The Political Economy of Devolution in

Britain from the Postwar Era to Brexit

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The Political Economy
of Devolution in
Britain from the
Postwar Era to Brexit
Nick Vlahos
The Political Economy of Devolution in Britain
from the Postwar Era to Brexit
 Nick Vlahos

The Political
Economy
of Devolution
in Britain
from the Postwar Era
to Brexit
Nick Vlahos
Toronto, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-48728-7 ISBN 978-3-030-48729-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48729-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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To Shazia
 Preface

This book examines the political economy of devolution in Britain

from the postwar period to the present. There are three ways I have
approached this subject: firstly, by situating devolution in Britain within
an understanding of the partisan recalibration of political, economic
and democratic scales (or levels) of the state. Diverse explanatory tools
are utilized to unpack complex social, economic, spatial and political
phenomena across the national, regional and local scales of the state
simultaneously. More specifically, the analysis highlights the interconnec-
tions between political-economic, spatial and partisan forms of political
competition, contributing to a growing literature that recognizes the
increasing significance of subnational politics and policy.
Secondly, an emphasis is placed on examining why both decentraliza-
tion and devolution occur at particular points in time, providing the op-
portunity to explore how political and fiscal power is (re)organized at
different levels of the state. There is substantial set of literature about re-
gional tiers of governance, including why broad programmes of decentral-
ization have been implemented across the world and how developed they
are. Much of this comparative research tells a story about how regionally
developed states are, but less about how they got there, and about the
enduring tension over the centralization and decentralization of decision-
making apparatuses. Therefore, the particular application of devolution in
Britain is used to further develop our conceptual understanding of decen-
tralization as a broader, comparative phenomenon.

vii
viii PREFACE

Thirdly, building on critical institutionalism and democratization re-

search I discuss how decentralization and devolution is a manifestation of
political struggle. An historical analysis is used to show how partisan com-
petition and capitalist development informs the design of the devolved
and decentralized governance structures in the UK. This examination cov-
ers the role of various class, and the other social actors that are actively
contesting different governance structures, economic policies and labour
processes. I attempt to describe some of the nuances of what these social
actors encompass, in some cases the fractions within the labour movement
and their touch and go relations to political parties, as well as fractions of
(industrial and financial) capital, and their connection to the state. The
actors are not just class-based actors, but political officials at the local
level, regionally appointed delegates of various subnational institutions,
centralized organizations within political parties, national elites and other
social actors as well; how they coalesced to form coalitions that are re-
gionally and spatially rooted is important to decentralization. In this way, I
give careful attention to political divergences and partisan cleavages across
England, Scotland and Wales. Ultimately, this book describes how these
struggles are connected to the uneven spatial economic underpinnings of
territorial management in Britain.
The struggle over the design of devolved administrations is a fasci-
nating history and much research has been written on the subject. This
book attempts to synthesize a vast array of research in the fields of
British history, economic geography, urban planning and political science.
The goal of connecting various seminal but often disparate analyses is
to build a conversation across specializations about the connection be-
tween governmental restructuring and national, regional and local eco-
nomic development.
For over a decade I have been fascinated by the notion that decentral-
ization might be a way to bring government closer to residents/citizens,
and potentially lead to collaborative decision-making that cross-cuts cleav-
ages in society. This interest has guided both past and current research, as
well as different roles in community organizations and the public sector.
The initial inspiration to pursue these interests came from a close and late
mentor of mine. Thank you, Margaret Ogrodnick.
This book is based off of the doctoral research I conducted while at
York University. The present book includes new research drawn from re-
cent sources, the restructuring and addition of new chapters, as well as
tables and figures encompassing economic trends. I owe a great deal of
 PREFACE ix

gratitude to Dennis Pilon for his guidance, support and extensive conver-
sations about how I could combine a political economy of scale epistemol-
ogy with comparative, critical and historical research. This book would not
be what it is as well without Stephen Hellman, especially because of the
amount of time he put into reviewing every chapter. I also owe thanks to
Terry Maley for various suggestions that helped shed light the connection
between democracy and decentralization in local contexts. Lastly, I was
fortunate to have Adam Harmes and Stephen Tufts review the manuscript
and provide insight into nuanced debates within the fields of economic ge-
ography and the politics of scale, as well as public finance and federalism.
This book was researched and written in a multitude of spaces, with
particular appreciation going to the Scott Library at York University and
the Toronto Reference Public Library.
My deepest gratitude goes to my family and friends. I have received an
inordinate amount of support from my parents, Andrew, Lee, Morgan,
Kristian and Ryan. Lastly, and most importantly, this book would not
be possible at all without my wife, Shazia. Not a day goes by without
recognizing that we have shared all of the years that I have spent working
on this book.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I would like to thank Ambra Finotello and
Anne-Kathrin Birchley-Brun for their editorial support, as well as the sub-
stantive contributions provided by an anonymous reviewer.

Toronto, Canada Nick Vlahos

 Contents

1 Decentralization, Devolution and the Political

Economy of Scale 1

2 National-Level Scale Commitments from 1945 to 1970 35

3 The Struggles over Scale Commitments from

1970 to 1997 71

4 Devolution as a Scale Commitment from 1997 to 2010 111

5 Sub-regional Scale Commitments and Devolution from

2010 to 2020 149

6 Democracy, Devolution and the Political Economy

of Scale in Britain 185

7 Conclusion 225

Bibliography 233

Index 261

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Public expenditure aggregates, 1967–2011 (Source Office

for National Statistics—Public Sector Expenditure) 117
Fig. 4.2 Sub-regional GVA per hour worked (£), 2004–2013
(Source Eurostat) 119
Fig. 5.1 Workforce jobs by industry (%), 2018 (Source Office for
National Statistics—Workforce Jobs) 155
Fig. 5.2 Employment by occupation (%)—services (Services entail:
Managers, Directors and Senior Officials; Professional
Occupations; Associate Professional and Technical; Source
Office for National Statistics—Annual Population Survey
2018–2019) 155
Fig. 5.3 Regional GDP (million Euro) (Source Eurostat) 156
Fig. 5.4 Weekly earnings (%), 2001–2018 (Source Office for
National Statistics—Monthly Wages and Salaries) 157
Fig. 5.5 Manufacturing, value added (% of GDP), 1990–2018
(Source OECD—Main Economic Indicators) 173
Fig. 5.6 Change in workforce jobs by UK regions (%), 2018–2019
(Source Office for National Statistics—Workforce Jobs) 180

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Distribution of Employment by Sector, 1948–1964 (per

cent of civilian employment) 52
Table 2.2 Foreign investment in developing countries, 1950–1970 53
Table 2.3 Unemployment (%), 1951–1977 56
Table 3.1 Value of exports manufactures, 1950–1979 86
Table 3.2 Service employment by gender, 1956–1997 87
Table 5.1 Q: As a result of leaving the EU will unemployment in
Britain be higher, lower or won’t make much difference? 167
Table 5.2 Q: As a result of leaving the EU will Britain’s economy
be better off, worse off or won’t make much difference? 168

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Decentralization, Devolution and the Political

Economy of Scale

Introduction
In the 1950 general election in the UK, the Conservative, Labour and
Liberal parties won 99% of the popular vote and 100% of legislative repre-
sentation, a pattern that remained virtually unchanged over the next two
decades. Meanwhile, regional parties like the Scottish National Party or
the Welsh Plaid Cymru registered support that collectively amounted to
far less than 1% of the total votes throughout the same period. Yet by
2000 many of the political aims of these regional political players would
be accomplished, with the establishment of devolved regional parliaments
after 1997 and the regular election of their own members to the national
parliament in Westminster since the 1970s. The success of this regional
politics with its focus on decentralizing the UK’s traditionally centralized
form of political power is surprising as it goes against the grain of most of
the twentieth-century British politics. Just how the country shifted from a
seeming consensus for a nationally focused polity in the 1950s to a more
devolved one at the turn of the century has produced much debate about
the actual factors that have led to what amounts to a profound shift in
the political status quo.
As is often the case, the story is more complicated than first appears.
Reforms to the economic and political institutions in post-World War
II Britain have entailed shifts in how they are organized at different
levels of the state. Traditionally and conventionally, the UK has been

© The Author(s) 2020 1

N. Vlahos, The Political Economy of Devolution
in Britain from the Postwar Era to Brexit,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48729-4_1
2 N. VLAHOS

viewed as top-down governing configuration, to the point that it has often

been considered the bastion of centralization among developed democra-
cies. To observers, this was reinforced by the constitutional practice of
parliamentary supremacy at Westminster, where the dominant governing
political party of the day was ‘unencumbered’ by any competing juris-
dictions, be they regional or hierarchical, in implementing any national
legislation they devised. The single-member plurality electoral system
reinforced this by tending to produce legislative majority Labour or
Conservative governments. Despite their competing partisan allegiances,
both parties long remained wedded to the ideal of Britain as a unitary
state.
Nonetheless, measures for devolving legislative powers from the
national level to regional levels were introduced at Westminster in 1997,
with the caveat that regional populations had to support devolution
through separate popular votes. In 1998, referendums were passed in
Scotland and Wales, inaugurating a new era in British politics. The
implementation of devolution led to a reconfiguration of the British
constitution; indeed, some have argued that the policy package imple-
mented by the Labour Party at the time was the most important since
the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century.1 This is interesting because
for most of the twentieth century the British left tended to view devo-
lution as incompatible with socialist aims to take democratic control of
the commanding heights of the economy, and particularly after World
War II as inconsistent with Keynesian demand management. Anything
but a centralized approach to social policy and economic planning was a
threat to a key pillar of the welfare state, namely the uniform provision of
social services across Britain. However, things shifted by the late 1990s
when the Labour Party sought devolution as the key to what they called
‘modernization’. The economic context had changed, and the era was
dominated by a new paradigm committed to supply-side economic poli-
cies influenced by new right-wing thinking and neoclassical economics,
which encouraged among other things the downloading of responsi-
bility to other levels of the political system. But within the ranks of the
left, devolution was also increasingly held in esteem for its potential to
further democratize British government and placate regional populations

1 See Vernon Bogdanor, Devolution in the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 3

unhappy with the methods of governance employed by the Conservative

Party led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
By contrast, the right had traditionally viewed devolution, for the most
part, as inconsistent with the sovereignty and security of the national level,
though there was some scattered right-wing support for Scottish Home
Rule. Overall, Britishness rather than regional identity was more relevant
to the Conservatives. Even by the time that devolution became law in
the late 1990s, decentralization of this magnitude was being opposed by
the political right for its potential to break up the state. However, over
time the Conservatives have come full circle regarding devolution. Now,
they also view it as an engine for Britain’s economic competitiveness in a
global economy, consistent with the view that regions are economic inno-
vators. Moreover, devolution deals between local and national authorities
are now being negotiated by recent Conservative-led governments.
Even though the postwar political system was dominated by two parties
and showed no signs of letting up, Britain in the twenty-first century
boasts a regionalized union state that is contested at the margins by
multiple parties. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own
elected legislatures, accountable to regional populations and with alter-
native electoral systems that differ from what is used at the national
level. These institutional reforms are no small feat considering that similar
reforms fell short in 1979 when Scotland and Wales were unable to
secure devolution via referendums. The failure at that time is somewhat
surprising when we reflect on the decline of two-party dominance at
the national level in the 1970s, amid what appeared to be intractable
economic decline and a concomitant rise of nationalist politics in the form
of a dramatic legislative breakthrough for the Scottish National Party and
Plaid Cymru. Yet it was roughly twenty years after these events took place
that constitutional reform was finally secured, at a time when nationalist
voting had declined. All of which makes devolution both a fascinating and
a perplexing phenomenon to consider.
Political scientists tend to regard constitutions and institutions as diffi-
cult to change, which begs the question: Why and how does the dispersal
of power like devolution take place? Some studies have attempted to shed
light on this question but often approach it in a way that describes decen-
tralization as an inevitable by-product of an inexorable economic and
technological transformation (globalization) that is external to partisan
4 N. VLAHOS

struggle.2 Economic factors and the possible politics behind them have
been given much less attention. More broadly, the common themes asso-
ciated with designing new institutional means of decision-making tend to
fall into one of four categories: pluralistic group activity/demands for a
more inclusive political system; the need to find new functional methods
to govern advanced industrial societies; local as well as regional dissidence
produced by social movements and political actors; and sheer political will
and the strategic calculations made by political parties in power.
Aspects of Britain’s recent devolution are clearly unique to the UK.
A major reason for this is the historic asymmetry of regional institutions
responsible for social, economic and urban development. Not all regions
can be considered equal when it comes to devolved political and fiscal
powers, either now or in the past. There is also a history of peripheral
resistance by Scotland, Wales and Ireland that has influenced the politics
of place and identity in the UK.3 At the same time, the UK’s recent
devolution is in line with an international trend towards decentraliza-
tion—as in the political, administrative and/or fiscal authority granted
to regional and/or local levels—which makes it an interesting case for
comparison. Much work has been done attempting to explain how and
why political reform has been occurring across the world in terms of the
partisan motivations and contested relationships involved in designing and
reforming decentralized political institutions.4 Here, a deep examination
of the reasons reform has occurred in the UK can then be brought into

2 Taxonomies of decentralization and devolution often appear without reference to

the contexts of political, social and economic contestation, focusing instead on the
‘politico-administrative’ features of devolution. See Paolo Fedele and Edoardo Ongaro,
“A Common Trend, Different Houses: Devolution in Italy, Spain and the UK,” Public
Money and Management 28, 2 (2008).
3 See Michael Keating, State and Regional Nationalism: Territorial Politics and the
European State (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), and James Mitchell, Devolution
in the UK (New York: Manchester University Press, 2009). Interestingly, recent commen-
tary has claimed that Scottish nationalism as we know it today began in the 1960s and
1970s, achieving maturity in the 1980s and 1990s. This nationalism was not seeking
independence to defend ancestral culture. Rather, it was a left-leaning political mechanism
to protect against neoliberalism. See Ben Jackson, “The Political Thought of Scottish
Nationalism,” The Political Quarterly 85, 1 (2014): 50.
4 For example, see Patrick Heller, “Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decen-
tralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre,” Politics & Society 29, 1 (2001);
Stephanie L. McNulty, Voice and Vote: Decentralization and Participation in Post-Fujimori
Peru (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Yves Mény, “The Political Dynamics
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 5

dialogue with this broader comparative work. Accordingly, this book will
examine devolution as a case study of this Western trend of decentraliza-
tion and its relation to broader questions of institutional and democratic
reform, focusing on Britain from the postwar period to the present, with
attention to the overlooked role of political economy.

Why Study Devolution and Decentralization?

With modern democratic states like Britain being restructured, scholars
have been examining new and previously under-appreciated forms of insti-
tutional organization including devolution (as a type of decentralization),
drawing attention to the changing spatial characteristics of state power
and democratic politics. Expanding literatures have sought to decentre
the entrenched role of the national scale as the predominant locus for
state activities and question the internal coherence of national economies
and civil societies.5 Broadly speaking, the examination of decentraliza-
tion is relevant given the dramatic changes that many Western states have
undergone in recent decades. In the 1960s, regions became an impor-
tant basis for administrative and political mobilization across Western
countries. The literature points out that the 1970s marked the begin-
ning of a decisive turn towards the creation of intermediary levels of
government. This phenomenon has been referred to as the rise of ‘meso’
government. Just as democratization has been said to occur in waves
starting with developed and then in developing countries, the first wave
of post-World War II thinking on decentralization focused on what has
been termed the deconcentration of hierarchical government structures,
namely the implementation of regionally administered outposts of the
national bureaucracy. The second wave of decentralization, beginning
in the mid-1980s, broadened the concept to include political power
sharing, democratization and market liberalization, expanding the scope
for private sector decision-making. During the 1990s, decentralization
was a way of opening governance to wider public participation through

of Regionalism: Italy, France, and Spain,” in Regionalism in European Politics, ed. Roger
Morgan (London: PSI, 1987).
5 Neil Brenner et al., “Introduction: State Space in Question,” in State/Space: A Reader,
ed. Neil Brenner et al. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 3.
6 N. VLAHOS

organizations of civil society.6 Clearly, some of these aims have proven to

be in tension with others, like market liberalization and increased public
input.
There are many possible examples of institutional reform that could
be described as decentralizing or deconcentrating political and/or fiscal
power. For example, a decentralizing thrust was observed in Latin
America in the 1980s and 1990s when reforms swept across almost every
country in the region. It was claimed that such changes were imple-
mented to strengthen the role of local and regional governments. At
the same time, national governments were also abandoning various social
programming efforts in favour of more neoliberal approaches to policy.
Ultimately, the experiences in Latin America were not isolated; by the
mid-2000s, sixty-three out of the seventy-five countries with a population
of five million or more across the world came to experience some degree
of decentralization since 1980.7 Many of these countries underwent tran-
sitions to elected governments in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, after
more than two decades—that is, the 1940s and the 1950s—of increasing
centralization of government power and authority in both more devel-
oped and less developed countries, governments around the world began,
during the 1960s and 1970s, to decentralize their hierarchical struc-
tures.8 Connected to the creation of a regional level of government has
been an emerging trend in municipal authorities to directly elect mayors.
Moreover, localism has arisen in the context of bureaucratic reform and
local government modernization, which claims to empower individuals
as consumers of public services. Yet this new localism tends to paper
over deep ideological differences between neoliberal and social democratic
understandings of the role of the public domain.9

6 Shabbir G. Cheema and Dennis A. Rondinelli, “From Government Decentralization

to Decentralized Governance,” in Decentralizing Governance: Emerging Concepts and
Practices, ed. Shabbir G. Cheema and Dennis A. Rondinelli (Harvard University, 2007),
2–3.
7 Andrew Selee, “Exploring the Link Between Decentralization and Democratic Gover-
nance,” in Decentralization and Democratic Governance in Latin America, ed. Joseph S.
Tulchin et al. (United States: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2004),
3.
8 Cheema and Rondinelli, “From Government Decentralization to Decentralized
Governance,” 3.
9 Kevin Morgan, “The Polycentric State: New Spaces of Empowerment and Engage-
ment?” Regional Studies 41, 9 (2007): 1245.
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 7

In addition, intermediate government has figured at the supranational

level, initially just in Western Europe. But with the fall of the Eastern
Bloc it has since become a broader European phenomenon. This was in
part due to the consolidation of the European Economic Community in
the 1970s, and especially in the mid-1980s when funds provided by the
supranational level enhanced regional consciousness in peripheral areas.
This bound subnational institutional developments to the concomitant
economic growth and expansion of the European community.10 More
recently, member states in the European Union (EU) comprising nearly
90% of the population have seen some level of decentralization.11 Extra-
constitutional relations in the form of supranational bodies and alliances
are often pursued in connection with the liberalization of trade.
The global shift in the transference of power, authority and resources
to supra/subnational levels of government indicates that few spaces
around the world remain untouched. It is especially pertinent because
of the extent to which regionalization and decentralization are currently
couched in terms of subsidiarity to city-regions. This begs the question:
How does the altering of political institutions impact the substance of
politics? This is important because assertions are often made about the
connection between political reform and the enhancement of democratic
processes. In fact, decentralization is often synonymously linked to the
concept and practice of subsidiarity, in impact.12 In an age where we hear
a great deal about democratic governments suffering from democratic
deficits, facing increasingly apathetic publics, the idea of restructuring
state or democratic institutions into new political tiers that would poten-
tially bring democracy to levels where citizens can interact more directly
with politicians might seem to be something prized and actively sought
after.

10 L. J. Sharpe, “The European Meso: An Appraisal,” in The Rise of Meso Government

in Europe, ed. L. J. Sharpe (London: Sage, 1993), 2.
11 Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Nicholas Gill, “The Global Trend Towards Devolution
and Its Implications,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 21 (2003):
337.
12 Michael J. Goldsmith and Edward C. Page, “Introduction,” in Changing Government
Relations in Europe: From Localism to Intergovernmentalism, ed. Michael J. Goldsmith and
Edward C. Page (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 10.
8 N. VLAHOS

However, there are various critical questions concerning how the

public is included in scrutinizing or providing input on fairly large-
scale government decentralization processes. Moreover, others like Mark
Purcell consider this the ‘local trap’, namely the problematic assumption
that decentralization automatically leads to democratization.13 Indeed,
there are various concerns that come with the local scale: decentralization
for some is an impediment to the achievement of both programme and
horizontal policy goals, threatening equality before the law. To be sure,
areas that are unable to handle complex problems may require large public
agencies for implementation. This draws attention to the fact that even
if elites are committed to decentralization at subnational levels, new laws
and regulations need to be implemented along with redeployed personnel
and rechanneled resources to achieve institutional capacity building.
Moreover, decentralization might reinforce or revive local power struc-
tures that centralized government may have been designed to control. In
developing countries especially, issues about the elite capture of devolved
power in the form of clientelism have been a common concern. This
means that potentially shaking up existing patterns of political control
and patronage might be necessary. Of course, this is much easier said
than done.
Mediating between claims about the outcomes of decentralization
requires an appreciation of history and context. Decentralization always
occurs within a wider structure of power dynamics, and the interplay
of political forces determines the choice of principles for the drawing
of administrative, political and economic boundaries. The autonomy of
regional and local levels of government is often partly the consequence of
central decision makers putting restrictions on local jurisdictions, partly a
result of a pre-existing institutional structure which limits the agenda of
legitimate political action, and partly the product of the structure of social
relations which state institutions are designed to sustain. Subnational
levels may develop degrees of autonomy and contradict these structures of
social and political relations, but the extent to which local political institu-
tions might challenge these structures depends on both mobilization and

13 Mark Purcell, “Urban Democracy and the Local Trap,” Urban Studies 43, 11
(October 2006): 1926.
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 9

allies.14 Where power resides spatially is political and is often the product
of antagonistic political struggle.
Decentralization thus provides the potential to reorganize how polit-
ical power is wielded at different levels of the state. It opens room for
exploring multiple spaces of contestation between central, regional and
municipal levels, including the extent to which democratic institutions
have or have not changed over time. However, why political restruc-
turing in the form of decentralization takes place needs to be more
thoroughly examined. This is relevant because understanding why political
reform and institutional decentralization happens connects to how states
and democracies are changing. As argued below, the major approaches to
understanding why decentralization takes place are limited in their ability
to capture the connections between political actors, civil society relations
and economic environments.

Why Does Decentralization Occur?

The literature on why decentralization occurs falls into four areas:
pluralism, functionalism, centre-periphery struggles and the rational actor
model. In the first group, civil society groups mobilize to achieve a more
representative and inclusive political system. Decentralization is imple-
mented to ensure more legitimate and accountable relations between
government and citizen interests, by making new spaces for democratic
decision-making accessible to the public. An example of pluralism in
connection with decentralization is observed in Robert Putnam, Robert
Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti’s (1993) book Making Democracy Work:
Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. The authors find that in regions where
civic action is strong, leaders partake in horizontal versus hierarchical
political relations. This is because ‘government institutions receive inputs
from their social environment and produce outputs to respond to that
environment’.15 Thus, the authors claim that bottom-up civic participa-
tion in local social networks determines both the quality and the variations
of different political and legal institutions. However, as I have argued
elsewhere, we also need to account for the fact that political actors

14 B. C. Smith, Decentralization: The Territorial Dimension of the State (Winchester:

George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 203–205.
15 Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Rafaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work:
Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 9.
10 N. VLAHOS

simultaneously impact the capacity of civil society top-down, often by

redesigning subnational institutions.16
The second group considers geographic as well as population pres-
sures as consequential for government structure, such that countries with
large populations are more likely to decentralize functions to subnational
governments in order to oversee tax obligations, and implement various
policy measures.17 Functionalist arguments also assert that decentraliza-
tion (in the postwar period) has been a response to pressures originating
in the administrative overload of the central state.18 As a result, local
governments are rationalized as service providers, and meso-governments
now typically seen in regions have been established in many countries.
Scholars adopting this approach also tend to highlight how globalization
and European integration force governments to recognize the limita-
tions and constraints of central economic planning and management.
Thus, functionalists consider decentralization necessary to produce a
more efficient organizational model of public service delivery.19 Changes
are therefore held to occur because they serve to make things work better.
But that assumes rather than explores what any given institutional goals
might be. The problem with functionalist and modernizing discourses is
that they neglect how institutional restructuring is a political project in
the service of class and partisan objectives. Decentralization is but one
manifestation of political struggle.
For the third group, decentralization arises from centre-periphery
cleavages and the push from below by (regional) parties and social
movements. The groups commonly cited are those linked to regional
political mobilization including regional nationalisms, linguistic minorities
and ethno-regionalist parties. Research indicates that ethnic nationalism
creates pressure on the state to relinquish decision-making powers; the
electoral threat of regionalist parties generates the clout necessary to push

16 Nick Vlahos, “The Politics of Subnational Decentralization in France, Brazil and

Italy,” The Journal of Public Deliberation 9, 2 (2013): 5, 12.
17 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “Beyond Federalism: Estimating and Explaining the
Territorial Structure of Government,” Publius 43, 2 (2013): 197; Sharpe, “The European
Meso: An Appraisal,” 9.
18 Maurizio Ferrera, The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the Politics of
Social Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 170.
19 Piattoni, The Theory of Multi-level Governance, 7.
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 11

national parties towards decentralization as a means of policy appease-

ment.20 Studies also examine peripheral mobilization through a party
lens, namely the ethno-regionalist challenges to centralization and how
these reflect the territorial dimension of party politics. Research on this
territorial dimension points out that culturally distinct peripheries are
trying to defend their minority culture against the encroachment of state-
and nation-building policies. Nevertheless, it is important to point out
that more than one explanatory approach is needed to fully understand
how certain cleavages can produce political devolution or decentraliza-
tion. Indeed, shifts in the territorial distribution of political power may
have as much to do with political struggle for resources as they do with
identity.21 Moreover, countries vary, with some having strong regional
parties but weak regional cleavages, or the opposite. As a result, regional
cleavages do not automatically translate into party systems, and even
where they do, the political pressure applied by regional parties is often
not enough to cause a country to decentralize.22
Lastly, there are those who argue that strategic choices by political
parties determine the issues that land on the political agenda and their
salience in public debates. Based on Anthony Downs’s median voter
model, decentralization could be a rational act aimed to maximize elec-
toral possibilities. In other words, by calculating the electoral trade-offs, a
party in power weighs the risks involved in institutional change. In the
case of devolving power, this would involve giving up some influence
over national power for the opportunity of competing for decentralized
power in the future and the possibility of winning future elections at

20 Simona Piattoni, The Theory of Multi-level Governance: Conceptual, Empirical and

Normative Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7; Emanuele Massetti
and Arjan Schakel, “Ideology Matters: Why Decentralization Has a Differentiated Effect
on Regionalist Parties Fortunes in Western Democracies,” European Journal of Political
Research 52 (2013): 797. Bonnie M. Meguid, “Institutional Change as Strategy: The
Role of Decentralization in Party Competition” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association, Cornell University, 2008), 3.
21 Jonathan Hopkin, “Political Decentralization, Electoral Change and Party Organiza-
tional Adaptation: A Framework for Analysis,” European Urban and Regional Studies 10,
3 (2003): 228.
22 Sonia Alonso, Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credi-
bility: A Comparison of Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 26; Dawn Brancati, “The Origins and Strengths of Regional
Parties,” British Journal of Political Science 38 (2007): 135.
12 N. VLAHOS

both levels.23 Moreover, political calculations are taken in the context of

path-dependent and internal institutional dynamics influenced by William
Riker’s political party model. Here, decentralization results from the
difference in the levels of political party centralization and national party
strength.24 Rational actor perspectives also see politics as occurring within
an institutional status quo, with rules governing policy, spending and
the way taxable powers are distributed between levels of government.
Equilibrium defines this state of affairs and decentralization entails rene-
gotiating a new one. Change only occurs when some disturbance upsets
this equilibrium. But what causes such disturbances? Here, rational choice
approaches offer only weak, essentially anecdotal reasons, which basi-
cally amount to suggesting that it was in somebody’s self-interest to seek
change. While veto-player accounts deny that decentralization is carried
out by benevolent leaders, they tend to assert how self-interests over-
ride more cleavage-based objectives. Yet cleavage-based approaches have
a lot to recommend in terms of understanding where the dynamic tension
fuelling change comes from. In fact, new theorists of decentralization are
being encouraged to go beyond studies of median voter models to better
understand institutions and politics.25
Contrary to assertions about the effects of post-industrialism and
the de-alignment of class voting, class politics in industrialized societies
and the social structural bases of politics are still empirically supported
and debated.26 Institutions are deeply political, whereby the control of

23 Kathleen O’Neill, “Decentralization as an Electoral Strategy,” Comparative Political

Studies 36, 9 (2003): 1074–1075.
24 R. Enikolopov and E. Zhuravskaya, “Decentralization and Political Institutions,”
Journal of Public Economics 91 (2007): 2265; Christopher Garman, Stephan Haggard,
and Eliza Willis, “Fiscal Decentralization: A Political Theory with Latin American Cases,”
World Politics 53 (January 2001): 212, 234.
25 Jonathan Rodden, “Federalism and Decentralization: On Meaning and Measure-
ment,” Comparative Politics 36, 4 (2004): 494.
26 G. Evans, “The Continued Significance of Class Voting,” Annual Review of Political
Science 3 (2000): 413. Much of the current spate of scholarship still revolves around the
use of class as a relevant way to understand democratic and welfare state politics. See,
for example, J. P. Allan and I. Scruggs, “Political Partisanship and Welfare State Reform
in Advanced Industrial Societies,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004): 496–
512; Michael R. Alvarez, Geoffrey Garrett, and Peter Lange, “Government Partisanship,
Labor Organization, and Macroeconomic Performance,” The American Political Science
Review 85, 2 (1991): 539–556; Richard Clayton and Jonas Pontusson, “Welfare-State
Retrenchment Revisited: Entitlement Cuts, Public Sector Restructuring, and Inegalitarian
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 13

strategic levers of governance, rule enforcement and embedding of social

norms, conditions power relations within and across nations.27 There
are constant reminders that class divisions in many advanced industrial
democracies have increased as a result of relentless neoliberal policies
starting in the 1980s and culminating in the years following the global
financial crisis of 2008-2009. The ‘left-behinds’ and the ‘precariat’ are
terms used to refer to voters suffering from prolonged periods of unem-
ployment and job instability, which taken alongside stagnant wages and
increased costs of living have resulted in populist surges against polit-
ical establishments and elites.28 Simultaneously, longitudinal studies have
shown that wealth has become increasingly concentrated in very few
hands over the last several decades.29
Class has defined the process of political institutional reform over
different historical periods because of the tensions inherent in establishing
and then maintaining the capitalist form of democracy that emerged in
Western countries.30 For Colin Leys, there is a significant connection
between the capital-labour relationship and the discussion of political
parties and actors: ‘the short and long term changes which are constantly
occurring in the capital-labour relation, interacting with political lead-
ership and organization and the effects of ideological struggles, have
affected the political significance of the class system in Britain in decisive
ways’.31

Trends in Advanced Capitalist Societies,” World Politics 51, 1 (1998): 67–98; Walter
Korpi and Joakim Palme, “New Politics and Class Politics in the Context of Austerity
and Globalization: Welfare State Regress in 18 Countries, 1975–95,” American Political
Science Review 97, 3 (2003); Hyeok Kwon and Jonas Pontusson, “Globalization, Labour
Power and Partisan Politics Revisited,” Socio-Economic Review 8 (2010): 251–281; and
Elinor Scarbrough, “West European Welfare States: The Old Politics of Retrenchment,”
European Journal of Political Research 38 (2000): 225–259.
27 Dermot McCann, The Political Economy of the European Union: An Institutionalist
Perspective (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 8–9.
28 Barry Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political
Reaction in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
29 Joseph E. Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of
Discontent (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
30 Dennis Pilon, Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the 20th Century
West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 230.
31 Colin Leys, Politics in Britain: An Introduction (London: Heinemann Educational
Books Ltd., 1984), 131–132.
14 N. VLAHOS

However, parties should not be reduced to their class base. Class inter-
ests are not ahistorical givens, but are rather historically constructed by
movements, organizations and leaderships that act in particular contexts
and entail possible alliances or oppositions.32 There is nothing immutable
in the relation of class to party, as broad social and economic trends
are able to alter the ties of class to party. Recognizing this nearly fifty
years ago, David Butler and Donald Stokes argued that the emphasis of
classes in relation to political parties has shifted from the maintenance
of established traditional allegiances to the articulation of new grounds
for party alliance.33 This book accounts for the way political parties and
actors adapt to shifting political circumstances over time by focusing on
the redesign of political and democratic institutions.
Ultimately, political parties and actors need to be studied over long
periods of time in order to understand how as organizations aim to
defend specific interests, they formulate programmes that reach beyond
the class whose interests initially inspired it, and adapt to changing
contexts.34 Though decentralization is often viewed as a phenomenon
associated with the protection of power, social relations flowing out of
capitalist development are often taken for granted. The result is that less
of a focus is given to the way that the contradictions of capitalism and
economic governance are reflected in the outcomes of intra- and inter-
state political restructuring. Decentralization should be linked with the
reasons collective actors seek to develop or limit political and economic
institutions at different levels of the state to regulate political-economic
conflict. The next two sections will elucidate the aspects of the political
economy of scale research that this book builds upon and adds to, i.e. the
ways in which the scaled organization of political-economic institutions
under capitalism is socially produced and transformed and how this helps
understand the British political struggle over devolution.

32 Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John D. Stephens, “The Impact of

Economic Development on Democracy,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, 3 (1993):
75.
33 David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral
Choice (New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1969), 95; Leys, Politics in Britain, 145.
34 Leys, Politics in Britain, 143–144.
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 15

An Alternative Analytical Approach

to Studying Decentralization and Devolution
I use a political economy of scale approach to address why decentral-
ization happens (how this particularly relates to British devolution is
followed up in the method section below). The analytical parts include:
redefining how decentralization should be examined, explaining why the
politics of scale is relevant to the study of decentralization and, lastly,
describing the contested social relations involved in scale production
and reproduction. In this approach, both centralization and decentral-
ization are interrelated facets of the politics of scale. Actors at different
scales of the state are implicated in either the maintenance or redesign of
economic and political decision-making institutions at the local, regional
and national levels. Fully grasping this requires a different framework for
examining decentralization and institutional reform.
A sizeable portion of the broader literature tends to view decentraliza-
tion as a partisan choice to implement at the national level alone.35 It is
also common to see attention given to just one form of decentralization,
even though it does not simply consist of the government-to-government
transfer of either fiscal or political powers to some alternative or new
subnational level. Countries that are (in the process of being) struc-
tured around multiple tiers of governments may not have symmetrical
constitutional powers, the same legislative capacities or electoral and party
dynamics, equal fiscal revenue-generating authority or developed public
administrations. This tends to produce uneven institutional outcomes.
A fruitful way to approach this topic is to draw from scholarship that
recognizes the need for studying the links between both centralization
and decentralization. In this sense, decentralization is part of a continuum
of institutional reform that encompasses both centralization and decen-
tralization. This implies a change in perspective, towards focusing on the
political system as a whole.36 To do this, the study of decentralization
should avoid reifying newly restructured state levels as fully completed
projects. Rather, decentralization consists of new or any altered means

35 Pedro Camões, “Political Decentralization in Western Europe and the Dynamics of

Institutional Change: An Empirical Analysis” (paper presented at the EGPA Conference,
Toulouse, September 8–10, 2010), 11.
36 Sean Mueller, Theorising Decentralization: Comparative Evidence from Sub-national
Switzerland (ECPR Press, 2015), xxiii.
16 N. VLAHOS

of political and fiscal authority that get implemented by incumbent or

incoming governments and the often-ongoing struggles to influence these
by opposition actors.
This requires going beyond path-dependent ‘high’ politics at the
national level of the state. Political scientists have asserted in the not-so-
distant past that the state possesses sovereign control over its territorial
borders, meaning it is self-enclosed and that state-level actors constitute
the units of the global system.37 This leads into a binary distinction
between domestic and foreign, where the national scale is a fixed part
of the modern international system and a static foundation for political
and economic life.38 By contrast, scholars in the field of geography have
created a useful heuristic for examining the state in terms of a set of social
relations between competing scales of the state. Here, the politics of scale
begins with the core assumption that scales (i.e. national, regional, local
and supranational) are not territorially fixed and timeless but are instead
made and remade.
The object of this analysis is to deconstruct; this begins by analysing
institutions as complex phenomena, whose reproduction is always incom-
plete and coevolves with other emergent phenomena.39 Seeing the state
as a political process in motion allows for an examination of the role of
political strategy in the production of new sites of governance.40 There-
fore, scales do not exist outside of the social relations that sustain them;
thus, empirical analysis should not treat scales as institutionally separate
from each other but rather as intertwined dimensions continuously being
struggled over and reworked.41
All scales of the state—meaning local/municipal, regional/provincial
and national levels—can and do change. What this study intends to do is
examine how scales of the state in the UK are changing over the postwar

37 John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International

Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1, 1 (1994): 59.
38 Brenner et al., “Introduction: State Space in Question,” 3.
39 Bob Jessop, “Institutional Re(turns) and the Strategic-Relational Approach,” Envi-
ronment and Planning A 33 (2001): 1230.
40 Mark Goodwin, Martin Jones, and Rhys Jones, Rescaling the State: Devolution and
the Geographies of Economic Governance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012),
13, 16.
41 Becky Mansfield, “Beyond Rescaling: Reintergrating the National as a Dimension of
Scalar Relations,” Progress in Human Geography 29 (2005): 468.
 1 DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND THE POLITICAL … 17

period, from sustaining a centralized national orientation to moving in

a more decentralized direction. It is important to note that the active
design and re-working of political scales do not automatically equate to
decentralization. Demands for pluralistic forms of inclusion in the polit-
ical system are not simply capitulated to whenever mobilization from
below is high. Decentralization demands are met with countervailing
tendencies, some of which are centralizing. Scales consist of various inter-
connected institutional apparatuses and the actors that use them for some
form of decision-making and implementation of their goals. When exam-
ining change at any given scale, different territorial scales, local/regional
political parties, government/bureaucratic officials, as well as social move-
ments, need to be considered all together as potentially part of the process
of contesting governance and influencing institutional change.
Research on state rescaling has opened productive avenues into histor-
ical and contemporary issues, but the literature contains methodological
and empirical questions that need more systematic consideration.42 One
relevant area that the politics of scale has been slow to pursue is a compre-
hensive inter-scalar examination of an encompassing political system. Less
empirical research has expressly tended to local, regional, national and
even supranational reproduction simultaneously over an extended period.
Conventional accounts tend to focus exclusively on how one scale impacts
others: selective national state top-down strategies, the regional asser-
tion of political rights or otherwise the ways in which local government
is a political force. Taken separately, these neglect the structuring of
interdependence between national and subnational levels.
Emphasis placed on one or two scales may be due to research
constraints, as the complexity of integrating local, regional and national
scales offers significant difficulties for detailed and consistent analysis.
Therefore, there has been the need for more nuanced approaches to
the periodization of state spatial development and to operate along
multiple temporal and spatial horizons.43 Yet, this should not deter
other academics from designing an integrated approach. In fact, the
impacts of institutions which affect interdependence between scales tend

42 Neil Brenner, “Open Questions on State Rescaling,” Cambridge Journal of Regions,

Economy and Society 2 (2009): 123.
43 Brenner et al., “Introduction: State Space in Question,” 21.
18 N. VLAHOS

to be under-theorized in comparative research, because it is not clearly

distinguished from the impact of decentralization.44
Another area of the politics of scale that has needed more exploration
regards the agents of change. There has been a noticeable lack of focus on
the actors involved with rescaling; the role of party politics, for example,
has been previously neglected in the politics of scale.45 Speaking to this,
Rhys Jones claims that devolution represents an opportunity to study
the role of people in reproducing and transforming UK state forms. He
argues that prominent scholars have failed to elaborate on the human
actors who have been involved in political transformation.46 All of this
raises the issue of how political actors and parties have in the past and
currently are strategically manoeuvring themselves nationally and subna-
tionally. It is vital, then, to make clear who the actors are in contesting
the politics of scale. Specifying the interests or ideological objectives, they
are seeking also matters.
To this end, this book builds on critical democratiza-
tion/institutionalism literature, drawing from its political economy
emphasis on the factors pushing the (re)formation of political and
democratic institutions. This literature approaches democratic politics as
a relational struggle involving structurally unequal agents, particularly
different collective actors. Critical democratization scholars argue that
democracy involves the distribution and use of power, and power rela-
tions determine whether democracy emerges, stabilizes and maintains
itself.47 Göran Therborn notes that modern democracy was no accident
of history, but arose out of the contradictions of capitalism, i.e. the
basic struggle between capital and labour is what carried representative
institutions beyond the boundaries of the ruling class.48 In the capitalist

44 Nicole Bolleyer and Lori Thorlakson, “Beyond Decentralization—The Comparative

Study of Interdependence in Federal Systems,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism (2012):
2.
45 Mueller, Theorising Decentralization, xxiii; Kevin Cox, “Rescaling the State’ in
Question,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2 (2009): 115.
46 Rhys Jones, People/States/Territories (Singapore: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 13,
146.
47 Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist
Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5, 51.
48 Göran Therborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” The New Left
Review (1977), 32, 34.
Another random document with
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producing a literature are absent, but the attempt might be made.
There is nothing else to do now.
This process is seen clearly enough in history. Look at Athens. Its
greatness produced its literature; and its literature supported and
advanced its greatness. Public life, of course, at Athens was such
that many things there gave increased power to literature; and some
in a way acted as substitutes for it. The public assemblies, the
administration of justice, the schools of philosophy, the theatres,
were to the Athenians, to a great extent, what books and
newspapers are to us. They were a machinery by which the thought
and knowledge of those who, more or less to the purpose, could
think, and who had knowledge, were brought into contact with the
minds of all; so that all were put in the way of thinking, and of
attaining knowledge for themselves; and were obliged, to some
extent, to do it: and thus the thought and the knowledge of the best
men became the thought and the knowledge of all, or were, at least,
submitted to the attention of all. And so knowledge went on
increasing, and thought went on achieving fresh conquests, and
Greece became the Holy Land of mind.
Every one can see how large a share in producing the mental
activity of the Americans must be assigned to books and
newspapers. Facts, and men’s thoughts about these facts, are each
day laid before the minds of a greater proportion of the population in
the United States than elsewhere. Take away this apparatus for
awakening and guiding thought, and their wonderful mental activity
would disappear. As it is, all the counteracting influences of the
rough and hard life most of them have to live cannot repress it.
Suppose as large a proportion of our own population could read, and
that they were treated in the same way—that is to say, that an equal
amount of seed was deposited in their minds, and an equal amount
of light, air, and warmth poured in—then I doubt not but that we
should see, down even to the lower strata of society, an equal
amount of mental activity.
This is a wide and fruitful subject. It is by the aid of this Egyptian
discovery of letters, and of letters only, no one other thing beneath
the sun being, without it, of any use in this matter, that the better
thought, which is the thought of a few, sometimes originally of a
single mind only, gains the upper hand of the inferior thought, which
is the thought of the many; that error, which naturally commends
itself to the ignorant, is slowly and painfully demonstrated to be error;
and that many forms of injustice, notwithstanding their hoar antiquity,
the memory of man never having run to the contrary, are shown at
last to be inhumanities. It is by their aid, and their aid only, that an
inch of good ground gained to-day, is not lost to-morrow, but kept for
ever; that hints are treasured up till what they hinted at is discovered;
that what has been observed by one man is set alongside of what
has been observed by another, till at last the fruitful conclusion grows
out of the connected view; that the experience of individuals, and of
generations, is stored up for those who are to come after; that the
spark kindled in a single mind becomes a common light. All this must
be despaired of without printed records, statements, and
discussions, without books, without newspapers; and the more
largely these means for arriving at, and conveying knowledge are
used, the greater is the effect of them. If the effect is so much when
the seed is sown in ten thousand minds, it will be proportionately
greater when it is sown in ten millions.
Nothing else has done in this matter for any people, and nothing
else will do for the Egyptians and Syrians. Their circumstances, over
which we appear to have no control, may make the effort barren; but
there is nothing else we can do for them. It is ‘the one way of
salvation’ for the state in which they now are. Nothing else can bring
them to see except printed discussion, in which what is gained is
retained, and what is discredited dies away, that for one disease the
dung of a black dog is not a sovereign remedy, nor for another the
dung of a white cow; and that the only preservative against the Evil
Eye is the security good laws, well administered, give to person and
property.
As to ourselves, had it not been for the assistance we received
from letters we should still have here the Druid, or some one or other
of his congeners, offering human holocausts to the accompaniment
of the approving shouts of frantic multitudes; and we should still be,
at this day, as far from the ideas of liberty of thought, and of
humanity, as Galgacus was from the conception of the steam-
engine, or of the electric telegraph.

The restorative, I have been prescribing, is one which must be

designedly, and, when designedly, can never be very widely, applied.
Another, however, there is, which will come spontaneously, and have
a very diffusive effect. Its germs are now quickening in the womb of
time. It is that of the outflow of western capital to the East,
accompanied by those to whom it will belong, or who will be needed
for the superintendence and direction of its employment. There is
plenty the West wants which the East can supply: cotton, silk, wool,
hides, wheat, maize, beans, peas, dried fruits, oil, &c. And, in return,
the East will take iron, copper, gold, silver, clothing, pottery, &c. The
only point that is uncertain is that of time. The trade of the East has
once already been taken possession of by Europe. Two thousand
years ago it was everywhere in the hands of the Greeks. The same
kind of thing will be seen again. But this time the invasion will consist
of Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians; amongst whom
the irrepressible Greek will reappear. But the future trade between
the East and the West will differ widely from the old in the amount of
commodities to be produced, and moved, and exchanged. That will
be such as modern capital only could deal with, and railways and
steamboats transport. Of the dawning of the day for the expansion of
this commerce to its natural dimensions I think there are some
indications even now. The railway is beginning to penetrate into the
East. It will, before long, be seen that much we are in want of can be
produced there, at a profit, by the employment of our capital, its
employment being superintended by Europeans. Security to person
and property will accompany the employment of capital. And then
the civilization of the East will be rehabilitated, with a life and activity
it never had in the glorious days of old. The rule then was that some
one district was to conquer, devastate, and plunder all the rest; so
that, at one time, only one locality, almost only one city, could be
great and prosperous. Looking back over the past we are misled by
observing the traces only of what was mighty and magnificent; for
wretchedness, degradation, and suffering leave no monuments. The
prosperity, however, that is coming will be diffusive, and universal; for
it will be supported not by arms, loot, and extortion, but by capital,
peace, knowledge, and industry.
 CHAPTER XLV.
ACHMED TRIED IN THE BALANCE WITH HODGE.

A man’s a man for a’ that.—Burns.

You do not go through Egypt without comparing the village

Achmed, who is so often at your side, with poor Hodge, whom you
left at home, but who, nevertheless, is often in your thoughts. You
ask which of the two is better off; and which is, after all, the better
man? And you ask yourself these questions not without some
misgivings, for you are pleased with Achmed, and now that you are
free from work and care, and with the glorious world unfolding itself
before you, you are disposed, when you are reminded of him, to feel
more pity than usual for poor Hodge.
They both work alike on the land all their days. The former for the
Khedivé, the latter for farmer Giles. Each of them is at the bottom of
the social hierarchy to which he belongs. These, however, are points
of resemblance only in words: the things the words stand for in the
two cases are very different. In fact, there are no resemblances at all
between them.
It is now winter. Hodge turned out this morning long before
daylight. The ground was hard frozen; but by-and-by it will all be
snow-slush. He had to look after his horses, and get down, before
people began to stir, to the town, five or six miles off, for a load of
manure. Or, perhaps, he did not get up quite so long before daylight
to-day. It would have been of no use, for he is now working in a wet
ditch, up to his ankles in mud all day long, facing a hedge bank. This
is a job that will take him three or four weeks. It is winter work, in out-
of-the-way fields; and no one will pass in sight all day. He will eat his
breakfast of bread and cheese, alone, seated on the damp ground,
with his back against a tree, on the lea-side; and his dinner of the
same viands, in the same place, and with the same company.
 And what will he be thinking about all day? He will wish that farmer
Giles would only let him have one of those old pollards on the
hedge-bank. He could stay and grub it up after work of moonlight
nights. It would give a little firing, and his missus would be glad to
see it come home. Things are getting unneighbourly dear, and he will
hope that farmer Giles will raise his wages a shilling, or even
sixpence a week. But he has heard talk of lowering wages. Times
are very hard, and folk must live. He will hope that baby will soon be
better; but it always was a poor scrinchling. He will hope his wife
may not be laid up this winter, as she was last. That was a bad job.
He got behind at the mill then. Tom and Dick have been without
shoes ever since, and he can’t say how the doctor’s bill is ever to be
paid. He will wish he could buy a little malt to brew a little beer. He
shouldn’t make it over-strong. He doesn’t hold with that. He will think
it can’t be far off six o’clock. He will wish they had not done away
with the old path across Crab-tree Field. It used to save him many a
step, going and coming. He minds that field well, because when he
was scaring crows in that field—he must have been going eight
years old then—the parson came along the path, and he asked the
parson, ‘Please, sir, what’s o’clock?’ and the parson gave him
sixpence. It was the first sixpence he ever got, and it was a long time
before he got another. He always says the parson gave him that
sixpence, because when the parson said, ‘What, boy, have you
pawned your watch?’ he kind of laughed. He minds, too, that the
corn came up very slow that year. It was cold times. Perhaps that
was why he asked, What’s o’clock?
Poor fellow, in his life there is plenty of margin for wishes and
hopes. As he trudges home you see that his features are weather-
beaten and hard. It would not be easy to get a smile out of them;
and, if it did come, it would be rather grim. His back is bent; his gait
is slouchy; his joints are beginning to stiffen from work and
rheumatism.
His life is dreary and hard, and so is his wife’s. She, too, is up
before daylight; and her candle is alight some time after he has laid
down his weary limbs, and sleep has brought him forgetfulness. She
has some odd things to do which must be done, and which she had
no spare minutes for during the day. She is now seated for the first
time since five o’clock in the morning, with the exception of the short
intervals when she snatched her humble meals. She has,
unassisted, to do everything that is done in that house, and for that
family of six or seven in all. She has to keep the house, the children,
and her husband tidy. She has a weekly wash, daily repairs, daily
cooking, weekly baking; to buy all that is wanted; to look after the
sick baby, and the other children; and to look in occasionally on her
sick neighbour.
The earth is a large place, but I believe that nowhere else on the
earth’s surface can a harder-worked couple be found than Hodge
and his wife.
And what makes their hard lot still harder is the fact that they are
the only workers who never have a fête or a holiday. Our climate is
such that neither in mid-winter, nor in mid-summer, need labour be
intermitted; and our agriculture is so conducted that it cannot. The
consequence is that Hodge is held to labour all the year round. And,
if he could now and then be spared, nature here imposes upon him
so many wants, and so inexorably exacts attention to them, that he
could not afford a day’s idleness from the time when, being about
eight years old, he began to scare crows, till the day when, worn out
with toil and weather, he will be laid in the churchyard: he must be in
harness every day, and all day long.
If, then, this couple have some failings (how could it be
otherwise?) be to those unavoidable failings a little kind. Think, too,
that it would be strange if such a life did not engender some virtues,
and to those virtues be fair and appreciative. They are not afraid of
any kind, or of any amount, of work. They don’t see much use in
complaining. They let other folk alone. They are self-reliant within
their narrow sphere. They think there must be a better world than
this has been to them. In the meantime they are thankful that they
can work, and earn their own, and their children’s, bread.
And here we have the true nursery of the nation. The schooling is
hard, but without it we should not be what we are. It forms the stuff
out of which Englishmen are made. It is the stuff that has made
America and Australia, and is giving to our language and race
predominance in the world. Our mental and bodily fibre is
strengthened by having had to pass through the Hodge stage.
And now we have to set Achmed by the side of Hodge. Poor
Hodge! How can there be any comparison between things so
dissimilar? Achmed is a child of the sun, that sun his forefathers
worshipped, and whose symbol he sees on the old temples. Every
day of his life, and all day long, he has seen him,

Not as in northern climes, obscurely bright,

But one unclouded blaze of living light,

pouring floods of light and gladness about him, as he pours floods of

life into his veins. The sunshine without has created a kind of
sunshine within. It has saved him from working in slushy snow, and
in wet ditches, and from all unpleasant skyey influences. It has given
him plenty of fête-days and holidays. It has made his muscles
springy, his joints supple, his step light, his eye and wits and tongue
quick. As to the rest, he might almost think that he had no master
over him. He works when and how he pleases. Still he is not without
his troubles. The Khedivé, and his people, will take all that his land
produces, except the doura, the maize, the cucumbers, and the
onions that will be barely sufficient to keep himself and his family
alive. All the wheat and the beans must go. And he will get
bastinadoed into the bargain. But about that he doesn’t trouble
himself much. It always was so, and always will be so. Besides, is it
not Allah’s will? After all his wants are not great. He scarcely requires
house, fuel, or clothing. And to-day Achmed’s donkey has been hired
by the howaji, from whom he hopes to extort two rupees. Two
piastres would be plenty, but he wants the rupees particularly just
now, for he has a scheme for divorcing his present wife, as she is
getting rather old for him, and marrying a young girl he knows of in
the village; and this, one way or another, will cost him two or three
pounds. And so he is more smiling, and more attentive to the howaji,
than usual.
 There is however, one point of resemblance: they both end the
day in the same fashion. They light their pipes, and take their kêf.
Achmed, at these times, appears to be breathing a purer and less
earthly ether than Hodge; but that is his manner. It may be that his
thoughts are less of the grosser things of earth, the first wants of life,
than Hodge’s. But who knows? Perhaps they may be only of
divorcing the old wife, and fetching home the young one. Hodge, I
believe, has the greater sense of enjoyment as the soothing narcotic
permeates his hard overstrained fibres. Sometimes there is a half-
formed thought in his mind that he is doing his duty manfully, without
much earthly notice or encouragement.
On the whole, then, I am glad to have made the acquaintance of
Achmed. I like him well. I shall always have agreeable recollections
of him. He is pleasant to look at; pleasant to deal with,
notwithstanding his extortions; pleasant to think about. But I have
more respect for Hodge. He has nothing to say for himself. If he is
picturesque, it is not after the received fashion. If his life contains a
poem, it is not one that would be appreciated, generally, either in the
Eastern, or the Western, Row. He has, however, a stout, and withal a
good heart. One ought to be the better for knowing something of his
unobtrusive manly virtues. Achmed has a gust for pleasure, in which
matter he has had some training. He is a merry fellow who will
enliven your holiday. Hodge’s spiriting lies in a different direction.
 CHAPTER XLVI.
WATER-JARS AND WATER-CARRIERS.

The pitcher may go to the well often, but comes home broken at last.—Old
Proverb.

Every drop of water that has ever been used for domestic
purposes—the waterworks of Cairo and Alexandria are innovations
only of yesterday—has, with the exception of the small quantity
conveyed in goat-skins by men, been brought up out of the river and
canals by women. Their custom has been to carry it on their heads in
large earthen jars, called goollehs. These are so large that they are
capable of being formed into rafts, which you often meet upon the
river, with two men upon each steering and punting them along. This
is the way in which they are taken from the places, where they are
manufactured, to be distributed to the towns and villages along the
banks of the stream. Each weighs when full, as near as I could tell
by lifting one, about forty pounds. Wherever you may be you see the
women trooping down to the river-bank with these jars on their
heads to fetch water. Arrived at the water’s edge, each woman tucks
her short and scanty skirts between her legs, and, walking a step or
two into the stream, fills her goolleh. She then faces round to the
bank, and sets it down on the ground. The next move is to face back
again to the stream, and wash her feet. When ready to depart she
receives the assistance of the one who will go next into the water in
placing the full jar on her head. The last of the troop has no
assistance. With forty pounds weight on their heads they walk up the
steep bank, and, perhaps, a mile or two off to the village, making as
light of it as if it were no more than a chignon. The practice of
carrying these weights on the head gives an erectness to the figure,
and a prominency to the chest, which nothing else could produce.
Though I have at times smoked out a cigar while watching an
incessant stream of these women coming down to, and going up
from, the watering-place, I never heard one speak to another. I
suppose they reserve what they have to say till they can say it
unobserved by the bearded sex. Nor did I ever see one of them cast
a glance upon a stranger. I quite believe what a native told me of
them—that it would be regarded as a portent, if one of the very
poorest class were in the least to commit herself in this way. I once
saw one of my companions—a tall, good-looking young fellow—walk
up to a damsel as good-looking as himself, who had filled her
goolleh, and set it on the edge of the stream till she had washed her
feet. As she turned round for it, he lifted it for her, and placed it on
her head. I narrowly watched her face. She ought to have been
somewhat taken by surprise, for she knew not that he was behind
her; but of this there was no indication. She did not look at him, or
move a feature: there was no apparent consciousness of any one
being present. The instant the jar was on her head, she walked away
just as she would have done, had it been her sister who had lifted it
for her.
One is astonished at the mountains of broken crockery, or pottery,
which mark the sites of the ancient cites. That well nigh all the water
used in Egypt, for so many thousands of years, has had to be carried
in these earthen jars—for there is no wood in Egypt to make bowls
and buckets—and that the cooking utensils of the mass of the
people must be made of the same fragile material—for Egypt, except
in times of unusual prosperity, has no metals cheap enough for this
purpose—will account for no inconsiderable part of the
accumulations. These shards have gone a long way towards forming
the barrows in which lie buried Abydos, Memphis, Esné, Edfou,
Thebes, Dendera, and scores of other places. The importance, in its
day, of any one of these ages-ago-effaced cities may be roughly
estimated by observing the magnitude of the barrow in which it is
buried. The mounds at Alexandria—and even already at modern
Cairo—are of surprising dimensions. Had they brought up the water
from the river in wooden buckets, which would have decayed, or had
they cooked in metal utensils—the materials of which, when they
became unserviceable for cooking, would have been turned to some
other account—these mounds would have been less conspicuous
objects than they are now.
 CHAPTER XLVII.
WANT OF WOOD IN EGYPT, AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES.

The trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write them.—Isaiah.

Egypt has no woods or thickets. It would hardly possess a single

tree without the care of man. The few it has would soon perish if that
care were intermitted. Even the palm, which we regard as the tree of
the desert, cannot exist unless it be supplied with water. The species
of the trees one meets with commonly in Egypt do not exceed half-a-
dozen. They are the large-leaved acacia, the small-leaved thorny
acacia, the tamarisk, a variety of the Indian fig, the palm, and,
occasionally in Upper Egypt, the dôm palm.
From this dearth of wood follow several obvious consequences,
which may be worth noting. First, all the houses of the lower class,
that is, of the great mass of the people of Egypt, must be built of
crude, or sun-dried brick. There is no wood for posts and planks, or
to burn brick for such folk as they. This obliges them to live in houses
that are singularly mean; and, according to our ideas, insufficient for
their purpose. They can only have a ground-floor, for no ceilings can
be made without wood. Nor, for the same reason, can they have any
roofs, there is no wood for rafters. Nor, if they could manage to get
the rafters, would they be able to get the fuel for burning the tiles. It
follows that only a part of what ought to be the roof can be covered
in, and that in the rudest way, for protection against what heaven
may send in the way of heat, or cold, or wet. This partial covering is
very ineffectual. It consists of a few palm-leaves, or of the stalks of
the millet and maize, laid horizontally from wall to wall; upon this
wheat and barley straw is generally piled till it has been consumed
by the donkeys, goats, camels, and buffaloes. Such is the rule; a real
serviceable roof being the exception. These roofless low walls, which
are the house, must also be floorless, for there is no wood either for
plank-flooring, or for burning floor-bricks. Then what does duty for
the floor must be dust. This makes every house a flea-preserve.
A further consequence is, that within these floorless, roofless,
windowless, doorless mud enclosures there can be no such thing as
furniture—nothing to sit upon, nothing to stow anything away in,
nothing to put anything upon; not a cupboard, a chair, or a table. But
this matters little to a people who can always sit, and sleep on the
dry ground; and who have nothing to stow away. Everywhere I saw
men, and sometimes even women, sleeping out of doors, even in
mid-winter.
The same cause obliged the old Egyptians also to build, for all
classes, with little, or no, wood. We have just seen that the rubbish
heaps of their cities are so vast as in many instances to have
completely buried the temples, which, together with many objects of
Egyptian art, have thus been preserved for us. Of course this could
not have occurred had wood been as largely used by them, as it is
by ourselves, in domestic and public architecture. This was, also,
one cause of the massiveness and grandeur of their style of
architecture.
But the consequences on the life and habits of the people of this
dearth of wood are not yet exhausted. It also puts difficulties in the
way of their cooking their food. For instance, they cannot bake their
bread as often as they would wish. A family may not have fuel
enough to admit of the recurrence of this expenditure of it more
frequently than perhaps a dozen times in the year. In order,
therefore, to keep their bread sweet, they have to cut it into thin
slices, and dry it in the sun. And to obtain a sufficiency of fuel, for
even these restricted uses, they have to collect carefully, and to turn
to account, everything that can be made to burn. As I have
mentioned elsewhere, their chief resource for this purpose are the
contributions they very thankfully receive from their herbivorous
animals. A great part of the time of the women is spent in
manufacturing this material into combustible cakes. And a shockingly
dirty process it is. The raw material is deposited in a hole in the
ground, together with a great deal of water. A woman, seated on the
ground, on the brink of the hole, stirs up the material and water with
her bare arms, which are immersed to beyond the elbow. This
stirring is continued till a smooth fluid mixture has been produced,
which is then left in this state, for the water to evaporate, and to drain
off through the ground. When the material has in this way arrived at
a sufficiently tough consistency it is made into thin cakes, which are
set in the sun to dry. When this has been effected, they are stored
away for use. As might have been expected, in the apportionment of
domestic duties, this manufacture generally falls to the lot of the
more ancient dames.
Those, who are curious in tracing up to their sources the customs,
and practices, of different people, may refer many other things that
they will see, and some that they will not see, in Egypt, to this dearth
of wood. In agriculture no carts, or vehicles of any kind, are used:
there is no wood of which they might be made. It is, therefore,
cheaper that everything should be carried on donkeys and camels.
Here, when you see a tree, you are looking on what may be
transformed into an essential part of the instrument of transportation.
The cart, or waggon, and the animals that are to draw it, together
form the complete instrument. In Egypt, when you see a bundle of
chopped straw, and a field of lucern, you are looking on all, out of
which the Egyptian means of land transportation are to be created.
In Egypt, when a donkey has any shoes, they consist merely of a
piece of flat iron, the size of the bottom of the hoof, cut out of a thin
plate. It is easy to cut this out, but it would be expensive, where fuel
is so scarce, to forge a shoe. This list might be very largely
increased.
Nor are we here in England, three thousand miles off, unaffected
by the niggardliness of nature to Egypt in this matter. The country
possesses railroads, steamboats, and sugar, and other, factories on
a large scale, but no fuel to create for them motive power. This must
come from without, and it is all supplied from English collieries, and
brought in English vessels. In return for it we get no insignificant
portion of the produce of the valley of the Nile. How strangely are
things concatenated. The rains that fall in the highlands of Abyssinia,
and in equatorial Africa, are grinding down pebbles in the channels
of mountain torrents, and washing away the vegetable mould, and
transporting their infinitesimal water-borne particles to Egypt, for the
purpose of giving employment to the coal-miners of Durham, and to
the weavers of Manchester. The intelligence and industry of England
turn to account, through the medium of Egypt, the evaporation that
takes place on the Indian and South Atlantic oceans. Such are the
working and interworking of the physical and mental machinery of
this world of ours: or rather, perhaps, we have here some slight
indication of what they will one day become.
 CHAPTER XLVIII.
TREES IN EGYPT.

Divisæ arboribus patriæ.—Virgil.

Vegetation is the garb of nature; and no description of any region

can pretend to completeness till the trees—the most conspicuous
part of the vegetation—have been brought into view. In Egypt as
each specimen of the few species of trees commonly met with (the
species may be counted on the fingers of one hand) must be
carefully looked after to be kept alive, every particular tree comes to
be regarded as beautiful, and valuable. The knowledge the traveller
has of this care and regard, which have been bestowed upon them,
enhances the interest with which he beholds them. Besides, the
trees of Egypt are entitled to a place in any description of the
country, for the additional reason, that on its level plain they are the
most marked and pleasing objects on which the eye rests. A work,
therefore, that aims at giving anything like a picture of Egypt, must
bring out, with some little distinctive prominency, the characteristics
of each species.
Among the trees of Egypt, the first place is held by the palm. On
landing at Alexandria you find it around the city in abundance, and
throughout the country you are never long out of sight of it. It is seen
to most advantage from the river against the sky. It appears most in
place when, in sufficient numbers to form a grove, it overshadows
some river-side village. You there look upon it as the beneficent
friend and coadjutor of the poor villagers. You know that it gives
them much they could not get elsewhere, and which they could ill
spare—shade, boxes, baskets, cordage, thatch, timber, and the chief
of their humble luxuries, in return for the protection and water they
have given to it. We often hear it spoken of as the queen of the
vegetable world. I had rather say that it is a form of grace, and
beauty, of which the eye never tires.
 The tree usually employed in forming avenues, where shade is the
first object, is the broad-podded acacia. The distinguishing feature in
this is the largeness and abundance of its singularly dark green
leaves. Its foliage, indeed, is so dense, that no ray of sunlight can
penetrate through it. The effect is very striking. In one of these
avenues, that has been well kept, you will find yourself in a cool
gloom, both the coolness, and the gloom, being such that you cannot
but feel them, while you see the sun blazing outside. The road from
Boulak to the Pyramids of Gizeh is planted the whole way with these
trees. For the first two or three miles they are of some age, and,
having now met overhead above the road, the shelter, even at mid-
day, is complete. For the rest of the way the trees are not older than
the Prince of Wales’s visit, they having been planted along the sides
of the road that was on that occasion made to do him honour, in
Eastern fashion. No tree more easily establishes itself, or grows
more rapidly, if sufficiently watered. All that is required is to cut off a
limb, no matter how large, or from how old a tree, and to set it in the
ground. If it be supplied with water it grows without fail. This acacia is
the lebekh of the natives.
Another tree used in avenues, and which grows to a greater height
and with larger limbs than the lebekh, is the Egyptian sycamore. It is
a species of the Indian fig. The largeness of its limbs enables you to
see the whole of its skeleton. The skeleton of the lebekh is
concealed by the multiplicity of its branches, and the density of its
foliage. There is a fine specimen of this sycamore in the first Nubian
village, on the way from Assouan to Philæ, and another equally good
on the bank of the river just opposite Philæ. Trees of this kind have
more of the appearance of age than others in Egypt. Their bark is of
a whitish colour, and their large branches are covered with little
leafless spur-like twigs, of a dingy black, on which are produced their
round green fruit, about as big as bantams’ eggs. These spur-like
processes on the branches are, I suppose, the homologues of the
descending aërial roots of its congener, the banyan-tree of India, of
which latter also I saw one or two good specimens in gardens in
Egypt. It was from the imperishable wood of the sycamore that the
ancient Egyptians made their mummy cases. The fine old avenue
from Cairo to Shoobra, three miles in length, is composed of
generally good specimens of this tree, intermingled with the acacia,
lebekh, and here and there a few tamarisks.
The tree which approaches nearest to the ability to support itself in
Egypt, without man’s aid, is the tamarisk. It is a tree that drinks very
little, and takes a great deal of killing. You see it growing as a
stunted shrub in the nitre-encrusted depressions of the desert in the
neighbourhood of Ismailia, and elsewhere, where it can only very
occasionally be refreshed by a stray shower. Wherever it can get the
little moisture, with which it is satisfied, it becomes a graceful tree.
The thorny small-leaved acacia gives but little shade. It produces a
small yellow flower, which is a complete globe, and has a sweet
scent. It is in flower at Christmas. If this is the acanthus of
Herodotus, its wood must have been largely used when he was in
Egypt for the construction of the river boats, which were often of very
great capacity.
The dôm palm is occasionally seen in Upper Egypt. The first I fell
in with was at Miniéh. That, I believe, is the most northerly point at
which it is found. Its peculiarity is that, when the stem has reached a
few feet above the ground, it bifurcates. It then has two stems and
two heads. When these two stems have grown out to the length of a
few feet they, too, each of them, bifurcate, following the example of
the parent stem. There are now four stems with heads. Another
repetition of the process gives eight, and so on. In fact, it is a
branching palm, and every branch is a complete palm-tree. The
whole is a cluster of palm-trees on one stock.
These are all the trees one notices in travelling through the
country. The list is soon run through, but I saw that an attempt was
being made to add to the list. In the neighbourhood of the Viceroy’s
palaces I found two species of Australian eucalyptus. They appeared
to approve of the soil and climate, and gave promise of soon
becoming fine trees. They do well at Nice, and will probably do better
in Egypt.
Every one of the trees I have mentioned remains, in Egypt, in full
foliage throughout the winter.
 CHAPTER XLIX.
GARDENING IN EGYPT.

The Garden of God.—Ezekiel.

That horticulture was a favourite occupation among the ancient

Egyptians is shown abundantly by their sculptures and paintings.
Representations of gardens are so common, that we may infer that
no residence, of any pretensions, was considered complete without
one. We even see that rare and interesting plants, brought from Asia
and Ethiopia, each with a ball of earth round the roots, carefully
secured with matting, formed at times a part of the royal tribute. The
very lotus, which may be regarded as, among flowers, the symbol of
Pharaohnic Egypt, is now supposed to have been an importation
from India. In this matter, as in every other respect, the country has
sadly retrograded.
Their style of gardening was stiff and formal. Straight lines were
much affected. Angles did not displease. Basins, or pools, of water
were de rigueur. Every plant, or tree, was carefully trimmed, and
trained. It could not have been otherwise. This was all settled for
them by the aspects of Egyptian nature, the character of their
religion, and their general manners and customs. As is the case
among modern Orientals, flowers were not valued so much for their
form and colouring, as for their odour.
The European of to-day, as he looks upon the sculptured and
painted representations of Egyptian gardens of three or four
thousand years ago, at which date his own ancestors were living in
caves, from which their ancestors had expelled races of animals now
extinct, finds that, notwithstanding the barbarism of his ancestors,
and the recentness of his civilization, there have come to be
reproduced in himself ideas and sentiments, which were giving grace
and finish to the highly organized society which had been
established then, no one can tell for how long a period, on the banks
of the Nile. At all events he beholds in these Egyptian gardens a
curious instance of an interesting and instructive similarity between
the two; for he sees that the Egyptian of that day, just like the
Englishman of to-day, took pleasure in watching, and controlling, the
life and growth of plants; in tending them, because they tasked, and
were dependent on, his thought and care; in making them minister to
a refined and refining taste for the beautiful; and in creating by their
aid, within the limits in such matters assigned to man, a kind of
artificial nature.
Of course all sub-tropical, and many tropical, trees and plants do
well here, if only they be regularly supplied with water. I never saw
more interesting gardens, on a small scale, than those of S. Cecolani
at Alexandria, and of the American Consul at Port Saïd. The same
may be said of the garden of the Viceroy at his Gezeerah palace. In
them you will find the plants we keep in stove houses doing well in
the open air, and many of them in flower at Christmas, or soon after.
In the first-mentioned of these gardens I saw very beautiful
specimens of the Norfolk Island pine, about thirty feet high, growing
luxuriantly. There was also a species of solanum, which, if I knew its
Christian name, I would commend to the attention of those who are
endeavouring to produce, in their English gardens, something of a
sub-tropical effect. It was about ten feet high, and was so regularly
filled up with branches, as to have a completely symmetrical, a
somewhat dome-like, form. Its leaves were large, rough, and prickly.
At the extremity of each twig, or lesser branch, was a large
branching spike of purple flowers. The individual flowers in the
spikes of bloom were about the size of the flower of its relative, the
common potato, and similar in shape. It was a most effective shrub. I
never saw one more so.
It is generally supposed amongst us that our English gardens are
quite unrivalled. They may be in the thought, care, and money
bestowed upon them; but in variety of interest they are very inferior
to Egyptian gardens. These may contain all the plants we consider
most beautiful and most worthy of artificial heat; which, too, may be
grouped with bamboos, palms, Indian figs, bananas, cactuses,