re: #235 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

This kinda puts us in the same place as Britain pre-Civil War. Technically against slavery but still doing business with the South because slavery meant cheap cotton.

I have a good book in my library: Blood, Tears, and Folly. It is an excellent history on how unprepared The British Empire was for WWII. The author went back quite aways in time to illustrate this.

Reading these parts I was struck by the similarities between Britain and the US. Why?

Well, after the Napoleonic Wars Britain was the premier manufacturing nation. If you wanted manufactured goods they probably came from Britain.

But the people with money soon decided that was…kind of beneath them. Factories are dirty, smelly, and not filled with the best people. So they decided to go into finance and spread their money far and wide, which came back with interest. It looked great on paper.

Who did they lend that money to? The US and Germany mostly. Who invested in industry. By the time of WWI the US was the chief manufacturing nation, and Germany was ahead of Britain. By WWII Britain had to armour its battleships with Czech steel, had to by foreign manufactured aircraft instruments, and buy its AA guns from Sweden and Switzerland.

After WWII guess who the #1 manufacturing nation was? And guess who decided that manufacturing was beneath them? And started lending money, a lot of it to Japan and then China?

And here we stand.