Insight - Two Elizabeths And The Eclipse Of Europe

Death of the queen represents physical change in world order

• The reign of the two Elizabeths marks the rise and fall of European empire

• Agricultural and industrial revolutions spanned their eras

• The Anglosphere, the Western colonies are now under attack

• Industry and technology found its birth and eclipse under Elizabeths

• Not ethnocentric but integral to the transformation of capitalism

• John Dee is the esoteric connection, resonant in today’s astrology

(Roughly 3,500 words or 15 minutes of your time.)

Sep 12, 2022

The death Queen Elizabeth marks the end of the second Elizabethan era. The two Elizabeths may be the bookends to our civilization and not just for the British. Modern trade began with this aeon, along with the settlement of colonies that today we call the West. All our countries are now in jeopardy.

Agriculture, innovation, trade, the nature of the entity once known as the corporation and even the remit of the state itself trace much of their modern character to the 1600s, and are facing their greatest evolutionary challenge in the 2000s.

One may quibble over the day the music died but it is the trajectory that matters.

The point is not to Anglicize history or to credit Britain with undue influence but to look objectively at the change in our lives. The Renaissance was underway across Europe but Britain was the first nation to undergo an agricultural revolution, without which there could not have been cities nor the workforce for industry leading to the technology of the present day.

Such an agricultural revolution gave us modern farming; now the oracles moan that farming as we know it must end. Meat, if it is eaten at all, must be synthetic.

Both revolutions, agricultural and industrial, began in the monasteries and cannot be chalked up to the British. However it was the dissolution of the monasteries by Elizabeth I's father and the sale of their assets that created capital and division of labour on a scale that kindled the modern markets. The release of those assets created impetus that imposed a new means of exchange.

According to analysis by Heldring, Robinson and Vollmer the location of monastery holdings correlates closely with later industrial development. The link with asset sales is much closer and more causative than the mere presence of resources like coal, fertile land or water. [1]

“The creation of a land market can be linked to local differences in subsequent development and, ultimately, industrialisation.”

This has implications for the world envisaged by Klaus Schwab of the Davos Economic Forum, his so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, and also for the billionaires who are so intent on controlling resources while chaining the masses to biological identity and central bank digital currencies that are in reality nothing more than vouchers or a ration book.

It was markets and thus property rights combined with freedom of movement that drove agricultural and industrial initative. The digital database envisaged by the Rockefellers, in which everything is nailed down, tracked and priced, threatens to push us back before the agricultural revolution, to feudalism, while sharply reducing the prospects for innovation.

Like agriculture, industrial development also finds its bookends in the two Elizabethan eras. The first camshafts were fitted to waterwheels to drive hammers to press oil, tan leather, saw wood and pump the bellows of furnaces. David Bentley Hart writes in The Christian Revolution (2009).

“We may find it somewhat difficult now to appreciate the revolutionary implications of devices like the heavy saddle with stirrups, the wheeled plow, the rigid horse collar, heavy armor, and the nailed horseshoe, but they allowed for the cultivation of soils that had never previously been genuinely arable, helped initiate a long period of Western military security, and did much to foster the kind of economic and demographic growth for want of which the Western Roman Empire had fallen into ruin.”

By the mid-16th century the British supply of wood to make charcoal was waning and the use of coal gained pace. The first steam engines were built to remove water from mines. A Spanish mining executive Jerónimo de Ayanz had patented the idea in 1606 but the first working example is attributed to Thomas Savery 80 years later.

The waterwheel gave way to the steam engine, steam to oil as the era of the combustion engine arrived. That era is now ending though not under its own steam (excuse the pun!) but by an arbitrary decision to restrict the use of oil. Although the telegraph came later we see the parallel trajectory of data over wires which evolved from Morse code, to voice, to facsimile machine to internet. With censorship we are witnessing arguably the end of that particular cycle.

There is good reason to question the claim of Schwab and Davos (he does not speak for the World) that the melding of data and biology constitutes another industrial revolution.

Censors and centralizers

A reading of the history of invention suggests that it blossomed out of many fields by accident or of necessity but certainly not from central planning, which so far as one can see is Schwab's goal. It does not matter if the planners are the Politburo or a public-private partnership, excessive control is a dead weight on innovation.

Russia witnessed this when it supposedly exited communism, yet the level of bureaucracy inherited from the Soviet Union, and the opportunities it provided for corruption, led many creative business people to sit on their hands or flee the country.

A point of continuity is that “Gloriana” or the reign of Elizabeth I was the world’s first modern police state. It took well over a century from Gutenberg’s printing press to produce Britain’s first newspaper. The nation lagged behind other countries because of the Tudor regime’s brutal censorship.

The mass media of the day was theatre and only two troupes were allowed — one controlled by the monarch, the other by the senior official, the Lord Chamberlain. Precisely the form of false competition that is so much in favour with bureaucrats today.

Britain was able to advance economically because its traders had a free hand abroad if not at home, for good or bad. Sometimes what we casually call progress has a nefarious impetus. See Insight: The Objectives Of 9/11 And The Covid Response (MC Sep 11, 2022)

Elizabeth I was able to finance her security state because her Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake faced no restriction abroad. It was the very diversity of governance, the absence of a “rules-based international order,” that allowed the European empires to arbitrage human rights, or the lack of them, between continents.

Arguably it lacked even the freedom of inquiry that obtained within the monasteries — even though it was the dispersion of monastic lands that spurred the development of markets and thus the innovation of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The final years of Elizabeth I’s reign saw the formation of the (British) East India Company that would go on to be the model of publicly traded companies. Lynn Forrester de Rothschild’s Council On Inclusive Capitalism now assures us that model must change to something closer to the corporativist one envisaged by Mussolini and copied by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In another historical echo, the Delanos had made their money in the opium trade once cornered by the East India Company (history is a bloody mess).

Opium of the masses

While on the topic of opium, in a contrarian account of the British wars with China of the early 19th century. Harry Gelber writes at Harvard University that the wars were never about drugs in China, where growing and selling opium had been legal for centuries.

He quotes none other than president John Quincy Adams who said in 1841 that opium was no more responsible for the China wars than tea had been the cause of the American revolt.

It was more conventional trade war that led to confrontation, because China opted out of general trade with the British, French or Americans and confined foreign merchants to one port, Canton now Guangzhou. The British sold opium to China in exchange for silver, which they used to buy tea in India, for brewing in Britain.

China harassed foreign traders whom it didn't fully welcome, and that’s what became the pretext for British foreign minister Lord Palmerston's war.

As today, it was competition for resources.

Also interesting is the reason for later restrictions on opium in the West. At the time it was legal everywhere, including Britain, where small amounts of laudanum continued to seep into sweets and pastilles up until the 1960s.

He argues that it was the rising influence of the medical and pharmaceutical industry as a tool of social regulation that led to prohibition. Gelber doesn’t mention him but that would be Rockefeller, who was behind both prohibitions.

“This was a period, too, when the Western medical profession, with the Americans largely in the lead, was becoming a powerful social regulating force, one that, especially in conjunction with the churches, was to bring “Prohibition” to the U.S. less than half a century later. So the general anti-opium and anti-drug campaigns in the West gathered pace.”

That was the very time that Rockefeller took control of the American Medical Association. And the reason to ban opium was that it competed with the petro-pharmaceutical industry which he controlled. [2]

Rockefeller would eventually own most of the pharmaceutical industry as well as the oil industry. In both cases J.D. used distribution as the means of securing control: manipulating railway and transportation in the case of oil; doctors and pharmacies in the case of medicine.

As for alcohol prohibition, Rockefeller's backing is usually put down to him being not a Marrano but a Baptist, and non-drinker himself. However the rival fuels of vehicles that rediced his gasoline sales included then dominant electric vehicles, and ethanol-driven and steam-powered vehicles.

My late grandfather witnesses numerous steam powered cars when he was a child in Toronto. There is a video of a design as late as the 1950s for a charcoal-fired motorcycle that did 50 mph, filling its tank with water.

So why are the Fakt Checka so desperate to deny Rockefeller-backed prohibition that put ethanol-driven cars off the road? How did local councils come to rip out the tram or trolleybus networks for that matter?

Why the need to concern oneself with a detail of history 100 years ago: it’s because the Rockefellers and their doppelgängers are using the same techniques today to strong-arm governments to follow policies that profit them. If they restricted alternative energy and manipulated medicine, what does that say for their credibility on “fossil fuels,” carbon, Covid and the climate?

Historical perspective, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, examine the present employing the evidence of the past.

The rules-based international order is a misnomer. It is interoperable or exchangeable with Sustainable Development Goals which are by definition restrictive and attainable only by the richest countries, just as only the biggest companies can afford to comply with Environmental and Social Governance. That’s cornering the market by another name.

See Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy (MC, Sep 8, 2022)

The concept of one world governance, of lock step and nations acting to one plan — coordinated by the World Health Organisation as Trojan horse for an aristocratic elite of an empire-turned-inwards, feeding off its own population — has not worked and never will.

Another supranational experiment, the European Union, has run into the same problem. The single currency is a political, not an economic, concept. It was a mechanism to equalize prices between countries with different products, specializations and export markets and thus with different costs of living. The disaster of the euro is plain for all willing to see.

See Crisis Update: Russia Turns Off Gas (MC Sep 6, 2022)

Censorship of the Internet ultimately will kill innovation. We already know this from the way that patents are used to stifle research. See Nobel prize winner Robert Laughlin, The Crime of Reason: and the Closing of the Scientific Mind (2010).

Censorship and surveillance are not limited to politics. The main target is not opinion but privacy. The profit motive would suggest that ideas shall be mined, that AI bots search for and steal from or, worse, shut down innovation because it challenges established interests.

When creative minds are surveilled they retreat into their shell, just like the Russian business people I mentioned who invest their earnings in a property on an Italian lake instead of starting a new venture. Self-censorship is not compatible with the exchange of ideas, the CO2 upon which innovation depends.

The WEF proposes arbitrarily to give people personal quotas in every field: what happens when your computer use exceeds normal and the smart grid shuts you off — think it can’t happen? I personally type quickly and search extensively. I am often blocked by search engines because they think I am trawling sites for too much information. It’s a niche example but expand it to the kind of topic you are allowed to research. Google has set up such a system for China.

The upshot of this is that centralized control of anything is a hazard. The fashion for managed outcomes is that offspring of ideology, equity. Outcomes management is zero sum thinking that results from an over-reliance on computers to make decisions. In particular the Computers don’t deal well with fuzzy logic