sense? Answering this question is especially important for today's global hyperpower—the United States of America—the only one to have been a former colony itself.
“THE PRODIGIOUS MULTITUDE OF EXCELLENT PEOPLE OF ALL KINDS”: JEWS AND HUGUENOTS IN BRITAIN
After expelling its Jews in 1290, England had virtually