Latest news with #GloriousRevolution
Times
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
First past the post electoral system has surely had its day
Forget the local election fallout for a moment. It's the four-way by-election bunfight unfolding in Runcorn & Helsby that should be turning heads — not so much for who gets elected but because of how low the bar has fallen to secure election victory. With turnout expected to slump below 50 per cent, it is plausible that Britain's newest MP could take office with as few as 10,000 votes, just 14 per cent of their constituents. How did the 'mother of parliaments' end up here? Let's first recall how we earned that accolade, with centuries of reform that shifted power from the monarch to the people: from Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort's parliament, an early civil war, the Glorious Revolution and a Bill of Rights
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Met reveals feminist take on porcelain that ‘has always elicited a strong reaction'
Chinoiserie – the European practice of imitating Chinese aesthetics – flourished throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, touching areas ranging from home decor to gardens, architecture and even the literary arts. The Met's fascinating new exhibit, Monstrous Beauty, takes an innovative look at the practice by showing the significant role it played in shaping modern womanhood, and offering compelling arguments about how it can revise our ideas of women and femininity. According to Iris Moon, who curated Monstrous Beauty, chinoiserie was first a part of the male domain, as 'princely' collectors would fill up neat cabinets with artifacts designed within the aesthetic. But as chinoiserie became more popular and moved more into the realm of everyday commerce, it was women who began to most spectacularly partake in it. Moon identifies Mary II, who ruled England alongside her husband William from 1689 to 1694, as a key player in the transition of chinoiserie from male-led collections to the stuff of everyday women. 'Mary II really personalized the language of chinoiserie,' she told me. 'She makes this consumption of exotic luxury goods a part of her power and presence.' It was while living in Holland that Mary first came upon chinoiserie, developing an extensive collection of the ceramics. When Mary was installed as queen following the Glorious Revolution, she brought this collection back with her, shepherding an entirely new aesthetic to England. 'She goes to Holland as a teenager with William, discovers this treasure trove of luxury objects that are being acquired through the Dutch East India Company, and develops her own taste,' said Moon. 'By the time she comes back to England to become queen, she makes sure to bring back all of her stuff. She makes this consumption of exotic luxury goods a part of her power and presence.' Monstrous Beauty advances the interesting argument that Mary, who had a series of miscarriages but did not give birth to an heir before her death from smallpox at age 32, birthed something quite different: namely, a style that women throughout England were profoundly influenced by. 'I wondered what would it mean to shift that narrative of giving birth, from giving birth biologically to giving birth to a style,' Moon said. 'We think of her as giving birth to chinoiserie as a way that women can shift their space by occupying it with all these porcelain vases and lacquers and things.' Through the popularization of the porcelain figures that were a mainstay of chinoiserie, the aesthetic filled women's lives with images of fantastic beings – goddesses, monsters, sirens and even cyborgs. This contributed to the way that womanhood was constructed in Europe, with consequences down to the present-day. 'The ability to acquire luxuries positioned women as consumers and gave them a kind of power,' Moon said. 'It was thought of as this unruly desire for foreign goods that didn't conform to a set standard.' Beyond figurines, one of the ways that chinoiserie was brought to the homes of middle class women was through elaborate tea sets – Monstrous Beauty features numerous beautiful and elaborate teapots, plates, cups with saucers, tumblers, caddies and more. As the exhibition's catalogue explains, this was in fact a primary way in which tea became synonymous with the British way of life. 'Consumption and taste naturalized this foreign commodity into a fully English habit, a process of domestication that took place in parallel with the transformation of porcelain from a coveted luxury good to a part of daily life,' Moon said. But not everyone was happy about what women were doing to English consumerism. Daniel Defoe denounced the newfound economic energy of women. 'Defoe complains about the fact that Mary created this trend for buying porcelain,' Moon explained. 'He called it a fatal excess, and said that these women were going to drive their families to financial ruin. He had a whole patriotic discourse about how you should be buying British products, not foreign goods.' Women's pursuit of porcelain impacted more than just the British taste for tea or home decor. Moon makes the interesting point that prior to the era of consumerist chinoiserie, the standard of artistic beauty was the nude female body. Against this dominant aesthetic, chinoiserie brought all sorts of fanciful forms – middle-class dining tables could suddenly be home to elaborate porcelain figurines striking dramatic poses, as well as monstrous creatures, like dragons, chimeras, manticores and others. Moon argues that these pieces shifted the aesthetics of the fine arts and opened up newfound creative potential. 'You could get away with saying more uncomfortable and weird things right at this miniature scale,' she said. 'What kinds of associations did people make in seeing these figurines while they were eating? I want to reclaim the historical language that had been applied to chinoiserie around the monstrous as a form of artistic empowerment.' Bringing these aesthetic debates to the present, Monstrous Beauty also showcases contemporary works that Moon sees as springing out of the legacy of chinoiserie. One such piece is Jennifer Ling Datchuk's take on how hair plays into beauty standards, Pretty Sister, Ugly Sister, which shows two porcelain plates sprouting black Chinese hair that has been bleached blond and dyed blue. The hair on one plate is copiously long, the other cropped short. Another standout piece is Lee Bul's remarkable sculpture Monster: Black. 'It's precisely because these works are not chinoiserie that they can illuminate these historical styles,' said Moon. 'They're meant to be a critical lens on to the past, in dialogue visually with the historical works of art.' While Moon is an expert in chinoiserie and has curated a wide-ranging and complex show into its history and contemporary importance, she is not necessarily a fan. 'I don't actually like chinoiserie,' she told me with a smile. 'I've always gravitated to the neoclassical.' Yet, she felt that, as an Asian American woman, it was something she had to examine. 'I knew I was going to have to confront it on some level and ask why I felt such discomfort around this style. Curating this show, I asked, how do I negotiate my own self in relation to this history of the exotic. And I'm not alone. Chinoiserie has always elicited a strong reaction, from its very inception. There's very few people who feel neutral about chinoiserie.' Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is on show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 17 August
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion remembered 340 years on in Somerset
A fresh look at an ill-fated 17th-century uprising that haunts the English West Country – and may hold lessons for the world today – is taking place close to the spot where many of the rebels were condemned to death. An exhibition at the Museum of Somerset tells the story of the Monmouth Rebellion, which ended with defeat for the rebels who fought alongside the charismatic Duke of Monmouth, with many condemned to death at the notorious Bloody Assizes led by George Jeffreys, the Lord Chancellor. Tom Mayberry, who co-curated the exhibition, said the 1685 revolt, also known as the Pitchfork Rebellion, may have been forgotten by many people in the UK but still had a deep resonance in Somerset. He said: 'The rebellion remains vividly imprinted on the minds of West Country people as a defining event in the history of the region. It made such an impact because the consequences of the rebellion were so cruel. The rebels were utterly motivated by principle and religion and were met with a tidal wave of violence.' The setting for the exhibition is poignant as the museum is housed in Taunton Castle, one of the sites of the Bloody Assizes, where rebels were told they were to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Jeffreys, the judge at the trials, is certainly not forgotten here. When two years ago an information board of Taunton's history was placed in the town, someone scratched out Jeffreys' eyes and inscribed the word 'bastard' next to the image. 'It showed that this defining event in West Country history has not been forgotten,' said Mayberry. 'In the light of modern events, one is forcibly reminded that some of the triggers to rebellion and to conflict 340 years ago are the very same ones which we are now rediscovering today – how charming and persuasive leaders can lead us to disaster, how societies divide according to religion and ideology, and how it's really the luck of the draw whether they find a way through to reconciliation.' The rebellion came 34 years after the end of the English civil war and three years before the Glorious Revolution. It was a failed attempt by dissident Protestants led by James Scott, the 1st Duke of Monmouth, to depose the Catholic king, James II. At the centre of the exhibition, called After Sedgemoor: Remembering the Monmouth Rebellion, are two paintings loaned by the Tate and Manchester Art Gallery. Edgar Bundy's The Morning of Sedgemoor (1905) shows rebels sheltering in a barn after the Battle of Sedgemoor, while John Pettie's The Duke of Monmouth's Interview with James II (c1882) captures the rebel leader vainly pleading for his life. Also on display is an ostrich plume reputedly worn by Monmouth at the battle and 200 musket balls recently found at the site. Documents being exhibited include an order by a royalist commander that a mound should be built over the dead who lay shallowly buried on the battlefield. Sam Astill, chief executive of South West Heritage Trust, which operates the Museum of Somerset, said: 'The rebellion has a fundamental place in the story of Somerset, and the events that followed it have never been forgotten. There couldn't be a better setting for the exhibition than Taunton Castle, which still echoes with the events of 340 years ago.' The exhibition runs from 29 March to 6 July 2025
Express Tribune
25-02-2025
- Business
- Express Tribune
Capitalism and bargaining power
Listen to article Capitalism is a system that fulfils two fundamental desires — freedom and equality — for which people have historically fought for millions of years. Capitalism operates on two levels: political capitalism and economic capitalism. Economic capitalism empowers individuals by granting them ownership of free markets, enterprises, and bargaining power within the economic system. It is a decisive factor in defining the freedom to do business and mobility in economic class. For example, there was a time when all the powers of economies were concentrated in kings, monarchs, or the feudal. This was the era of empire-building and mercantilism. Common people had no say in economic activity. They were merely passive recipient of official economic policies. With time, economic capitalism developed after the Glorious Revolution in Britain. The transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy facilitated reforms that gradually fostered market capitalism. People came to know about their political, economic and social rights. It opened minds and opportunities to do economic reforms. Bargaining is more than just a term. It refers to people's ability to enhance their economic influence. With the development of capitalism, people's bargaining power increases. Referring to the previous paragraph where we discussed collective empires and concentrated economic capacities, we are moving further to highlight that capitalism introduced decentralised economic bargaining capacities where an ordinary person can decide about their production, outcomes, and inputs. In a capitalist system, from a day-to-day vendor to an industrialist, everyone has the potential to define their products and decide their earning capacity. A vendor in a local market has the freedom to do economic activity, regulate rates, and decide the market value of his product. This marks a pivotal moment in history when an economic model evolves into a decentralised and sustainable system. This is how capitalism empowers individuals, from an ordinary people to the elite, by granting them authority over economic regulation. Overall, it increased the bargaining power of the people in their lives. The transformation of bargaining capacity empowered people about their economic rights. It is always a historical precedent that improvement in economic conditions improves political space. Economic capitalism increases the likelihood of political progress. Political capitalism is simply defined by the idea that "from an ordinary citizen to the prime minister of any state, all have the power to decide their political representatives." Political capitalism highlights how people are more free, decisive, and autonomous in their rights. It was an idea of economic capitalism which ensured political wisdom in people. As Francis Fukuyama explains in his book The End of History and the Last Man, economic capitalism creates a middle-income class society which eventually demands political space, rights, and authority to decide. Economic capitalism in European and Western societies seeded the idea of political enlightenment. From economic bargaining capacities to political bargaining power, people gained empowerment from the French Revolution to the American Revolution. It is how economic capitalism brought political evolution in society. Why is capitalism crucial in the 21st century? One key reason is that the rise of authoritarian leadership in this era threatens to centralise economic and political bargaining power. It is the time to uphold those economic and political bargaining rights which we acquired after the struggle of millions of years. There is no doubt that the capitalist system has become a symbol of economic inequality and social polarisation, but there is still a need to rectify the problems for a collective cause. Capitalism has played a crucial role in eliminating absolute poverty, reducing violence, and promoting peace within borders.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Over the past month, many have warned that President Donald Trump is trying to make himself king or dictator. Trump's defenders wave off such warnings as hysterical hyperbole. The past week has shown that they are very much not. Indeed, Trump's own monarchical statements aside, his recent executive orders, notably the one purporting to eliminate the autonomy of federal independent agencies, combined with the actions of the leaders of Trump's Justice Department are significant steps toward an American dictatorship. The defining attribute of a dictatorship, as well as of kingship in its ancient and absolute form, is the assertion that law—its making, interpretation, adjudication, and enforcement—is an emanation of the will of one man. As King James I of England put it in a lively little work he published in 1598 titled The True Law of Free Monarchies, kings emerged: before any estates or ranks of men, before any parliaments were holden, or laws made, and by them was the land distributed, which at first was wholly theirs. And so it follows of necessity that kings were the authors and makers of the laws, and not the laws of the kings. Acting on this theory, James ruled without Parliament for long periods, granted dispensations from statutory law for courtiers and confidants, administered the law through special 'prerogative courts' in which the rule of decision was derived from the will of the king, and generally conducted himself as an absolute monarch. His son Charles I was even more convinced of his divine right to absolute legal sovereignty, a disposition so resented by the English that in 1642 Parliament took up arms in a civil war that ended with Charles' execution and Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, British kings and queens ever after acknowledged that statutory law could only be made by the crown and Parliament acting in concert, that such statutes bound the monarch's official actions, and that the interpretation of law was primarily a function of judges who based their decisions on statutes and precedent, not the will of the monarch. The next great constitutional upheaval in Britain, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, displaced King James II in favor his daughter Mary and her consort, William of Orange. To gain the throne, they had to accept the English Bill of Rights which, among other things, abolished the royal power to nullify statutory law, either in general or for the benefit of particular people. Parliament also changed the royal coronation oath to require that monarchs swore to govern according to the laws enacted by Parliament and the laws and customs of the realm. That is, each new monarch had to agree that he or she was not the maker of law, but the upholder of laws made by or in concert with the legislature and judges. Thus, by 1776 the constitutional monarchy of King George III, the monarchy Americans deemed so tyrannical that they rebelled against it, was not democratic because its royal head was selected by heredity rather than election, but it was already fully committed to the rule of law—the fundamental principle that the law is above even the king. Our founders wanted both popular participation in the choice of rulers—democracy—and the rule of law. They were nonetheless nervous about the risks inherent in pure democracy, particularly the historical phenomenon of the demagogue who manipulated the passions of an ill-informed majority to make himself a monarch beyond the control of law. For that reason, they designed a government of separate, but mutually checking, branches in which the principal powers of making and interpreting law were conferred on Congress and the judiciary, not the president. And copying their British forebearers, they put into their Constitution the text of an oath to be sworn by the chief executive placing him under the law: 'I do solemnly swear … that I will … to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' The founders' fears of dictatorship found a real-world overseas exemplar soon after the Constitution was ratified. In 1799, a Corsican artillery officer named Bonaparte led a coup against the government of post-Revolution France, first making himself dictator (under the title 'First Consul') and later, because in those times the titles and trappings of monarchy legitimated dictatorship, Emperor. Thus, when Trump quotes Napoleon's alleged declaration that 'he who saves his Country does not violate any Law,' he adopts the view of an undoubted tyrant—and a man despised by our own founders. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams in 1815, Napoleon was a 'Usurper' and 'Autocrat' who was possessed of a 'tyrannical soul' and a 'ravenous thirst for human blood.' The death of most European monarchies after World War I did not signal the demise of lawless autocracy so much as its translation into the new form of nonhereditary dictatorships, Adolf Hitler's first among them. A central pillar of Nazism was the Führerprinzip, or 'leader principle,' which made Hitler the supreme authority on all questions of law and policy, superior to the legislature, judges, and all civilian and military authority. This was not, of course, a mere theoretical construct—those who denied Hitler's claim to supreme authority were dismissed, impoverished, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. We will recognize an American dictator if he openly proclaims that he is superior to the law, does what he pleases regardless of law, and seeks to crush those who seek uphold the rule of law against him. Which brings us to Trump's new executive order on 'independent agencies.' In the 20th century, Congress recognized that it lacked the in-house expertise to draft statutes of sufficient refinement to address increasingly technical questions raised by modern finance, commerce, and technology. Accordingly, it increasingly enacted statutes that created rules of a fairly high level of generality and delegated responsibility for making more particular legal rules—called 'regulations' —to executive branch agencies with expertise in the field. This rulemaking is carried out according to a stringent set of procedures mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act. In addition, it became clear that Article 3 federal judges lacked both the numbers and the specialized knowledge to adjudicate all the disputes arising under federal regulations. Thus, a new class of jurist—the administrative law judge—was created to preside over regulatory cases in virtually every federal agency. Accordingly, in the U.S., as in virtually all modern states, law is made and interpreted not only by the legislature and the courts, but also by a multitude of executive branch officials applying their own expertise and judgment to the creation, interpretation, and application of administrative law. Many of the agencies that perform regulatory and adjudicative functions are ordinary Cabinet-level departments, the heads of which are nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and removable at will by the president. However, Congress believed that some governmental functions should be performed by bodies with an extra degree of independence from the personal control of the president. Accordingly, when it created the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and others, it made them 'independent agencies' in the sense that, while constitutionally in the executive branch and broadly subject to presidential direction, they are headed by a person or commission whom the president can remove only under stated circumstances. On Tuesday, Trump issued an executive order which purports to do several things. First, it purports to abolish the independence of congressionally created independent agencies and subject the heads of all such agencies to performance (and by implication, dismissal) standards set not by Congress but by the White House Office of Management and Budget. This portion of the order is a bald power grab that plainly violates Supreme Court precedent. Second, the order asserts as to independent agencies the claim Trump has already made about the rest of the executive branch—that he can ignore Congress' statutory commands about how appropriated money shall be spent. The nonchalance of this declaration reflects Trump's growing confidence that the Republican Congress will not protest his usurpation of the legislature's constitutional power of the purse, and thus that the legislative branch already bows before the Führerprinzip. In addition, the Feb. 18 executive order makes a breathtaking assertion that reaches far beyond independent agencies, declaring that the president (and the attorney general subject to the president's control) 'shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch' and that: No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General's opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General. In short, Trump is declaring that in all questions of either making law in the form of regulation or interpreting any law whatever—regulatory, statutory, or constitutional—the only executive branch opinion that matters is his. If Trump opines, for example, that SEC regulations do not bind Elon Musk, then that is the authoritative position of the executive branch, from which no SEC commissioner may dissent. If he opines that all the procedural protections for immigrants contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act and implementing regulations are no longer operative, his 'opinion' is 'authoritative' and no employee of the Department of Homeland Security—including presumably its immigration judges—can disagree. If he opines that regulations governing the oil and gas industry or the discharge of toxic effluents into the water should be amended, or merely reinterpreted, to give special privileges to his campaign contributors, that, too, would be an authoritative declaration from which no dissent would be allowed. If he decides that the FBI and the Justice Department may legally commence criminal investigations or prosecutions against his 'enemies' without any factual basis, then that is the 'authoritative interpretation of law for the executive branch.' And, as demonstrated by the forced resignations of multiple Justice Department prosecutors in New York and D.C. in the past week, anyone who disagrees publicly with such patently unethical or illegal 'interpretations' of law will be deemed 'disloyal,' forced out of government, and possibly investigated themselves. One can, if willfully blind, ignore as a kind of twisted playfulness Trump's social media quotations of Napoleon or the White House's posting of an image of Trump wearing a crown. But there is nothing playful in the content of Trump's executive orders or the behavior of his thuggish minions at DOJ. Having already subdued Congress, Trump has now openly announced that the Führerprinzip governs the executive branch and that he will crush any honest public servant who dissents.
