William Blake Our Contemporary
Look at a Royal Navy video. It shows one of the Navy’s new aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth II, at sea. On her deck, men wearing high-visibility red and yellow jackets and helmets direct F-35 aircraft around the deck. The aircraft take-off by accelerating along the deck and launching up a ramp. They showcase their ability to hover. The video has a soundtrack. I instantly recognise it. It is “Welcome to the Danger Zone” from the movie Top Gun. I have an idea. I check out a few other websites and see that the US is using music from Top Gun to sell its warplanes worldwide and that across the world, air forces and navies are using the same music to convince their fellow nationals that they too have the ‘right stuff’.
In such videos, what is decisive is what is not present. Here, I will restrict myself to commenting on the worldwide expansion of the nuclear armaments race. This was documented at the time by William Arkin and Richard Fieldhouse in their book Nuclear Battlefields. Arkin and Fieldhouse emphasise that it was an expansion that meant we live, minute by minute, a hair-trigger away from nuclear war. This reality was confirmed by the man in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal...
In the case of the Soviet Union…
The worldwide expansion of the nuclear arms race led to global resistance. There was also the emergence of new actors. There had long been feminists who argued that modern warfare revealed the bankruptcy of a patriarchal order in which older men ruled over young men and women. The unprecedented expansion of nuclear weapons now led to the argument that women needed to highlight the failure of patriarchy. One example was the all-women peace camp outside Greenham Common airbase, which was going to receive nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
William Blake is our contemporary. He challenges us to see what is in front of our eyes but fails to recognise its significance because we are so invested in not seeing its true meaning.
The trouble is that Blake has been turned from being a Bengal tiger into a cuddly if slightly mangy, tabby cat. And a cat, moreover, that has been domesticated and declawed.
The hymn Jerusalem is Blake’s most popular work, but it is not Blake’s. It is the result of Robert Bridges, then Poet Laureate, and Hubert Parry’s invisible rewriting of Blake. In 1916, Bridges was concerned that the mass slaughter of British troops in the Battle of the Somme had weakened the nation’s morale. He cut out the words from Blake’s larger poem Milton and persuaded Hubert Parry to set them to music. The result is the anthem of Jerusalem that people know today.
In stirring words, the speaker calls for his chariot of fire, his bow of molten gold, and his arrows of desire. He then declares that he shall not cease from mental strife, nor shall his sword sleep in his hand, till “we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.”
It all seems fine until we see these words restored to their place in Blake’s preface to his poem Milton. What we then see is that in the prior text, Blake declared that the British elite was gripped by a war culture based on a perverse interpretation of Greek and Roman models. He called for the:
Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.
It was vital to:
Believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are just & true to our imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever; in Jesus our Lord.
Blake was right about the British elite’s promotion of a war culture. Britain had been almost continuously at war for a century. New streets were named after British victories. The aristocracy had themselves painted in military uniform. Everywhere there were great bronze statues of Wellington, Nelson, and other military and naval commanders.
Blake’s poem struck directly at the key institutions of the British fiscal-military state. But what might a fiscal-military state be? A few words are in order. I take the term from John Brewer’s pathbreaking work, The Sinews of Power. Here, in extreme compression, is what he and others who have focused on the fiscal-military state have to say.
What is a fiscal-military state?
The world’s first fiscal military state was established by the Dutch. The flow of gold and silver from South America to Catholic Spain had made Spain the greatest power in Europe and had enabled Spain’s bankers, the Genoese, to displace Venice as the center of global finance. The speed with which the Dutch defeated the Spanish was based on their success in raising increasingly vast sums of money. They did so because the Dutch state was run by people who understood the needs of finance and had established institutions—a national debt, the Dutch East India Company, an excise tax, etc.—that convinced creditors they could meet their interest payments. This led European states to copy Holland. The British had been the most successful. One reason for this is that they were able to develop a reasonably incorrupt taxation system.
The transformation of the British state into a fiscal-military state was completed by the Dutch themselves. The standard story of 1688 is wrong. The decision to land an army in England was taken by the Dutch parliament, not by William. They did so because they were concerned that James II of England would side with Louis XIV in his expected attack on England. It was only after this decision was taken that William made sure he was invited to come to England to prevent James II from establishing an absolute monarchy.
William of Orange shared the crown with his wife Mary. He ensured that the British fiscal-military state supplied him with the arms and the cash he needed to win the war with Louis XIV, the king of France.
The strategy developed by the British fiscal-military state rested on its ability to secure finance in greater quantity and at a lower price than its continental rivals. It also rested on its willingness to attack the soft civilian side of its enemies.
At sea, it could afford a large and better-equipped navy, which was able to bombard or blockade its enemies. On land, it maintained continental allies with mass armies, such as Prussia, by paying them. The result was that within a few decades, Britain held the balance of power in Europe and had established itself as the top naval power worldwide.
Key institutions of the British fiscal-military state:
The Royal Court
The Houses of Parliament
The Excise and Customs
The Admiralty Board
The Royal Society of Arts
The Royal Society
St Paul’s Cathedral
The Bank of England
The National Debt
The Stock Exchange
The British East India Company
The Royal Hospital, Greenwich
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The Royal Dockyards at Deptford
The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich
The Spiral
The fiscal-military state had its central institutions in and around London. It soon became a global institution with bases all over the world. Its institutions formed a mutually reinforcing circle. For example, improvements in maritime clocks overseen by the Royal Society enabled British warships and merchant ships to know which longitude they had reached. This boosted British commerce and the Royal Navy, enabling the growth of London and the City of London—and so on. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain had the naval and military force necessary to compete with its continental rivals and, through luck and leadership, translated that force into victory.
Several qualifications need to be made to this statement. The fiscal-military state was far from being under the control of the men who governed it, and it repeatedly produced outcomes that its governors did not want—the most commonly known one being that the huge cost of the Seven Years' War led to new taxes being imposed on the American colonists, leading to the American War of Independence. By the end of the French Wars (commonly known as the Napoleonic Wars), the British economy was crippled by enormous debt.
The British answer to how they could ensure the money and naval forces necessary to secure victory was twofold:
First, to make sure the British economy was so large—by breaking down all barriers to British merchants—that wars could be paid for out of current tax revenues;
Second, to maintain a naval force larger than the next two naval powers combined.
It was a system that could not last. The success of other countries in industrialising and the development of hugely expensive coal- and then oil-fired battleships meant that by the end of the 19th century, it had become increasingly clear that Britain could no longer maintain the two-power standard by simply building more ships. The answer of the sometime First Sea Lord, “Jacky” Fisher, and his followers—known as the Fish Pond, of which Winston Churchill was a member—was that Britain needed a naval revolution. The very latest naval technology, coupled with innovative tactics and strategy, would enable Britain to maintain its lead.
The Royal Navy’s domination of the seas went hand in hand with an imperial insensitivity to other nations. The Kaiser was proud of developing a blue-water fleet. He invited the Royal Navy to a review of his new battleships. There was a heavy fog on the morning of the review. The Kaiser was aghast to find, when the mist cleared, that the Royal Navy had used the fog as cover to occupy the best stations.
The children’s author Beatrix Potter saw it as showing the hubris of Fisher’s plan and wrote a children’s book about a frog who goes fishing and is nearly drowned by a trout, entitled The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, in the belief that children—and the women who read to them—could see the madness of it all, whereas the men ready to play the naval game could not.