The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

CHAPTER V YOU CANNOT DODGE THE ECONOMIC

Most of us know to our cost—our intellectual cost—that the professional historians are incurably obsessed with the glitter and intrigues of Courts, the glamour but not the grim realism of war, the drama of statesmen’s struggles for power, the formalisms of Parliament, and how perversely they ignore the economic forces that make history. And how, in the process, the wells of historic truth are poisoned. Thus who but students who specialise have any accurate knowledge of the main factors that have determined our destiny since the days of Elizabeth?

I mention that period advisedly, because it was in the early years of her reign that the power of the Hanseatic League was finally broken and English commerce asserted itself. The power upon which Elizabeth relied and with which she co-operated was the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers of England. We find the chief agent in London of the Society of German Merchants of the Holy Roman Empire indignantly writing to the Worshipful Senate of Lubeck:—‘‘ How abominable that such a Company (the Merchant Adventurers) could suppress the Hanse, considering that at other times a few Hanse towns have

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