Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
John Bright told his Birmingham constituents that if Britain was indeed a great nation, it was because her public was contented and not because her empire was wide.
After John Bright MP criticised British imperial policy in India, saying it was too much about the glories of empire and too little about the condition of the people, a Calcutta newspaper scolded him and reminded him solemnly of the greatness of Rome. But Bright was unrepentant, and speaking to his constituents in Birmingham on October 29th, 1858, he brought his lesson closer to home.
John Bright asked the people of Birmingham to spread the word that a great nation, like any good citizen and neighbour, does not meddle officiously in the affairs of others.
In the 1850s, prevailing opinion in Europe was that peace and prosperity depended on the diplomacy and military interventions of a few exceptional ‘Great Powers’. John Bright MP, however, told his Birmingham constituents that nations had to observe the same humble morality as citizens do. No one likes domineering and meddlesome people, and history shows that there is always a reckoning eventually.
Hannah Mullens describes her battle to reach out to wealthy Indian ladies with nothing to do, nothing to think about and nowhere to go.
From the 1850s, Calcutta-born Hannah Mullens (1826–1861) travelled all over India trying to bring literacy, self-respect and spiritual consolation into the dreary leisure of zenanas, the cloistered women’s quarters of well-to-do Indian families. The following account is taken from a letter she wrote from Nagercoil on India’s southernmost tip, then in the Kingdom of Travancore.
When Ambassador Molesworth criticised the government of Christian V, the Danish king cried ‘off with his head!’.
Christian V, King of Denmark and Norway from 1670 to 1699, was a great admirer of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV of France, and sought to emulate the glory of Louis’s court, his ‘divine right of kings’ and his absolute power of government. Over here, though, Parliament had thrown out James II in 1688 for doing the same, and his replacement William III gathered that in England no one was beyond criticism.
The doorman of a Paris theatre had strict instructions to keep dogs outside, but it was the humans they let in who caused all the trouble.
The following anecdote comes from a pamphlet entitled Popular Sketches of British Quadrupeds, published in 1815. Reflecting the gentler times of Georgian England, the authors looked not only at working animals but also at pets, and treated the reader to a tissue of heartwarming tales of their affection and intelligence.
Emperor Akbar’s court physician told his nobles that beneath the waters of a lake was a dry, cosy room, and dared them to find a way in.
In April 1594, Persian physician and inventor Hakim Ali Gilani (?-1609) laid a challenge before the open-mouthed courtiers of Emperor Akbar, then in Lahore. He showed them a small pool, and assured any man brave enough to dive in that there was a perfectly dry, cosy room waiting for him beneath the dark surface.