Ed Luce: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Are you sure it’s liberal though? Because James, he’s in office. He issues some Toleration Acts that will allow Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters to hold office. This is viewed as unacceptable. Foreign forces, from what we now call the European Union, invade your country and depose him by force. This leads eventually to a number of wars fought by the British, arguably, an age of imperialism, higher levels of public credit, state building, yes, larger markets. Even to this day, do we know how liberal a development that was? Foreign forces ‑‑ again, you can describe the Stuarts. Remember, this is pre the Act of Union which is 1707, which is almost 20 years after James is deposed. The Stuarts are Scottish, so they were then foreign. Hopefully, they will forever remain not foreign, but we don’t know that at the moment. You’re right. You could argue that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is the beginning of the real foundations of imperial Britain, which is not exactly a term, “imperialism,” you associate with liberalism. I, although, would focus on habeas corpus, on the right to try by jury, and all the various things that came with the Glorious Revolution. And with the Dutch, a more‑evolved version of liberalism that existed in the Netherlands at that point, having rebelled against the Spanish empire, and having had their own industrial revolution and their own enlightenment way before the English one. I would minimize the foreign king taking over England bit and stress the fact that this was a king that understood that the divine right of kings was over. It was dead, and the Stuarts didn’t really understand that. How many years do you think we need now to judge whether a particular development is a liberal development or an illiberal development?…

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