This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

Mass democracy went into abeyance with the demise of the Roman Republic. With the revolutions in America and France in the late eighteenth century, the masses asserted their political presence with a vengeance. Although both revolutions began moderately enough, they quickly diverged. In America, patronage became the predominant means of winning and keeping power. In France, in contrast, politics was soon dominated by a series of demagogues, from Danton to Robespierre. Rather than looking to ideology, this chapter proposes that the difference was due to the lower cost of patronage as a means of political incorporation in America compared to France. American elites had more than a century of working in the limited franchise democracy of British America prior to its "democratization." In France, in contrast, French elites had no such legacy on which to build. French institutions instead precluded the building of political parties, rendering direct appeals to the masses, especially those in the capital, cost-effective. The recurrent cycle of populism in France was interrupted only with Napoleon’s combination of popular appeal with the reimposition of centralized, executive power: a popular dictatorship.

The same sense of Britain’s lapsed capacity to deliver on the promise of global reach was viewed as a rare opportunity by Scottish and Welsh separatist parties, whose stunning rise to electability between 1961 and 1979 cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader implications of imperial decline. Here, the end of Britain was the avowed political prize, persistently and effectively packaged in the aspirational politics of ‘stopping the world’ so that older nationalities might be retooled for a post-British age. The chapter considers the electoral breakthrough of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party during these years, both of whom won surprise electorial victories respectively at Carmarthen (1966) and Hamilton (1967). Contemporaries were quick to conflate the two events, detecting deeper ruptures in the tumult of Hamilton and Carmarthen. To this day, they mark the onset of ‘devolution’ as a major theme of contemporary British politics, but the connnections to the wider context of global decolonization are poorly understood. This chapter takes seriously the idea that the end of empire was heavily implicated in the rise of separatist political parties in the UK.

The quaternions of Hamilton show that it possible to generalise the complex numbers, but only at the expense of introducing unexpected behaviour. It is thus reasonable to extend no further than the complex numbers. However the quaternions provided the inspiration for vectors.