Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [111]
How much did Britain's tolerance after 1689 assist its rise to world dominance? This of course is impossible to know. Lest the obvious be overlooked, it should be noted that, if only by dint of England's far larger population, the majority of Britain's most important bankers, merchants, magnates, generals, and governors-general in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were English. Not only Scots were responsible for Britain's technological breakthroughs. It was the Englishman Jethro Tuli, for example, who invented the seed drill, and other Englishmen who invented the fly shuttle, jenny, water frame, and spinning mule—all major factors in Britain's industrial revolution.
Nevertheless, the contributions of the Jews, Huguenots, and Scots—which would not have been possible without Britain's turn to tolerance—were not only disproportionate but pivotal. Take, for example, the Bank of England, “the most powerful financial institution in the world's most powerful country” and a chief reason Britain was able to triumph over France. A Scot conceived the bank, Huguenots funded it, and Jews brokered its biggest loans. (Other Dutch capitalists invested heavily in it too.) Likewise, Jews founded the London Stock Exchange, brought diamond and bullion trading to Britain, and almost single-handedly made London, as opposed to Amsterdam, the world's financial center.18
Without the steam engine and the iron-smelting hot blast furnace, both of which were Scottish inventions, Britain could not have built naval monsters like the HMS Warrior, described by Niall Ferguson as “the supreme expression of mid-Victorian might”:
Steam-driven, “iron clad” in five inches of armour plate and fitted with the latest breech-loading, shell-firing guns, Warrior was the world's most powerful battleship, so powerful that no foreign vessel ever dared to exchange fire with her. And she was just one of around 240 ships, crewed by 40,000 sailors— making the Royal Navy the biggest in the world by far. And thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world's merchant tonnage. At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world's oceans.19
In sum, while impossible to quantify precisely, the benefits that Great Britain gained from harnessing the talents, capital, and ingenuity of non-English groups such as the Scots, Jews, and Huguenots were immense and far-reaching.
Tolerance in nineteenth-century Great Britain transcended purely strategic calculation. To a surprising extent, the English embraced and practiced the Enlightenment ideal of tolerance: They espoused principles of universal equality and, to a remarkable degree, permitted members of different ethnic and religious groups to become full citizens of Great Britain with the same social and political rights as native Englishmen.
Indeed, the very idea of “Britain” overcame long-standing national and ethnic boundaries. Although a nation in its own right, Great Britain was created by incorporating at least three different peoples that could claim, and frequently did claim, national identities of their own: the English, Welsh, and Scots. Intermarriage among the nobility was one powerful indication that age-old barriers were coming down. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the number of marriages between the daughters of Scottish aristocrats and Englishmen more than doubled, creating a new landed “British” upper class. When the Scottish heiress Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, married the Englishman George Granville Leveson-Gower, the latter gained 800,000 acres of prime real estate in Scotland. Whereas before 1770 reference books about British nobility had almost always treated the English, Welsh, and Scottish peerage as distinct entities and kept them in separate voiumes, between 1770 and 1830 most of the guides to the nobility published in Britain—and there were seventy-five such guides— treated the peerage