Abstract
When people ask why governments took the decisions which led to war and why people supported them, they usually mean what reasons did they give or what motives did they hide? But our conscious and articulated motives are like the visible part of the iceberg; the assumptions and feelings, which make up our culture, lie behind the decisions we take, even if they are hidden from us. As one commentator put it, ‘continuity is no accident. Social customs, like personal habit, economise human effort. They store knowledge, pre-arrange decisions, save us the trouble of weighing every choice afresh.’1 They become particularly important in an intense crisis which may lead to intervention in a major war; Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, who more than any other carried the burden of the British decision to go to war in 1914, recalled afterwards:
It is not always easy for a man to trace the inward path and steps by which he reaches his conclusions; so much of the working of the mind is subconscious rather than conscious. It is difficult to be sure of one’s own mind, one can only guess at the processes in others.2
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Notes
A. H. Halsey, Change in British Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 2.
Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years: 1892–1916 (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), Volume 2, p. 1.
Francis Beer, Peace Against War: The Ecology of International Violence (San Francisco, Freeman, 1981), p. 16.
I use the term ‘culture’ rather than ‘character’ to emphasise its ability to change. On character, see Sir Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in its Formation (London, Methuen, fourth and revised edition 1948);
Daniel Jenkins, The British: Their Identity and the Churches (SCM Press, London, 1975);
Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006).
For the way in which European romantic notions increased the gap between Japanese and Western culture, see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze: Cherry Blossom and Nationalisms (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Jonathan R. Adleman and Chih-yu Shi, Symbolic War: The Chinese Use of Force 1840–1980 (Taipei, National Chengchi University, 1993).
M. A. Salahi, Muhammad: Man and Prophet (Shaftesbury, Element, 1995);
Harfiyah, Abdel Haleem, Oliver Ramsbotham et al., The Crescent and the Cross: Muslim and Christian Approaches to War and Peace (London, Council of Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament, 1999);
Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003).
John Proctor (ed.), Village Schools: A History of Rural Elementary Education from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century in Prose and Verse (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), introduction.
Harari, Y. N., Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity 1450–1600 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2004), p. 21.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, Methuen, 1965), p. 68.
For an individual view of mobility and immobility see Jack Ayres (ed.), Paupers and Pig Killers: The Diary of William Holland a Somerset Parson 1799–1818 (Gloucester, Allan Sutton, 1984).
‘Review of the history of the ancient Barony of Castle Combe’ by G. P. Scrope MP, Quarterly Review, March 1853.
Rowland Parker, The Common Stream (London, Paladin-Grafton, 1976), pp. 132–133.
Amiram Raviv et al., How Children Understand Peace and War (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999), p. 192.
Quoted in W. O. Lester Smith, Education (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965), p. 9.
For an analysis of the way modern children learn, see David Coulby and Crispin Jones, Education and Warfare in Europe (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001), p. 69.
Oliver Morley Ainsworth (ed.), Milton on Education: The Tractate of Education (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1928), p. 55.
See also W. O. Lester Smith, Education (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965), p. 9.
F. H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Snorri Sturluson, King Harald’s Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 102, 129 and 142.
Eugenia Stanhope, Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (London, Dodsley, 1792), Volume 2, p. 95.
E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations and the Principles of Natural Law (Washington, Carnegie Institution, 1916);
Donald Read, Cobden and Bright: A Victorian Political Partnership (London, Edward Arnold, 1988), p. 128.
F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), part 1.
Marten Ultey (ed.), Adapting to Conditions, War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Alabama, University of Alabama Press, 1986), p. 1.
Stanhope, Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (London, Dodsley, 1792), Volume 2, p. 21.
William Hazlitt, ‘Coffee house politicians’, Table Talk (London, Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1925), p. 256.
Nicholas Shakespeare, In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World (London, Vintage, 2004), p. 97.
Emma Vincent Macleod, A War of Ideas (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998), p. 6 gives 315,000 casualties which would be a proportion of 1 in 38.
The proportion would also be altered if Ireland were included thus bringing the population to just under 18 million in 1811 and 45 million 100 years later, Anthony Wood, Nineteenth Century Britain: 1815–1914 (London, Longmans, 1960), p. 449.
For the war’s impact on burials, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (London, Edward Arnold, 1981), p. 128.
Richard Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 377–390. Dickinson, Britain and the French Revolution, particularly Chapters 1 and 7.
Crouzet, ‘The impact of the French wars’, p. 194. The primary reason for the high birth rate was the fall in the age of marriage from 26 to 23, though a subsidiary reason was the decline in the death rate, see E. A. Wringley, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 222–224.
For casualty statistics on the First World War, see Robin Prior, Churchill’s World Crisis as History (Beckenham, Croom Helm, 1983), Chapter 12.
Compare, for example, James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson 1758–1802 (London, Oxford University Press, 1949),
Jack Ayres (ed.), Paupers and Pig Killers: The Diary of William Holland A Somerset Parson 1799–1818 (Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1984)
and Peter Jupp, (ed.), The Letter-Journal of George Canning 1793–1795 (London, Royal Historical Society, 1991)
with Gavin Roydon (ed.), Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Geogina Lee (Stroud, Sutton, 2006);
Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violent Bonham Carter 1914–1945 (London, Phoenix, 1999), part one. See also Parker, Common Stream, p. 202.
Arthur L. Bowley, Some Economic Consequences of the Great War (London, Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 101.
For British borrowings from the United States, see Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1985).
Gyorgy Ranki, The Economics of the Second World War (Vienna, Bohlau Verlag, 1995), pp. 285–290.
For the initial efforts to raise income taxes, see Arthur Hope-Jones, Income Tax in the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1939).
W. K. Hancock and M. M. Browning, British War Economy (London, HMSO, 1949), pp. 547–548. See also ‘Sixty years on, we finally pay for the war’, The Times, 27 December 2006
and Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946 (London, Penguin, 2002).
Alan T. Peacock and Jack Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1968), p. 170.
Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 9.
For GDP levels, see Angus Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-run Comparative View (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 7; Michael Shanks, ‘The English sickness’, Encounter, January 1972; Henry Fairlie and Peregrine Worsthorne, ‘Suicide of a nation?’ Encounter, January 1976.
David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988).
John Pollock, Wilberforce (London, Constable, 1977), pp. 132–136.
General Baron von Schweppenburg, The Critical Years (London, Wingate, 1952), p. 19.
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© 2009 Philip Towle
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Towle, P. (2009). Culture and Circumstance. In: Going to War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234314_2
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