How Britain Won The World While Rivals Fought Over Silesia
Rivals went broke fighting over one province, while Britain seized trade and territory in India and North America.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning - [Invest Like the Best, EP.490]Walter Russell Mead, the historian who wrote God and Gold, still talks about walking through Silesia. It is beautiful, he says, a sausage-shaped province in what is now Poland.
In the 1700s, Prussia's Frederick the Great and his rival Maria Theresa spent seven years fighting over it. Both countries went bankrupt.
In the end, Frederick kept Silesia. That, Mead jokes, is why he is Frederick the Great, and Maria Theresa is remembered here as the one who lost.
Mead argues Britain won by fighting the same war through trade and empire, and that choice built the order we still live in.
To explain what worldwide trade meant, Mead says he sometimes advises his students to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He tells them not to study the brushwork, but to notice the stuff.
There is the merchant in a silk robe from China, "standing on a rug from Turkey," with "a stuffed parrot from Brazil on his mantelpiece." That clutter, Mead says, was astounding wealth, and wealth like that lets a country start thinking globally.
The Dutch had shown how it worked a century earlier. Mead thinks there were about 10,000 seagoing ships from the Netherlands in the 1600s, sailing to ports across the globe, and that trade made the small country, in Mead's phrase, stinking rich.
While Frederick and Maria Theresa exhausted their treasuries in central Europe, Mead says, "the British basically kicked the French out of India and Canada and North America."
That victory, Mead argues, laid "the foundations of the world order" we still live in today. Once Britain had built that global system, it did what Mead calls "something extremely treacherous," and invited everyone else to participate in it.
Questions people ask
Who were Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa?
Frederick II ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786 and built its army into one of Europe's most disciplined forces. Maria Theresa ruled the Habsburg lands, including Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, from 1740 to 1780. Silesia, rich in farms, towns, and minerals, lay between them in what is now southwestern Poland.
What was the Seven Years' War?
It lasted from 1756 to 1763 and was fought in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Asia. Britain and Prussia faced France, Austria, Russia, and their allies. In North America, it is often called the French and Indian War.
Why did losing India and North America hurt France so much?
France lost its major bases for overseas trade, naval supply, and future settlement in Canada and India. That cut income from furs, fisheries, and Indian commerce, and left France without the colonies and sea power to match Britain. France was thrown back on costly land wars in Europe while Britain compounded its commercial lead.