Transcript Week 4: International Business

Mr. Niall Douglas
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9.30am-11am: Last full TOEIC exam
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11.20am-12pm: Reading and vocab check
12pm-12.40am: Niall’s History of the History
of the Irish Revolution part 2 of 3
12.40pm-1.20pm: More English Language
Cementing
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So back to the Irish Revolution, the first
modern information war which was
successful, defeating the world’s greatest
power of that time ...
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Yesterday we covered powers of forty
(“Dirac’s Large Number Hypothesis”) and
events leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising
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Got one more bit before we get into that ...
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During the Potato Famine (1845-1852), the
British decided to deliberately NOT help one
of its dominions and let the people starve
 In fact, they increased food exports from Ireland
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Around the same time there was also famine
in Scotland (1846-1857). Instead of helping,
they drove the starving Scots off their land
(called “The Highland Clearances”). Most died
or went to the USA
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Why let millions starve?
 The British had come to believe (due to a philosopher
called Rev. Malthus) that populations incapable of
looking after themselves needed “stiff medicine” for
their own good
 If you saved people from famine, they simply had
more babies and created worse famine later
 The British decided that only an educated property
owning middle class could “civilise” a population so it
could look after itself
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So instead of food, after the famine they enabled Irish
Catholics to go to school, buy and sell land, practice
their religion, form businesses, set up finance (banks),
and vote BUT only to send politicians to London
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So you get catholic universities set up all over Ireland
as well as banks, companies etc.
 University Colleges Cork, Dublin, Galway etc were founded
in 1848 and permitted Catholics to enter
 Allied Irish Bank was founded in 1864
 1870s onwards there were a series of Land Acts freeing up
land for Catholic ownership
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So to summarise, after the famine:
 Irish Catholics were enabled and encouraged to
become middle-class i.e. Educated and land-owning
 There were lots of resources freed up by halving the
population and by putting a lot of derelict land into
more productive use, so average incomes more than
doubled
 The British thought this would create a population
able to look after itself, and one loyal to the British
Empire
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Something usually left out of considering the Irish
Revolution is the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902)
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This war was militarily successful – a group of rag-tag
Dutch ex-pats under General Jan Christiaan Smuts
beat the entire might of the British Army
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Unfortunately, the British commander realised that by
simply rounding up their women and children and
putting them into concentration camps (a British,
NOT Nazi invention) and starving 20,000 of them to
death, you could win
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The Boers weren’t anti-British, they just
wanted self-governance and no taxation
without representation
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In fact, after they lost the Boer War, the same
British commander which defeated them
became their greatest advocate. They got
their self-governance and became very loyal
British subjects
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Most importantly for Ireland, General Smuts was
brought into the British Army as Field Marshall Smuts
where he was considered a genius among geniuses,
not just militarily but also as a thinker
 Albert Einstein said of Smuts when reading Smuts’ book
Holism and Evolution (1926) that Smuts was one of three
people in the world he knew of who fully understood
general relativity.
 He also said that his theory – general relativity – and
Smuts’ holism would be the two most important theories
for mankind in the next two hundred years (and he was
right!)
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Smuts went on to fight in both the first AND
second world wars, becoming even more of a
legend as he did so. He was a close friend of King
George in Britain, as well of Lloyd George the
British Prime Minister
 He was the only person to sign BOTH peace treaties
of the first and second world wars!
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This matters, because Field Marshall Smuts
decided to help the Irish, and history doesn’t
mention this often (Smuts also invented
apartheid, so he’s been deleted from the record)
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By 1916 Irishness had become defined as one of
character not where one was born
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So, now the Irish population considering
themselves Irish were maybe 20 million strong.
Moreover, the US Irish were increasingly wealthy
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A man called Eamon De Valera was born in New
York in 1882, the child of an Irish mother and
Spanish/Cuban father. Being born in the USA, he
therefore had a US passport ...
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He was sent home to Ireland to study to become
a priest, but decided instead to free Ireland from
British Rule
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So in concert with others he staged an
insurrection in 1916, taking over several key
buildings
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The British brought in artillery and used naval
vessels to shell those buildings. After several
days, they had to surrender
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There was a young man aged 26 in the revolutionaries
called Michael Collins who was from Cork
 Collins was part of the land owning Irish middle class.
Aged 16 he took employment in London working for the
Royal Mail in their finance department
 At age 20 he went to work for an eminent firm of
stockbrokers in London
 At age 25 he went to work for Guaranty Trust Company of
New York (better known today as J.P. Morgan). One year
later he went home to join the 1916 rising.
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That experience of finance turned out to be very,
very important ...
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After the 1916 rising, all the leaders except for
De Valera (because of his US passport and World
War I) were executed via hanging or firing squad
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The rest were put into prison until 1918. While
there, Collins read lots about the Boer War and
Field Marshall Smuts in particular. He began to
think of a way to win without fighting ...
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From 1918 Collins began to set up a network
of spies throughout the British Empire
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He also set up a war bond i.e. A financial
instrument used for raising money using his
banking connections
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In 1919 all the leaders of revolutionaries were
arrested by the British ...
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Which left Collins in charge. He broke De
Valera out of prison a few months later and
sent him to the US to raise money from the
Irish emigrants using his financial instrument
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In total, he raised US$5m in the USA and
£380,000 in Ireland, a tremendous sum
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In today’s money that’s about US$300 million!
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Best of all, he routed this money through London
because in those days the government had no
idea it was possible, and even if they did they
had no power then to stop it!
 In fact they had so much spare money they lent some
of it to the Russians to finance one side of their civil
war (using the Russian Crown Jewels as collateral!)
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Now Collins starts to bribe lots and lots of people
to get information about the British
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He had people sift the rubbish of all the
British employees and government ministries
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He had cleaners in British government
buildings send him any papers thrown into
waste baskets instead of being destroyed
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He had telephone operators in London listen
into calls and send him what was said
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He knew all the troop movements, arms shipments,
naval vessel movements and internal dialogues going
on in the British government
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He also brought on board the Protestants (Anglican,
not Presbyterian) in Ireland to launder money to
finance the war and to provide safe houses
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Best of all, he did all this from an office on O’ Connell
street (one of the main streets) in Dublin. He cycled
there every day in a business suit and despite being
the most wanted man in Ireland with a £10,000
bounty, the British never realised who he was!
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Starting from late 1919, Collins started to
decapitate the British in Ireland
 Anyone working to aid the British were
assassinated, sometimes including their families.
The biggest was on 21 November 1920 when they
decapitated 14 of the most important civil
servants and policemen
 Railways, tax offices, law courts and police
stations were blown up
 The civil, police and legal service in Ireland crumbled.
Collins set up replacements run by him instead of the
British
 Because he knew about all British internal dialogue
through his spies, he knew where everyone lived and
if they were helping the British
 Meanwhile the British didn’t even know what he
looked like!
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All these tactics were copied straight from the
Boer War with full credit given to Smuts!
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The British reacted through sending the “Black
and Tans” in 1920, a paramilitary group
 These guys blew up civilians, used machine guns on
blocks of flats, burned down houses and businesses,
even drove tanks into a pitch in a football game in
1921 and fired machine guns into the crowd
 There were 1,604 armed assaults, 102 mass reprisals
of burnings and shootings and 38,720 raids on private
houses
 A “death penalty without trial” law was established,
and used by the British to execute anyone they
wanted. The problem was, they often murdered the
wrong person!
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The result of Smuts’ asymmetric war techniques:
 Ireland effectively began ungovernable by the British.
Anytime they tried to do something Collins knew
about it before they did and destroyed their efforts
before they began. AND without a “proper” war!
 Ireland also became very expensive. No taxes were
being raised, and tens of thousands of extra troops
sitting around cost a lot of money. The British simply
didn’t know how to fight without fighting!
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Field Marshall Smuts had been watching with
great admiration, and had been in
communication with Collins about how to
win.
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He convinced the British King George that
peace was achievable if it was done right ...
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But more on that tomorrow!