Question: What did James Cook accomplish?
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Captain James Cook (1728-1729) was a great navigator, surveyor and cartographer, who was the first to map the coastline of Newfoundland (1763-1766) and went on to make three famous voyages to the South Pacific. He was the first known European to circumnavigate New Zealand, navigate the eastern coastline of Australia, and make contact with the Hawaiian Islands.
His first Pacific voyage (1768-1771), commissioned by the Royal Society, was to observe the transit of Venus across the sun from the island of Tahiti. He went on to map the entire coastline of New Zealand and from there sailed west to reach the south eastern coast of Australia.
His second voyage (1772-1775), again for the Royal Society, was in search of the theoretical southern continent of Terra Australis. During this voyage he circumnavigated the globe at a high southern latitude and was one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle. Discoveries included South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Landfalls on his return journey included the Friendly Islands, Easter Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu. This voyage dispelled the myth of Terra Australis, but ironically, Cook came close to discovering Antarctica.
The third voyage (1776-1779) had the principal purpose of searching for the North West Passage. After calling at Tahiti he headed north, passing and making landfall on the Hawaiian Islands en route to the west coast of America. On this voyage he mapped most of the North West coast of America for the first time, from Oregon to the Bering Strait, filling in many of the gaps left by Spanish and Russian exploration. Finding the Bering Strait impassable, Cook sailed back south, calling at Hawaii. After a month's stay, and shortly after leaving the islands, he was obliged to return to carry out repairs to one of his ships. Cook was killed during an altercation with the islanders on 14 February 1779.
Cook is important in that he increased knowledge of considerable portions of the globe, thus assisting further exploration and the extension of trade. During his voyages he claimed new territories for Britain and opened the door to the eventual colonisation of Australia, New Zealand and other newly discovered regions. His journals were completed after his death by Captain James King and published on the return to Britain of the last expedition.
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Question: How did Britain become a colonial power?
Answer:
The British Empire was largely an accidental thing, the result of diverse impulses often satisfied in despite of the mother country. Britain’s expansion into the world at large began in the Americas with opportunist adventurers and speculative joint-stock expeditions, often supported by arbitrary land grants from the Crown that were scarcely capable of cartographic definition. Chartered colonies followed, but for many years the interest of the home government in overseas settlements was spasmodic. Colonial settlements grew haphazardly: by sectaries seeking religious freedom (or the freedom to practise religious intolerance); by Utopian experiments; by opportunist land grabbing; by governments seeking to rid themselves of anti-social or dissenting elements of the population. All of this was scarcely a formula for cohesion amongst the colonials or between the colonies and the homeland. That cohesion was supplied by commercial interests rather than by idealism or dissent.
Britain was not Persia or Macedon or Rome, driven by territorial imperatives to expand its land borders. Britain was an island nation that had, by the days of colonial acquisition, abandoned its territorial claims in France. Extra-continental settlement and trade allowed Britain to keep pace with its European neighbours, with the homeland as the economic hub; and imperial adventures added new dimensions to Britain's tactical adjustments to the European balance of power, necessary to avert potential threats to the state. Commercial efforts were encouraged by the issue of royal charters to trading companies; and as new lands, as far away as the Pacific, came within the European purview, pre-emptive settlement was considered a necessary precaution. A new curiosity, part of the wider Enlightenment, had stimulated exploration and scientific research: the primary purpose of James Cook's first voyage, commissioned by the Royal Society, was to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti; his last voyage included navigation of the west coast of North America in search of the North West Passage. (And the voyage that carried Darwin to the Galapagos some fifty-five years later was first and foremost a mapping and geological expedition on behalf of the Admiralty.) These and many more exploits boosted national pride in maritime heritage and expertise, an experise that was crucial the defense of the Realm and the Empire. When conflict with France in the Seven Years War led directly to the loss of the American colonies of the ‘First Empire’ merchant venturers had already laid the foundations of a second, especially in India and Africa.
Empires grow through the need to source and secure commodities, to protect markets for consumables and to defend the trading routes that service this two-way traffic. The embryonic ‘Second Empire’, essentially maritime, developed as a network of remote and widely scattered enterprises with extended lines of communication. Trading stations, and the staging posts required to service and secure the shipping lanes, created defensive exclusion zones through alliances with or oppression of local tribes and rulers. The territorial base expanded through necessity. But as borders extend, so do the resources required to defend them. Private armies increased the ambition and arrogance of the ex-patriate societies and abuses escalated, watched with growing concern by a home government whose attitude to Empire was more and more informed by a liberal paternalism underscored with civilising fervour and nonconformist religiosity. Intervention was called for, and for reasons that ranged from external threat to private greed to maladministration and corruption, Britain became, almost by default and sometimes reluctantly, a major colonial power.
The acquisition of empire was not universally welcomed. Taxation to support imperial adventures was seen by some as public subsidy of private ambition. Political power blocs emerged from the collaboration of colonial administrations with military cliques. Communication with the outposts of empire was slow and unreliable, and expansionist escapades were carried out without reference to government. At home the influence of imperial/military cliques increased and became inextricable from the military and political establishment. It is interesting to speculate how a fragile British democracy might have evolved had not the High Command been substantially discredited during the Great War.
The British Empire survived the aftermath of a war that had swept away other, older, empires; indeed, overseas responsibilities increased through League of Nations mandates to administer Ottoman territories in the Middle East. But the seeds of separatism had been planted at home and abroad, and unrest was quelled, sometimes brutally, by anachronistic rearguard actions. The Second World War was the watershed. Education in the services had produced a better informed soldiery; and long years away from home had reduced the willingness of a citizen army, maintained by protracted conscription, to police an empire that was seen as increasingly irrelevant to a modern state with a newly elected socialist government. Events in India, Palestine and elsewhere found Britain as the unhappy arbitrator between opposing factions and there were aberrations, in Suez and in British territories in Africa and the Middle East, when backward-looking politicians tried to reassert Britain’s role on the world stage. But, in spite of a substantial conservative element and a school curriculum that looked to Empire as an integral part of the national myth, the long dismemberment had begun – whether or not it was welcomed by territories that felt threatened by more powerful neighbouring states, or by minorities at risk from their co-nationals.
A good recent book is by Lawrence James: "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire".
Question: How European accents turn into American accents?
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Briefly:
Settlers from the British Isles originated from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Within each of these source regions there were (and are) a number of sub-regional accents. In America, people from these source regions settled in different permutations. In the colonial period the concentrations of populations were somewhat isolated from each other, and from the motherland. Where variations of accent exist, there is a tendency for differences to dissolve over time, with the most prominent accent having the most influence. So that America not only developed, generally, a distinctive mode of speech, but American regions developed their own variants, depending on the population mix.
And there's more! Continuing waves of settlement and immigration have brought in influences from other languages. These influences include the adoption of loan words (how many Spanish words, for example, are in common use in the USA today?) and the application of non-English syntax (sentence construction) to spoken and written English. The influence of Dutch, German, Spanish, French syntax, etc., on American English is very apparent in different areas of the USA, depending on patterns of settlement; perhaps the best example is the influence of Yiddish, Irish or Italian on the New York vernacular.
So that there is no such thing as an 'American accent' any more than there is any such thing as an 'English accent'. Boston American differs from New York American, Texas American differs from West Coast American, and so on. In the same way West Country English differs from the dialects of the North East, or London, or the Midlands. And even within the British Isles there are distinctions where non-English languages have lent words and syntax to English, creating colourful and expressive regional variations; as an instance, consider the influence of the 'Celtic' languages of Wales, Scotland and Ireland on the spoken word.
The English language is continually enriched by contact with its neighbours.
For a good readable account of the development of English to its current status as a global medium of communication, see ‘The Adventure of English’ by Melvyn Bragg. Or for very serious study (at considerable cost) invest in the 'The Cambridge History of the English Language'.
More titles on the English language can be found on the England page of the History Unlimited Bookshop.
Question: Where did accounting originate?
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Many historians argue that 'accounting', in the form of 'tallies', was the precursor of written language in all civilisations. The need to keep permanent records of transactions, commodities, tax receipts, etc., prompted ancient civilisations to adopt various media, most often clay, and devise appropriate writing tools. A primary example was the use of a reed stylus to produce wedge-shaped (cuneiform) markings on clay tablets that evolved in the Sumerian civilisation of Iraq around 3,400 BCE.
With many early tally systems, items were ennumerated with simple strokes rather than mumeric characters. What was initially required was a way of denoting the items being recorded. This led to the development of pictograms and ideograms - simple symbols representing these items. In many languages these pictograms evolved into characters representing sounds that could be used in combination to form words, whether as alphabetic or syllabic scripts. Ideograms combined with text were the key to the decipherment of Cretan Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, who demonstrated that the language was an early form of Greek. These scholars were able to develop values for individual characters by comparing textual content with the pictographic symbols.
Scripts, alphabets and syllabaries could spread through cultural diversion, regardless of the original language or the languages that adopted them. Cuneiform, for example, was dispersed from Mesopotamia throughout the Middle East and was adapted for the Akkadian, Hittite and Elamite languages and many more. This pattern was repeated with most early scripts, and these early forms of writing gradually developed (in most cases) to more easily used forms, especially as new media (papyrus, parchment, etc.) allowed a more flowing cursive style.
So that 'accounting' was one of the earliest skills and markers of civilisations and led directly to the development of written language.
A good account of the early archaeology and decipherment of ancient texts for the general reader is 'Voices in Stone' by Ernst Doblhofer. Although first published in 1957, this remains a classic account of some of the most important discoveries in the area of ancient languages. ‘The Man Who Deciphered Linear B’ is a (much more) recent biography of Michael Ventris.
