In light of the British obsession with all things related to the second world war and, especially, Nazism – the British history curriculum focusing on the NS period of German history has repeatedly been named a prime cause for “Kraut bashing” in the British tabloids – today’s Independent features an interesting article about an opinion poll conducted by the BBC which states that –
[s]ix out of ten people under the age of 35 have never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp that was the scene of the biggest mass murder ever recorded[, and] 45 per cent of British adults did not recognise a name that others might have assumed was synonymous with evil.
Interesting, indeed.
Might stop the comments about the Americans being stupid for thinking Saddam was involved in 9/11…
*Yaw drops*
So is WWII only about Coventry, V-2, U-boats, D-Day and Dresden?
Interesting that it should be the two British media outlets most consistently hostile to the state of Israel – the Independent and the BBC – that are featuring this story.
It is not interesting at all, unlike one is a racist and confuses (the act of the) the state of Israel with ‘the Jews’.
actS.
ken, you beat me to it. i was going to say that these brits must live in kansas or texas.
no matter bush selected a real brute with barely a high school education to be the director of homeland security. homeland security i guess that refers to all those germans living in texas…. the broderkund.
i can not keep my history right it keeps morphing. the nazis were in germany and not in texas?
the americans liberated the iraq from this planet?
i live in nyc its part of europe? that explains it.
On second thought, I would like to see the poll itself – what were the questions precisely and such. Where people asked to tell in their own words what it is, pick from a choice, or were just shown the word for recognition?
There is absolutely nothing surprising about this. I’ll bet that an even larger percentage haven’t heard of the famine in the Ukraine in 1932/3, which is estimated to have killed upwards of 7 million people there, and how that came to happen – see: http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/
As more astute observers noted long ago, the English are really very bad at history:
“Now one of the very curious things about the English, I think . . is that they suppose themselves to be conscious of history and to be enveloped in History. They are not. They are indifferent and ignorant as far as history is concerned. If you want a really historically conscious country you have to go to Central Europe, where they have too much history . . or to the United States, where they have so little of it . . ” – from: The Future of the Past (1968), an inaugural lecture by Geoffrey Elton, quoted in Norman Davies: The Isles – A History (1999).
The late Geoffrey Elton was a distinguished historian of Britain’s constitution at Cambridge. He was born under the name of Gottfried Ehrenberg in Tubingen in 1921. Fortunately, he managed to reach Britain in 1939.
For any who might doubt the substantive accuracy of Professor Elton’s pertinent observation, try asking a random selection of folk walking in or around Trafalgar Square, London, about the battle, its date and significant, or ask passengers awaiting trains at Waterloo Station about why that station is so named.
A-m-a-z-i-n-g. And this in the land of the BBC?
However, I wonder what the scores would be in The Netherlands and, to a lesser extent, Belgium.
“70 per cent admitted they did not know a great deal about the subject and 74 per cent did not know that Jewish people were not the only victims.”
Less surprising, but very telling.
“For any who might doubt the substantive accuracy of Professor Elton’s pertinent observation, try asking a random selection of folk walking in or around Trafalgar Square, London, about the battle, its date and significant, or ask passengers awaiting trains at Waterloo Station about why that station is so named.”
Which only goes to show that far more people should read Patrick O’Brian and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. (Off-topic and unhelpful, I know.)
Auschwitz is especially infamous because the estimated number of victims of mass extermination there runs into seven figures but there were over 1,000 death camps of various sizes in Germany alone – almost every city or town of any standing had one. But isn’t it more important that folks know about the salient features of the two outstanding totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century, and how they came about, than be able to recall the names of particular concentration camps or particular gulags?
Bob, this may be nitpicking, but let’s not confuse terms: there were thousands of concentration camps; death camps (where inmates were not just killed by guards and diseases and overworking and malnourishment, but mass executions or gas chambers or other methods of industrialised murder too) were only a dozen or so. Most of them on Polish or former Soviet territory, established after the Einsatzgruppen (SS extermination squads) proved ‘bad for troop morale’. Auschwitz was the biggest; Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka are also often mentioned.
I wonder how many of them know that all of the Jews were all thrown out of England during the reign of Richard the Lionhearted? He borrowed tons of money from them, and then when he couldn’t pay it back just threw them out. It’s hardly ever mentioned in British history books, or any others, for that matter.
So this news doesn’t surprise me a bit. The British hatred of Jews is very deep-seated and goes back a long, long way. Way before the establishment of Israel, or even before anybody ever thought of an Israel. They also find some way to rationalize or excuse it, as they do now by characterizing it as anti-Israelism, not hatred of the Jews themselves (I won’t dignify it with the term anti-Semitism), but it’s just good old-fashioned bigotry.
I remember when I was a security guard at the embassies in Ottawa, Canada … I defended the Iraqi, American, Saudi, Iranian embassy (it had a picture inside on the wall displaying an americn Gi’s running shoe with his foot still in it-blown off..from a downed helicopter)and mostly the Turkish embassy and the homes of its workers/diplomats and a hospital where one was staying (paralyzed from am Armenian’s shot) … this was in the early 80’s, 4 Turks were killed and one was paralyzed in these useless acts in an unaware Canada… one guard was killed at the Turkish embassy which was my main site ….. I was amazed at the memories and sickness of these Armenian terrorists and their supporters, who so wanted Turkey to admit to the world its genocidal act, that they killed innocents, many who were not alive at the time of the deed.
Indeed, genocides in China, Russia, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Sudan, Rwanda, the Horn of Africa, in a Kurdish village, in many African wars,and this is just a few of them… occur frequently.
I guess the really educated would know about all of them and study them in isolation and study them together …and would not fixate on one example, for that would be the mark of the very stupid, wouldn’t, the kind that would follow, and support a Hitler type… who of us is really so educated? Are the British children so uneducated because they don’t know of this … well perhaps they are, but then, we all should know of all the genocides….
hey, many people are non-political, the way societies often like ’em, unaware.
Might stop the comments about the Americans being stupid for thinking Saddam was involved in 9/11…
Apparently, there’s been a poll showing that most Britons believe the Bush administration intentionally allowed 9/11 attacks in order to justify going to war (I don’t think full results ever made it online.) So this one may not do the trick, either.
Sorry, tag accident. Tried to link to Aaronovitch’s column.
Canadians are the real winners! We know less about history than americans know about geography, and that is really hard to do.
Americans truly do not know where their own major cities are, honest!Foreign cities are a real long shot, even Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal and Ottawa..they have no idea.
Here is one of a million examples: In 1975 at Christmas break in Daytona, Florida, I overheard a Quebecois speaking French and a man from Detroit passing on the waters edge ask, “are you from Paris”? The Quebecer said, “non, from Montreal, know where that is”? The man from Detroit did not, but asked if the man from Montreal new where Detroit was. The answer was, “non”.
But Canadians do not even know who General Brock was! I bet you Euro’s do not know either, he was our George Washington in the war of 1812… a real hero who talked down General Hull in Detroit (possibly the worst general in american history-for this loss alone) and then raced to the Niagara Falls area to take on the other invading American force, weakened by the knowledge of Brock’s surprise appearance. Like most famous generals operating on Canadian soil, he died on the battlefield in this last encounter of his. I figure the Euro’s reading this would know about Britain’ Wolf and France’s Montcalm above Quebec city in 1763; the entire world still pays for the chagrin and loss France bore from this defeat, and even today attempts to make amends for…
Our only excuse in Canada is that the British (claimed by others in these comments to be the wrote most of our school texts until very recently, though I still pick Canadians) wrote most of our school texts until very recently (I remeber in high school, about 80 percent of the books I received were English writers, about 15% american, and the rest of the world did not exist (I mean Tolstoy would have had to wait through 50 years of high school before we got to his Russia, we hadn’t even reached France yet!). Half of our English books to study for English were from one writer, Shakespeare. Not a bad choice that was, if they had to pick one…love his humor.
that last paragraph of mine proves the system did work, in my ‘thick’ case.
They are making their own holocaust in Iraq, so they must ‘forget’ about the other one. Sorry.
“all of the Jews were all thrown out of England during the reign of Richard the Lionhearted? He borrowed tons of money from them, and then when he couldn’t pay it back just threw them out. . . The British hatred of Jews is very deep-seated and goes back a long, long way.”
According to Norman Davies: The Isles (1999), the Jews in England were expelled by Edward I (in 1290) and readmitted in 1655, at the initiative of Oliver Cromwell.
Disraeli (1804-81), the grandson of immigrants, became Conservative leader in the House of Commons 1859 and, in due course, prime minister in 1868 and 1874-80.
Popular anti-catholic sentiments in England have been a far more potent influence through history than anti-semitism, at least since the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century. The Gordon riots of 1780 in London amounted to an anti-catholic pogrom – lives were lost and property destroyed, including Newgate Prison, which was burnt down. In modern times, there have been no remotely comparable anti-jewish riots in Britain.
Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s Chief Rabbi, in 2002: “I went to Christian schools, St Mary’s Primary, then Christ’s College Finchley. We Jews were different and a minority. Yet not once was I insulted for my faith.” – from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,659294,00.html
Like DoDo, I have become skeptical of these claims about some outragously high percent of a population does not some critical event in history, like the Holocaust, or when it occurred etec. Too often on detailed investigation it turns out to be understandable when the questions are looked at carefully. Trouble is this usaually done, if at all, only after the results have been shown in the Media in a sensational, distorted way.
People usually remember an event primarily from their or their ancestor’s experiences. Hence it does make sense that the British remember WW II primarily as Dunkirk, the Blitz, El Alamein, the U-Boats, D-Day, V1 & V2 bombs and V-E Day. How many British know anything about their role in the war against Japan, outside of maybe the disgraceful surrender of Singapore in Feb. 1942?
How many British know that the greatest land defeat the Japanese suffered in WWII was by Britain’s last great Imperial Army of British, Indian & West African troops at the Battle of Imphal in early 1944? At least the British know who was responsible for the war. In the inmortal words of that archtypical Brit, Basil Fawlty to the German tourists:
“Yes, you did, You started it, You Invaded Poland!”
PS: I understand that in a recent poll, the British, by a wide margin,(better then 40%) picked Homer Simpson as the Greatest American! Lincoln came in second picked by a bit under 10%. In picking the Greatest Britishers, I vote first for Monty Python and second for the Beatles! Of course I am joking just like those Brits who picked Homer Simpson, all of us are just making fun of all those pompous inquiries as to who is the most famous person is, which is usually a way of saying the most well know or most publicised etec.
Bob is right, Anti-Catholicism in both Britain and the USA have been deeper, more violent and of more consequence then anti-Semitism. Indeed if you replace Catholic with Communist in 17th & 18th Century writings you get some idea of how deep the hatred was. As in Guy Fawkes as the archypical English traitor, leader of band of Catholics (Communists) who tried to blow up King James I and Parliment with the help of the Jesuits (the KGB).
(I am NOT saying Catholics same as Communists, just showing how English speaking Protestants then saw Catholics and the Catholic Church as Communist and Communism have been viewed more recently as subversive traitors.)
Mike:
In which European country did court decisions in the 1720s describe Jews as citizens and rule that they could own land?
In which European country could Jews serve as police officers and enforce the law against non-Jews starting in the 1740s?
In which European country’s colony, in 1718, did the voters choose the first Jewish elected official in modern times?
The answers might surprise you.
Oliver Cromwell brought the Jews back to England primarily because he and his fellow Puritans 1)respected the Jews for the commitment to learning and to interpreting their religious writings including the Old Testament and 2) any group, like the Jews, that was being persecuted by what the Puritans saw as the Evil Empire of their day, ie the Catholic Church and the Inquisition, were basically okay.
To put all this into some sort of illuminating and, in retrospect, entirely horrifying historical perspective, we ought to recall where Europe is coming from.
An American researcher has chillingly reminded us that the overall casualty rate during the battle of Waterloo in 1815 was more than 6,000 (six thousand) an hour. In a day, more were killed than America lost during the whole course of the Vietnam War: http://www.napoleonic-literature.com/WE/Casualties.html
And remember the populations of European countries were much smaller then.
Between 1562 and 1598, eight wars were fought in France between Catholics and Protestants. The numbers of Huguenots slaughtered in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 24 August 1572 makes 9-11 appear in comparison as a minor incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew's_Day_Massacre
The main war of the Reformation in Europe, or more correctly the series of wars, is dubbed the Thirty Years War (1618-48): http://www.pipeline.com/~cwa/TYWHome.htm
Much of the “quirkiness” of the British illustrated by their selective knowledge of history and other subjects like languages has its roots in the narrow-and-deep education system. I have no reason to believe that my own education was unusual in any way and I learned nothing about 20th century history at school. Until I started reading about the subject myself, my knowledge of the second world war was obtained from the popular English and American films such as “The Battle of Britain”, “Where Eagles Dare” and “Bridge Over the River Kwai”. Exciting certainly, but for learning history?
And, so what did we learn at school? From 13 years, many British school children had only six ‘academic’ subjects including mathmatics and English, from 16 years only three subjects and from 18 years just one. As it happened, history was one of my chosen subjects for ages 13 – 16 years with the topics, British history: up to 1300 (year 1), 16th and 17th centuries (year 2) and industrialization and socialism (year 3). Other periods, topics and geographies… forget it.
The only good thing that I can say about this system was that it allowed children like myself to get into enough depth to feel ‘involved’ and, thus, it instilled a desire to go and learn more. For many children, however, it simply presented history as a extremely dry subject with no relevance to the world today.
Hm, Bob, I don’t really understand what exactly your examples are meant to put into perspective, but for A Fistful Of Euro’s benefit, I take this as an ocassion to present something I researched lately.
That no major war beween members of, or no major civil war within a member of the EU (and its predecessors) was fought for more than half a century is an entirely unique period of European history.
In fact, up until 1721 (the end of another cataclysmic war most of you probably haven’t even heard of, the Great Northern War, which involved not just all countries around the Baltic Sea but the Ottoman Empire too), there has been not a single year without multiple wars in Europe. (Even constrained for Western Europe, I couldn’t find an armed conflict only for 1680 and 1681.) The dozen-year peace until the War Of Polish Succession (which was actually fought on much more fronts than those in Poland) begun in 1733, during which there was only a British-Spanish war fought in the colonies, was absolutely unprecedented.
But, though there were six further periods of peace, also unsurpassed until the Belle Epoche, when in Western Europe there was a full 38 years of peace: from the end of the third Carlist War in Spain (1876) until WWI. But even then, in the East, there was continued strife on the Balkans, with four major wars: the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish (in which all Balkans states and would-be states participated and Britain at the end too, was on the scale of the Franco-Prussian war), the 1897 Greek-Turkish and the 1912, 1913 Balkan Wars.
So while most people today think peace is ‘normal’, the real European norm is continual slaughter on varying fronts.
I forgot from the pre-last paragraph:
…And, in Western Europe, unlike in the last half a century, France, Germany and Britain spent those 38 years with arming itself to the teeth for the next major war.
Thanks for the fascinating numbers, DoDo. Just the other day I came across these words written by Thomas Mann in September 1914:
Krieg! Es war Reinigung, Befreiung, was wir empfanden, und eine ungeheure Hoffnung.
There’s also an amusing analysis by Oles Donii in Ukrayinska Pravda today (in Ukrainian) of why there has been much talk in Russia about a Ukrainian civil war and almost none in Ukraine itself.
The author looks at the images that defined for Russians their recent history in the making. Crowds facing tanks on the streets of Moscow in 1991. Yeltsin making a victory speech mounted on one of them. Tanks firing on the pariliament building. Russian soldiers being pulled out of tanks and paraded on camera by Chechen guerillas, and tanks rushing back to reoccupy Chechnya.
He then looks at the unifying image of disturbances in Ukraine in 1990, 2000, and 2004: a tent city pitched in the center of Kyiv.
To generalize the authors’ words a bit, Russians’ view of history is like a Russian novel: grave, fatalistic, violent, and laden with shades of grey. Ukrainians expect to make history that’s more like an operetta. People in bright costumes walk out singing upbeat songs, and in the end the villains are banished amidst much dancing.
Once in the middle of the 90s I said that the “regime ought be toppled in good fun!” Essentially, what we’re having is a fun toppling of the regime. We are a jolly nation. Our countenance is marked by a grin. Our Tent turned out to be stronger than their Tank!
Michael S. quotes young Thomas Mann from 1914: Krieg! Es war Reinigung, Befreiung, was wir empfanden, und eine ungeheure Hoffnung.
*shudder* At least Mann learnt from the next four years, unlike that man with the moustache.
BTW, looking for something else, I just found that there was Western European armed conflict in 1680 and 1681 after all. The Reunions, France’s bit-by-bit conquering of the Alsace was finished in these years (tough in 1681, Strasbourg was taken without a shot).
Russians’ view of history is like a Russian novel: grave, fatalistic, violent, and laden with shades of grey. Ukrainians expect to make history that’s more like an operetta.
Interesting observation! Bob quoted from Geoffrey Elton, who said Central Europe has too much history – that is quite right I can say; and true for Eastern Europe too. Here history is everything. To understand the Orange and Blue sides’ expectations of the other (or the others’ outside superpower backers), Western observers should bear that in mind.
In strongly agree with DoDo and David All on questioning the exact questioning of the poll as well as on Simpson Homer as greatest American.
But of course we should not deny that a lot of people are very ill-informed and a lot are very unintelligent.
A recent “poll” in the Netherlands was much more worrying in my opinion. One or two months before the EU was extended with 10 new members [b]members of parliament[/b] were asked if they could tell which 10 countries were going to join. None of the interviewed mp’s could name all 10; some even tried to avoid answering at all.
Sarcastically one could say this that a referendum on every joining countries is not such a bad idea if apparently the mp’s are hardly better informed than the people in general…
But my conclusion is different. (fill in my hobby horse)
Bob,
In modern times, there have been no remotely comparable anti-jewish riots in Britain.
In medeival times England was a hotbed of anti-semitism:
1144 – (Passover – the first blood libel apparently). Jews of Norwich are accused with both ritual murder and blood libel after a boy (William of Norwich) is found dead with stab wounds. The legend gets turned into a cult, William acquires status of martyr saint and crowds of pilgrims bring wealth to local church. In 1189, Jewish deputation attending coronation of Richard the Lionheart is attacked by the crowd. Pogroms in London follow and spread around England. On Feb 6 1190 all the Norwich Jews found in their houses were slaughtered, except few who found refuge in the castle.
1190 – (York Massacre) 500 Jews of York massacred after 6-day siege by departing Crusaders, backed by a number of people indebted to Jewish money-lenders.
1275 – King Edward I of England passes anti-Jewish statute forcing Jews over the age of seven to wear an indentifying Yellow badge, and making usury illegal (linked to blasphemy), in order to seize their assets. Scores of English Jews are arrested, 300 hanged and their property goes to the Crown. In 1280 he orders Jews to be present at Dominicans preaching conversion. In 1287 he arrests heads of Jewish families and demands their communities to pay ransom of 12,000 pounds.
1290 – King Edward I of England expels all Jews from England, allowing to take only what they could carry, all the other property became the Crown’s. Official reason: continued practice of usury.
Gary,
The only reason we can suppose England was a “hot-bed of anti-semitism” in medieval times is because a few surviving texts from those times included anti-semitic passages and, in that, followed the mainstream, orthodox teaching of the universal church then.
My knowledge of medieval history is sparse so I thought to look up entries for jews in: Ben Weinreb amd Christoper Hibbert (eds): The London Encyclopaedia (1993), an ever fascinating source of information and perspectives, admittedly from a London perspective but then London is approaching 2000 years old and it is the greatest city in Europe in terms of population – as well as much else. Of course, there is an entry for the Jewish Museum in London but there were few relating entries beyond this, which also related to medieval times:
“Jewin Street – Barbican: By the middle of the 12th century Jews had settled in the street in considerable numbers. In 1177 Henry II granted them a patch of ground here for burying their dead. The Barons desecrated the graves in 1215 [NB the year of the signing of Magna Carta] and took some of the head stones to repair Lud gate. When the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, their burial ground was granted to William de Monte Forte, Dean of St Paul’s . . ”
Significantly, the worst anti-semitic atrocity you mentioned was in York, in the north of England, but perspectives there were and are very different. London has always been a cosmopolitan city – as Disraeli wrote in 1847: London is the modern Babylon. It was founded by the Romans. An archeological dig a few years ago of a Roman cemetry in London turned up remains of a young woman, almost certainly of north African origin, in a tomb with artefacts suggesting a relatively affluent social standing. That is not altogether surprising.
Other London digs indicate regular trade in imported wines and olive oil from the Mediterranean region in Roman times. A few years back, an archeological dig in my neighbourhood uncovered the foundations of a substantial Roman villa. But then a few hundred metres away from where I sit there is a bricked-up cave which was found to have evidence of human habitation going back to the middle stone age. Just a few miles away there are the are the ruins of Nonsuch Palace, a sumptuous palace built for Henry VIII. The local church is part Norman and the place name has a Saxon ending, as have most place names hereabouts. The foxes, which still roam the neighbourhood, are probably the surviving indigenous inhabitants.
Europe’s history has a very bloody narrative. Historic manifestations of anti-semitism need to be seen in the context of recurring wars over territory and religions and periodic bouts of persecution of ethnic or religious minorities, often intigated by civil or ecclesiastical authorities, quite possibly for self-serving motives. There were periodic bouts of persecuting folk deemed to be “witches” right up to the 18th century for reasons which we have great difficulty in comprehending nowadays.
Pray consider this relating to Hartlepool, a small town by the sea, not very far from York, and which was the Parliamentary constituency of Peter Mandelson, who has just become the UK Commissioner in the EU:
“The monkey-hanging legend is the most famous story connected with Hartlepool. During the Napoleonic Wars a ship was wrecked off the Hartlepool coast. During the . . Wars there was a fear of a French invasion of Britain and much public concern about the possibility of French infiltrators and spies.
“The fishermen of Hartlepool fearing an invasion kept a close watch on the French vessel as it struggled against the storm but when the vessel was severely battered and sunk they turned their attention to the wreckage washed ashore. Among the wreckage lay one wet and sorrowful looking survivor, the ship’s pet monkey dressed to amuse in a military style uniform.
“The fishermen apparently questioned the monkey and held a beach-based trial. Unfamiliar with what a Frenchman looked like they came to the conclusion that this monkey was a French spy and should be sentenced to death. The unfortunate creature was to die by hanging, with the mast of a fishing boat (a coble) providing a convenient gallows.”
– from: http://www.thisishartlepool.co.uk/history/thehartlepoolmonkey.asp
But then, anyone can makes a mistake.
Btw Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up Parliament at its state opening in 1605, came from York but any generalisations about Yorkshire people would probably be over-hasty.
Gary,
Bob’s reply notwithstanding please, note the other fact relating all victims of your atrocity catalogue: they were owed money by the perpetrators. These crimes, and there were many, were not anti-jewish (as a religion) but debt-cancelling in a time when courts could not be relied upon by either party.
Bob, as a Lancastrian, I can assure you that generalizations about Yorkshiremen, or tykes as they are more familiarly known, are all totally correct… 🙂
For our European readers: the Wars of the Roses between Lancashire (red rose) and Yorkshire (white rose), 1453 – 1485, is still remembered with a passion and fought annually to this day, though less bloodily, on the cricket field. So for those that think the British Pythonesque attitude to Germany may go away soon, think again. However, football may be the better for it.
Michael.
For our European readers
Sorry. I hate it when other people make that mistake.
-M.
Well what’s even more worrying is that no one remembers the brave american soldiers who died fighting the persians in thermopylae.
I’m sure there’s a hollywood movie in the pipeline that will put the record straight about that.
Igloo: Bull. The Americans were bogged down in Carthage at that time. It wasn’t until Johannus Waynus screwed up at Alamoninum that they ventured so far east.
Now for some straight stuff: reference has been made here to jews and usury so I thought to look up about Britain’s usury laws in what I take to be the current definitive text on the history of Britain’s industrialisation and thereafter: The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Vol.I 1700-1860 (CUP 2004). This passage relates – and recall that Britain pioneered industrialisation (and central banking) so the usury laws were hardly an effective constraint on the development of underpinning finance markets.
“The weaknesses of Tudor and Stuart regulation were the result not only of inadequate enforcement by the executive branch but also of its drafting and maintenance by parliament. The ceiling on interest rates in the usury laws was bypassed by adding risk fees, by fictiously increasing the sum of the original loan, issuing bonds below par, playing with exchange rates on foreign bills or adding profit-sharing elements. When parliament drafted the usury laws, it did not sufficiently account for enforcement problems or for the complexity of the credit market.” [p.208]
However, it would be wrong to generalise from there to suppose a general laxity in fiscal administration for the same text reports that by 1782 there were almost 8,300 full-time tax collectors – Britain’s population at the time of the first census in 1801 was only 10-5 millions. Ireland’s population at the time was five millions.
The usury laws were repealed in 1854. They had become irrelevant. Indeed, much inherited Tudor and Stuart regulation was repealed in the first half of the 19th century, the general presumption being that laissez-faire works best but then we may also note that Parliament in 1802 passed the first of many subsequent factory acts to regulate working conditions: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/peel/factmine/factleg.htm