Free Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind … By their naturalizing Men of all Countries, they have laid the beginnings of many great advantages for the future. For by this means, they will be able to settle a constant Intelligence, throughout all civil Nations; and make the Royal Society the general Banck and Free-port of the World. 41
     
    Four years later, the Académie Royale des Sciences was set up in Paris, initially as a pioneering centre for cartography. 42 These became the models for similar institutions all over Europe. Among the Royal Society’s founders was Christopher Wren – architect, mathematician,scientist and astronomer. When, in 1675, Charles II commissioned Wren to design his Royal Observatory in Greenwich, he certainly did not expect him to predict the outcomes of battles. Real science, the King well understood, was in the national interest.
    What made the Royal Society so important was not so much royal patronage as the fact that it was part of a new kind of scientific community, which allowed ideas to be shared and problems to be addressed collectively through a process of open competition. The classic example is the law of gravity, which Newton could not have formulated without the earlier efforts of Hooke. In effect, the Society – of which Newton became president in 1703 – was a hub in the new scientific network. This is not to suggest that modern science was or is wholly collaborative. Then, as now, individual scientists were actuated by ambition as much as by altruism. But because of the imperative to publish new findings, scientific knowledge could grow cumulatively – albeit sometimes acrimoniously. Newton and Hooke quarrelled bitterly over who had first identified the inverse-square law of gravity or the true nature of light. 43 Newton had an equally nasty argument with Leibniz, who dismissed gravity as having ‘an occult quality’. 44 There was indeed an important intellectual fault-line here, between the metaphysical thought of the continent and the empirical practice of the British Isles. It was always more likely that the latter, with its distinctive culture of experimental tinkering and patient observation, would produce the technological advances without which there could have been no Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 5 ). 45 The line that led from Newton’s laws to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine – first used to drain the Whitehaven collieries in 1715 – was remarkably short and straight, though Newcomen was but a humble Dartmouth ironmonger. 46 It is not accidental that three of the world’s most important technological innovations – James Watt’s improved steam engine (1764), John Harrison’s longitude-finding chronometer (1761) and Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769) – were invented in the same country, in the same decade.
    When Newton died in March 1727 his body lay in state for four days at Westminster Abbey, before a funeral service in which his coffin was borne by two dukes, three earls and the Lord Chancellor. The service was watched by Voltaire, who was astonished at the venerationaccorded to a scientist of low birth. ‘I have seen’, the famous
philosophe
wrote on his return to France, ‘a professor of mathematics, only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.’ In the West, science and government had gone into partnership. And no monarch would better exemplify the benefits of that partnership than Voltaire’s friend Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Property
     
Freedom is … a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another … The great and
chief end
therefore, of Men’s uniting into Commonwealths … is
the preservation of their Property
.
John Locke
We are the vile offspring of the predatory Spaniards who came to