Sunday 11 July 2010

Going Dutch?

The Dutch were the first to establish diplomatic relations with the rebel American Colonies. Honestly, first the 1688 invasion and military coup, and then that. Thus did they repay our support for their war of independence. From Spain.

2 comments:

  1. The events of 1688 were the Dutch repaying us for our support in their war of independence.

    Comfortably the best thing that could have happened to the country at the time.

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  2. Well, indeed. We cannot have any of that universal religious toleration rubbish, can we?

    Still, Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688 was such that within those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate, a sense which had startlingly radical consequences.

    The American Republic, the campaign against the slave trade, Radical action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, opposition to the Boer and First World Wars: radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.

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