The occupation commander informs Grand Duchess Sandra that the new High Commissioner will be a Hermetian named Benoni Strang. Sandra reflects:
"Strang? Not one of the Thousand Families. Possibly a Follower, but I doubt it; I'm sure I'd remember. Then he must be -" (p. 183)
She can leave that sentence unfinished. An English person knows what she means. This Strang must be a member of the lowest social class whose name would not be known to her. Do I know you? Have we be been introduced?
When, later, Strang does address Sandra, he tells her that there is going to be a revolution. Words are used in different ways. "Revolution" can mean just an abrupt change of the rulers at the top of society, a coup. As I understand it, a "social revolution" means a change of relationships between classes in an economic, not just a social, sense of "class." Thus, the American Civil War was a social revolution because slaves became free workers, a change in their economic status: "wage slaves," if you like, but still different from owned slaves, human property. The English "Glorious Revolution" replaced absolute monarchy with constitutional monarchy and (I think) was a stage in the shift from land to trade as the main source of wealth which is an economic change even if some people, with admirable British pragmatism, managed to be involved in both.
Strang might impose some changes from the barrel of a gun but social revolutions really need to come from conflicts within the relevant society and such conflicts had certainly come onto the stage of history before the Baburites arrived. The Travers were in uproar. Change gathers momentum. After the upheavals of the occupation, people will not return to the way things were before.
On a multi-planetary scale, three narratives had shown conflicts within Technic civilization as a whole:
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688-89 was more of an aristocratic coup by a faction among the land owning peers against James II and VII. I don't think new classes based in commerce and industry can be said to be more than barely beginning in the 1680's. Those latter only became really prominent in the 18th century.
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Ad astra! Sean
OK. I wasn't sure of that sequence. I would think that constitutional monarchy made economic progress easier.
Kaor, Paul!
It did. And James II and his descendants could have played a role in that if he had had the wit to be more like his wily, realistic brother Charles II.
Hope this uploads.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that James II would have reigned unopposed if he hadn't tried to agitate the religious question and restore Catholicism. He couldn't grasp that Protestants were -sincere- about what they believed.
Hence his attempt to get persecuted Protestant sects on his side by extending them toleration -- they mostly turned him down, seeing (correctly) that he'd turn on them when his position was secure, so they put up with Anglican discrimination instead.
Charles II left James a government that was solvent (unprecedented for a Stuart) and in control of Parliament, with the Whig opposition in powerless exile.
James managed to screw things up in short order. It took real talent to do that!
Charles had probably been a Catholic by conviction, but he appreciated that you couldn't be an overt Catholic and rule Britain -- hence his deathbed 'conversion'.
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