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Technically Catholic's avatar

Hi Tomas, well done as always. If you were to add an appendix to your article, it might be the British embrace of learning in general and science/ technology in particular.

Most noblemen and (as the centuries went on) rich young men attended universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. The Royal Society gave scientifically-minded people a place to gather, report and rebate. It was also seen as an honor to belong.

The Royal Navy and merchant fleet recognized the value of technology to help them survive the sea and to defeat their rivals.

I suspect that the Church of England together with the puritans and other Protestant churches exerted a net positive on the enterprise, but much of the history I know reports the British morality being honored in the breach. But there is a uniform tendency to report bad news. There is also a tendency of those who rebelled against the British Empire, like my fellow Americans, to slant the story so that it justifies their treason/ freedom fighting.

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Matthew Zuck's avatar

yeah. London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford is good… the whole story is fascinatingly complex… the london guild hall is built on top of the site of the old roman forum for londinium so something unique about the geography anchored it as you point out. Alford highlights the expulsion of the Hanse Merchants / the Steelyard as a key catalyst… so London played a key role but was dominated by the continent (amsterdam), until this break…. and after that break then London needed to build

it’s own trading networks…. so it needed peace with the continent to get to minimal scale, but then it needed to break with the continent to really scale globally…. for better overall, but for the worse for a lot of places the network extended to in its early form…

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