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Hume on the events of 1688

Stirrings of unease

The English, prepossessed against their sovereign, firmly believed, that he had concerted a project with Lewis [Louis XIV] for their entire subjection. Portsmouth, it was said, was to be put into the hands of that ambitious monarch: England was to be filled with French and Irish troops: and every man who refused to embrace the Romish superstition, was by these bigoted princes devoted to certain destruction.

[Footnote:] That there really was no new alliance formed betwixt France and England, appears both, from Sunderland’s Apology, and from D’Avaux’s Negotiations, lately published: see vol. iv. p. 18. Eng translation, 27th of September, 1687; 16th of March, 6th of May, 10th of August, 2d, 23d, and 24th of September, 5th and 7th of October, 11th of November, 1688.

These suggestions were every where spread abroad, and tended to augment the discontents of which both the fleet and …

The case of Sir Basil Firebrace

Source

Pamphlet, A collection of the debates and proceedings in Parliament, in 1694 and 1695. Upon the inquiry into the late briberies and corrupt practices, published anonymously in 1695.

Corrupt MPs

This pamphlet tells the tale of the large-scale corruption practised by the East India Company in the 1680s and 90s. But it opens with a caustic preface reminiscing about the heady days of corrupt Parliamant in the 1670s under Charles II, when MPs were more or less openly treated and paid for their votes:

Then was the time when an hungry Member was sure of a dinner at one or other of the public tables kept about Westminster to feed the betrayers of their country. The Practice was, that besides a dinner, when they had done any eminent piece of service, every one found under his plate such a parcel of guineas as it was thought his day's work …

Extracts from 1689 HOC Journal

Extracts from the 1689 House of Commons Journal concerning complaints against the East India Company.

25 May

And the Counsel for the East India Company delivered in a Narrative of the Rebellion, or Tumult, which happened 21 October 1684, dated at St. Helena, 27 December 1684

8 June

Resolved that those who ordered martial law at St Helena (the Company refusing to reveal who had signed the order) not be covered by the general act of indemnity for these crimes.

13 July

Petition of Martha Bolton, Widow, was read; setting forth, That George Sheldon, her Brother, and one Gabriel Powell, Two of the Nine Persons condemned by Martial Law at Sancta Hellena, having, in December last, delivered to one Captain Dore, (then coming for England), a Petition to the late King James; setting forth, The ill Usage they had from the East India Company, and their Agents; whereof as soon …

Winning in Vietnam

Robert Asprey's monumental work on guerilla warfare, War in the Shadows, is really about the Vietnam War, even as he ranges across the centuries in his analysis of asymmetric methods in war. He reserves his most exacting rhetoric, and his greatest scorn, for those who ordered and conducted the failed American invasion of Indochina, for their amorality and incompetence. I was struck by how often, through the years from 1945 onwards, he was able to quote a general who confidently announced impending victory or at least great strides towards it. So I collected a few.

Source

Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows (Macdonald & Jane: 1975)

Background

We start in 1945 with British and French troops in south Vietnam, along with the defeated Japanese army.

Under the terms of the Potsdam Conference as confirmed at Yalta, Britain and China shared responsibility for occupying Vietnam: British forces moving in south and Chinese …

Bengal: saltpetre

A seventeenth-century army increasingly relied on gunpowder, and the production of that vital resource required three mineral ingredients - charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre. Of these, the two minority ingredients were charcoal, which could be obtained readily wherever there were trees, and sulphur, which was mined in many places and was fairly cheap. However, three-quarters or so of the mix was taken up by saltpetre, the mineral potassium nitrate. Saltpetre forms naturally in small quantities in some locations, but for regular supply it had to be 'farmed' by heaping animal dung with earth in large beds that were then treated with urine for a period of months. Bacterial action produces potassium nitrate, which with the right technique can be refined to a relatively pure crystalline product.

The Mughal army was as gunpowder-based as the European armies. At the start of the sixteenth century the technologies were very similar, with European powers making …