by Tom Anderson
This would lead to some problems later on. For while the British dominions settled down to a period of peace, a new war, an invisible war had been declared. A war not of flesh and blood and iron and steel, but of something far harder to destroy than mere human lives.
Interlude #2: A War of Ideas
TimeLine L Expedition Mission Log
Dr Bruno Lombardi: However, it would be a mistake to assume that the eighteenth century of TimeLine L consists solely of one long unrelenting series of wars.
Dr Theodoros Pylos: How so?
Lombardi: Er... (long pause) What I meant was...other things happened as well.
Pylos: Well, of course.
(Pause)
Captain Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen, need I remind you that time is of the essence? Even with the new compression algorithm, our transmission bursts can only carry limited data.
Pylos: (coughs) Err, yes, sir.
Lombardi: Sorry, sir. (Ahem) The eighteenth century was also noted for the rise of two closely related concepts, scientific Linnaeanism and ideological Racialism.
Pylos: Because of the part these played in the eventual global ideological makeup of this world, we have once again chosen to obtain a work published by one of the Societist writers of the Instituto Sanchez...
*
It is not pleasing to me that I must place humans among the primates, but man is intimately familiar with himself. Let’s not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name is applied.
But I desperately seek from you and from the whole world a general difference between men and simians from the principles of Natural History. I certainly know of none. If only someone might tell me one! If I called man a simian or vice versa I would bring together all the theologians against me.
But perhaps I ought to, in accordance with the law of the discipline of Natural History.
- Karl von Linné, letter to Johann Georg Gmelin, dated February 1747
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Carolus Linnaeus—a great man of the sciences, and incidentally also the creator of the second most destructive political ideology that has ever darkened the world. A fine example of why scientists should be on tap, not on top.
- George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, 1941[57]
*
From—“A Life in Life—the Biography of Carolus Linnaeus”, by JoSe Vivaro of the Instituto Sanchez (originally published in Novalatina 1971—unauthorised English translation 1977):
The man known to posterity as Karl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus was born in 1707 into a farming family in the area of Zone 15 known to the nationalistically blinded as southern Sweden. It was an era in which self-identified Swedes did not commonly use surnames, and the surname Linnaeus was chosen by Carl’s father when he went to university, being a Latinised form of the Swedish for ‘lime-tree’. It would be an appropriate name for a man who would spend most of his life applying more concise names to every living thing in existence.
Linnaeus attended the University of Uppsala, and in 1732 received funding for a long-term botanical visit to Lapland in the frozen north. At this point, Sweden’s economy was suffering, and one policy idea to remedy this concerned finding valuable plants that would grow in cold Sweden, as the country lacked an East Indies trading company. Some wondered if strains of spice plants could be found that would grow in colder climes than their native ones. To do so, Swedes needed both to survey what currently grew in Lapland and also to make examinations of the economically valuable plants that grew elsewhere. Linnaeus, as it turned out, achieved both in his lifetime.
His major early achievement was the creation of a new classification system that permitted plants to be classified by their flowers, and more specifically by the precise shapes of their stamens and pistils. In this he was influenced by Sebastien Vaillant’s Sermo de Structura Florum, which he read in 1718. Linnaeus’ approach was new in that it focused on sexual characteristics as a means of classification. This would have been vulgar enough in the eyes of society, but Linnaeus had a cheerfully dirty mind and commonly applied Latin words for sexual organs to plants that bore the most passing resemblance to them.[58]
Linnaeaus spent the years 1735-38 in the Netherlands, printing his seminal Systema Naturae, the first form of his system of classification. Linnaeus’ approach was controversial as it ignored the Great Chain of Being[59] and, almost as significantly, the approaches established by the Greek writers, who had based their groupings of organisms solely on gross external appearance. Linnaeus’ approach focused more on shared ancestry (sex, again) and included data from dissections, comparing internal organs of animals as well as their outer appearance.
During this time, Linnaeus visited Britain, specifically Oxford University. In 1737 Linnaeus was introduced to George Clifford, a wealthy Amsterdam banker who possessed a famous garden that included plants collected from all over the world, primarily via the Dutch trade from the East and West Indies. Linnaeus published the treatise Hortus Cliffortianus, a description of the plants in Clifford’s garden. He also wrote a more general work, Classes Plantorum, which was published in Leiden in 1738. After that he returned to Sweden, marrying Sara Morea and helping to found the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences.
Linnaeus went on other field-trips around Sweden, helped inspire a younger generation of natural historians who made similarly extravagant trips around the world, and briefly returned to London in 1754, being presented to the returned King Frederick I. He met the by now ageing Stephen Hales, a great pioneer of plant and human physiology, and they discussed such matters as they applied to taxonomy. Perhaps his most significant meeting was with a young man, an English Dissenter named Joseph Priestley, who thanks to Frederick relaxing the restrictions on Anglican supremacy was now able to study natural history at the University of Cambridge.[60] Although Priestley was still a student, the two of them meetomg after he had attended a visiting lecture by Linnaeus, the young man nonetheless had a profound effect on the old Swede and persuaded him that his controversial ideas about humans being closely related to apes should not be silenced. Priestley cited the examples of Galileo, Copernicus and Paracelsus fighting for their ideas, and that the free thought of natural philosophy should not be constrained by the attitudes of the day.
It is perhaps the example of Copernicus that most appealed to Linnaeus, for just like that pioneer he was careful to only publish his seminal Taxonomy of Man posthumously, in 1780. His work on humanity’s possible relations with the animal world were taken up by later writers, including Priestley himself and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French Enlightenment philosopher and anti-clericalist who went to play a part in the Jacobin state. For the moment, Linnaeus’ human studies focused on less controversial subjects, and it was from this that the ideology known variously as Racialism or ‘Linnaean Racism’ sprung.
Linnaeus was the first to give humans a Latin name, Homo sapiens (“Thinking Man”). However, he also added four lower-level taxae to divide humanity into subspecies, influenced by the old mediaeval theory of the four humours. These consisted of Americanus rubenscens, Red Americans (American Indians), who were said to be stubborn and angered easily; Asiaticus fucus, Sallow Asians (Chinese), who were said to be avaricious and easily distracted; Africanus negreus, Black Africans, who were said to be lazy and negligent; and Europeus albescens, White Europeans, who were said to be gentle and inventive. Obviously, the principles of Societal Unity enlighten us that this was merely an artificial division imposed to prevent humanity reaching its destiny of togetherness, and furthermore that Linnaeus’ classifications were clearly biased in favour of Europeans.
The system was attacked in his own lifetime for failing to provide a classification for East Indians, Turks and Semites. There was also a debate as to whether Slavs were European or some other group. This ultimately spawned the far narrower and more chauvinistic theory Nationalist Racism [as dubbed by Societists],[61] which is a tool that has been used by the ruling elites in many nations, enemies of Societal Unity, to
keep their peoples apart. Nationalist Racism began in France, and stemmed from the ideas of Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers[62] who refined Linnaeus’ ideas to impose divisions within the European Race, broadly defined as Latins, Germanics and Celts (and also sometimes Slavs).
The movement was approved of by the French court and the mostly ethnically ‘Latin’ Roman Catholic Church (ironically in retrospect), which made it harder later for the clergy to go against Linnaeus’ ideas of humans being related to apes: they had already committed themselves to at least giving a fair hearing to anything with Linnaeus’ name on. The French Nationalist Racists considered the Latin subrace to be superior, citing the Roman Empire as an example of Latin civilisation when Celts and Germanics had still been barbarians, and the idea that the Latins had held true to the Catholic Church while the Germanics had fallen into Protestant heresy. Of course one objection was that the Roman Empire had fallen to Germanic invasions, but the French argued that modern European states—most obviously their own—were the result of Germanic peoples becoming ‘Latinised’ in their thought patterns and thus civilised. After all, did not the confederacy of German states call itself after the Latin Roman Empire?
The movement was ridiculed in the ‘Germanic’ Protestant countries, not least pointing out the hypocrisy that Linnaeus, the man who had started it all, was a Swede and therefore one of the French’s inferior ‘Germanics’! In Britain and many other places, a rival movement sprang up. It was led by a number of British intellectuals, including the Earl of Chesterfield, ironically a man who was on speaking terms with Voltaire and, instructively, the two of them seemed to treat the whole nationalistic fervour whipped up by their words as a kind of private joke. Chesterfield also funded Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language,[63] and as a condition of such, asked him to choose a form of English spelling that was more ‘Germanicised’ and to take out French-sounding spellings. Johnson himself disliked the Nationalist Racist movement, but was willing to accommodate Chesterfield’s whims if his Dictionary could be published (although he added some whimsical definitions mocking the movement throughout the Dictionary). The anti-French spelling movement was not very successful, the English language historically being quite resistant to prescription, but did manage to make some long-lasting changes – picquet and racquet became picket and racket, for example.[64] These misguided and halfhearted efforts in the service of a Contrasanchezista cause only highlight the importance of forward planning and full focus required for the true linguistic harmonisation demanded by Societal Unity.
Linnaeus’ controversial ideas about humanity’s relationship with the animal world would not become public knowledge until 1780, after his death, when they sparked an enormous debate. One consequence of this was that, as there were almost pseudo-Biblical arguments about the veracity of translatioons of Linnaeus’ work, many were desperate to get hold of Linnaeus’ writings in the original Swedish and learn enough of the language to interpret them. This unexpectedly resulted in a temporary boom for other Swedish writers, who had previously languished from writing in a language which few non-Swedes understood. One of the more famous was an apothecary named Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who was able to alert the world of natural philosophy to his discovery of several new chemicals in the late 1770s. He developed the notion that the atmosphere was composed of a mixture of the lufts [gases] elluftium and illuftium, which was an important foundation for the later work of Priestley and Lavoisier, as well as making several more important discoveries.[65]
The controversy raged on throughout the wars of the latter eighteenth century, and in particular, the war with which it ended. The conflict in which the ideas of Linnaeus would mutate into one of the most influential and destructive ideologies the world has ever seen.
The Jacobin Wars.
Chapter #9: Sowing The Seeds
“When considering the systems of government prevalent in the eighteenth century, Bourbon France and Romanov Russia are often compared on the basis of their absolutism. This is a gross mistake. The Bourbons had sat down and decided that what France most needed was an absolute monarchy. To the Romanovs, on the other hand, it had simply never occurred that there could be any other state of affairs.”
- George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, “A Century of War” (1941)
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From—“The Storm Before The Storm—Conflicts of the 1760s” by Daniel Harkness (1938):
It might be expected that, after the global violence of the Third War of Supremacy (1756-9), the nations of Europe would take the opportunity to rest in a few years of peace, or at least take the time to lick their wounds. No such luck for the people, the soldiers, or even the nobles and politicians, many of whom would have preferred to avoid such conflicts. Events conspired against them. Cultures and ambitions continued to clash, fuelled by jockeying for trade and influence.
If war had been predicted, few would have forecast that it would involve no clash between Britain and France. Relations between Louis XV and the new George III remained cold, but both had their own reasons to avoid another war. George was attempting to come to terms with a duty that he had previously only thought of in a vague, theoretical way, and tried to master the British Parliamentary system without becoming a slave to it. Meanwhile, Louis XV was aware of the alarming state of France’s finances,[66] and knew that another great naval war with Britain would only make things worse. He appointed Étienne de Silhouette as Comptroller-General of Finances, a skilful Basque economist inspired by English mercantilism. His attempts to raise more funds by taxing the rich were not a success, for the same reasons as Louis’ more personal approach had failed earlier, but Silhouette did manage to cut corruption in the French East India Company and ensure that more of the funds raised from the rich East India trade went into the French national purse. Although this made him somewhat popular at home, Joseph François Dupleix famously sourly remarked that the ‘Shadow of Silhouette’ (L’ombre de Silhouette) was hanging over everything he did in India, and this phrase entered the French vocabulary.
As it turned out, Britain and France both became involved in wars, but in a peripheral capacity, and in separate conflicts which did not significantly affect the other. The first of these wars had been brewing for a long time, and stemmed from the failure of the old Spanish-Portuguese Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) to define reasonable spheres of influence and colonisation in the New World. It had rapidly become obvious that the original meridian, based on incomplete information at the time, allotted far too little territory to Portugal. In 1748, the Spanish and Portuguese governments took advantage of the temporary environment of peace to sign the Treaty of Madrid (1750).
This, also known as the Treaty of Limits, acknowledged Tordesillas and all other former border treaties to be null and void. It defined the new ‘line in the sand’ to be the 46th Meridian. It also attempted to resolve a dispute over Colonia del Sacramento (Sacramento Colony), a Portuguese town on the northern bank of the Rio de la Plata (variously translated as the River Plate or River of Silver) which had been founded almost a century before and had been contested by the Spanish ever since. The Treaty held that Portugal should cede Sacramento to Spain, and in return Spain would give up the lands of seven Jesuit missions known as San Miguel, Santos Angeles, San Lorenzo Martir, San Nicolas, San Juan Bautista, San Luis Gonzaga, and San Francisco de Borja.[67] These were all located on the east side of the Uruguay River, which according to the treaty was now Portuguese territory.
Although the Treaty had been formed with the best of intentions to preventing further Spanish-Portuguese wars, it did not pay much attention to the facts on the ground, and required both the costly movement of the missions to the Spanish side, and also the forced relocation of several thousand Guaraní Indians, who did not see eye to eye with the proposal (to put it mildly). The Jesuits themselves agreed to move by 1754, but the Guaraní refused and this sparked an unusual, quixotic war in which Spanish and Portuguese forces fought on the same side against t
he Indians. The Guaraní were defeated, but it was a hollow victory, as the whole affair cast a shadow over the Spanish-Portuguese deals and relations were beginning to break down for other reasons.
King Joseph I of Portugal had helped initiate the Treaty negotiations in the first place when he succeeded to the throne in 1750, but his capable chief minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo[68] was now beginning to have second thoughts. This had been sparked by the fact that Spain’s King Ferdinand VI had died in the interval and been replaced by the drastically different Charles III in 1761.[69] Charles brought back the disgraced Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, Marquis of Ensenada, as chief minister, and his highly francophilic and anglophobic attitudes clashed with Portugal’s priorities. Also, Charles was very much an enthusiast of Bourbon enlightened absolutism, while in Portugal Carvalho had spent much of his ministry crushing the power of the Portuguese ruling classes and adopting relatively egalitarian policies, including the abolition of slavery in the Portuguese colonies in India. He had also been praised for his handling of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the recovery from which would define Portuguese foreign and domestic policy for generations.
