A snippet from Delbourgo

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My second, rather desultory, reading of reference 1, as has been noticed from time to time, most recently at reference 2, continues, with this snippet being turned up yesterday evening.

I start with the observation that people in the US like to castigate us Brits for our dreadful colonial record, seemingly blind to their own record, which is not that much better. For example, stealing most of what is now the south west of the USA from Mexico. Or bottling up what was left of the indigenous peoples in reservations. A blindness with sits badly with their strangely prolonged regard for the words of our Lord. I think particularly of the parable taken from the Sermon on the Mount about motes and beams. With a modern language version of same illustrated above.

Then yesterday, I read about one Elihu Yale who made a great deal of money out of more or less dubious transactions and trades in India in the early eighteenth century. 'A rapacious private trader', that is to say not trading under the umbrella of what became the East India Company, who went on to buy his place at the high table by bankrolling the foundation of what become the Yale University in Connecticut. Elihu does get a mention at reference 4, but the rapacious trading does not.

I associate to the thought that places of education in this country were sometimes founded by kings who were pious and possibly learned - but pretty useless at being kings in the rough and tumble of the late medieval world. See King Henry VI.

Reference 1: Collecting the world: Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum - James Delbourgo - 2017.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-building-site.html.

Reference 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/. The source of the illustrations. Just a few clicks away from the starting blocks.

Reference 4: https://www.yale.edu/.