Petty Lines in the Sand

0:00A password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. Why? Because compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors attack companies, and small businesses are their favorite targets. But unlike a lot of security challenges, passwords actually have a pretty simple solution. 1Password lets you manage all your business's credentials, so you can feel confident that your data stays secure as your company grows. Find out more at 1Password.com slash special offer and start securing every login. With its two juicy beef patties, three slices of melted cheese and tangy Big Arch sauce, the Big Arch is what happens when you start making a McDonald's burger and never stop.

0:41The Big Arch, the most McDonald's McDonald's burger yet for a limited time. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by ACAST.

1:01How are you doing there? It's time for the podcast. And today's podcast is all going to be about the economics of cartography, John. Now, I know it's a strange one, right?

1:13David McWilliams: It's about borders, shifting borders, who gets to determine who lives where, who owns what. Because if you look back at 2025, almost everything we've been discussing when it comes to critical points has been at least geographically about shifting borders. True. I'm looking here at a map of the disputed part of Ukraine. Zelensky was in Ireland this week talking to the Taoiseach. but maybe maybe even more importantly Sharmok Rovers played a crowd called Shakhtar Donetsk last week Donetsk is a city in eastern Ukraine which is now occupied by Russia it has always been a Russian speaking city but has been a Ukrainian city now that football team has to play its games in Lviv or Lviv depending on what your accent and some of its games in Poland and then I'm looking at the uproar over Herzog Park here in Dublin.

2:18We'll explain to non-Irish listeners what that's all about in a second. I also went to an event the other night on Northern Ireland on whether we should have a unification, a yes or no for and against one in the National Concert Hall, which was quite interesting. Yeah. Was it rowdy? No, it wasn't. It wasn't rowdy enough, maybe. It wasn't rowdy enough, right? That speaks volumes in itself. I gave away just thinking, you know, like the arbitrary nature of borders, who came up with them. And that brought me to who will be the subject as we get onto him of this podcast, John, is William Petty. Yeah.

2:53Well, it's interesting, actually, just before we get there, and I thought you mentioned that, it's even like having spoken with Peter Frankopan in the last few weeks about Central Asia and, you know, how those countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in particular are massive countries with really straight line borders. And, you know, you begin to wonder, were they just drawn in the sand? And I think they very much were. They definitely were. Yeah. They definitely were. And then you have, of course, you have in Africa, you have Sudan. But it seems to me that a lot of the conflicts at the moment, you know, they're about borders, but they're also echoes of treaties and drawings in the sand of borderlines, you know.

3:42You're absolutely right. And that brings us on to probably the first one. I want to talk about William Petty, right? So William Petty was the man who was responsible for the map of Ireland that we know.

3:53David McWilliams: The map of Ireland, we love the detailed map. He set this map out in the 1660s. He was an employee of Cromwell. and I want to talk to you about the economic role in cartography and the slightly malignant role that economics has had in mapping and why mapping was essential, number one, and why mapping, too, became a commodity and why the William Petty approach to mapping, which was called a down survey, became the gold standard for maps all around the world and why this is related to money and why it's related to economics. Right, okay. Before we start there, maybe the most contentious map, certainly the most contentious map here, of course, is the border, but maybe the most contentious map in the world at the moment is the maps that came as a result of what was called the Sykes-Pico project in the Middle East.

4:49So you have, we're talking about a period of time, and the reason I'm interested in this is because I'm also interested in this Herzog Park idea. Just if you're not Irish or if you have been in Ireland and not really listening to the radio or TV or online in particular, there has been a big kerfuffle between Dublin City Council and a rather Orwellian committee at Dublin City Council, which I think is called the Committee for Names, which is always a bit worrying because it's very Orwell, the Committee for Denaming. We don't know who they are. Right. They are a, I wouldn't say clandestine, but they're a secretive committee in the Dublin City Council, which if you're old enough, used to be called Dublin Corporation.

5:32You've got all these fancy names. Corporal. Right, so Dublin Corporal, who are into naming and denaming places. And they wanted to dename a park in Rathgar, which was named after Kayam Herzog, who was the Irish-born first president of Israel. Yes. So that was the big kerfuffle. They said they wanted to dename it. all sorts of people went wild on media, social media said, this is not right. This is either anti-Semitic and it undermines the Jewish community in Dublin, very, very small community. And frankly, you cannot, I think what they're mainly saying is you cannot judge yesterday's actions with today's morality, which I think is probably the way.

6:17Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a bit like, you know, them tearing down all the statues of the slave traders and the Confederate generals in America and stuff. I mean, to me, it's pointless. That's trying to erase history. You know, you're better off actually explaining history rather than erasing it. You can't get away from it. Yeah, you can't get away. It's like, for example, in Trinity College, the Berkeley Library has been denamed because Berkeley may be one of the greatest philosophers strokes mathematicians ever to come out of this country, a Kilkenny resident as well. We might even have the Berkeley homily at Kilkenomics just to really piss off the denamers.

6:58Jesus. But it has been denamed. And again, you know. Down with that sort of thing. Down with that sort of thing. But again, it's interesting about the history because if you're judging people by the standards of today, but you're judging people, descendants of people,

7:12David McWilliams: ancestors of people, people who lived many, many years ago, I think history becomes, therefore, not really factual or not really accurate. it just becomes whatever you're having yourself. Yeah. Whatever you're feeling. It becomes weaponized or potentially. Exactly. So the Herzog thing is fascinating for a variety of reasons. But what's really fascinating is the link between the old IRA who established this country and the Jewish terrorists, they call them freedom fighters, but they were called terrorists by the Brits, who actually harassed the Brits out of Palestine. This is a fascinating story.

7:47Yeah.

7:47David McWilliams: And the link between these is the Herzog family and the Briscoe family, right? Who are the Briscoes? So Bobby Briscoe was a Fianna Fáil TD for years. But what Bob Briscoe was, he was the number one gun runner in Ireland during the War of Independence. Right, okay. And Bob Briscoe was a Jewish Irish Republican. Right. And he was very, very close to both Michael Collins and to de Valera, but much closer to de Valera. and he became a Fianna Fáil TD, as did his son, Ben Briscoe. So the Briscos, they weren't into the darts guy. Eric Briscoe. They could have been. Yeah. Maybe the best quote I ever heard was from a darts commentator in 1982 or 1983.

8:32Eric Briscoe had won not only the British Darts Championship, the World's Darts Championship, and it was a particularly exclusive darts championship. This is when we used to watch the darts, John. Yes. but there was absolutely nothing else on the table. Eric Briscoe was 35 and the commentator says, there's Eric Briscoe. He's won the British Championship, the World Championship, the European Championship and he's even younger than Alexander the Great. This is how, this is how, in the darks world, your genius is set against some of the greats.

9:08David McWilliams: So anyway, so here's the interesting, Isaac Herzog, who is the chief rabbi of Ireland, we know hid Michael Collins on at least two occasions. And the reason his house was incredibly safe was because nobody would suspect a rabbi of hiding a terrorist. Right, okay. And of course, because he was the rabbi, he mixed with everybody. But he was an Irish speaker. And his son, Caim Hartsack, the guy who's caused all the hassle, was also an Irish speaker, right? Now, the fascinating thing is that they, that family in the Briscoes, were really good mates and they were all good mates of de Valera. Yeah. This is the interesting thing.

9:46I believe they actually, de Valera gave him a draft of the constitution.

9:51David McWilliams: Not even gave him a draft. Here's the fascinating thing. Article 44 of the Irish constitution. Yeah. It's the first article ever in a Western European official constitution to include in the constitution the protection of minority religions, and in particular, the Protestant and Jewish congregation of Ireland. Right. Now, in fairness to De Valera, because everyone talks about De Valera being an uber-Catholic, right? McQuaid, Archbishop McQuaid, this is, again, a bit of Irish history. If you know it, you know it. If you don't, just go along with the story. Archbishop McQuaid, who was the uber-Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, when de Valera was writing the constitution of this country in 1937, McQuaid wanted an exclusive mention for the Irish Catholic Church.

10:44Right. Exclusively. He said, this is a Catholic country. Right. De Valera, who was a very, very devout Catholic, inserted into the constitution the rights of minority religions, specifically the Protestant religion and its various different offshoots, and the Jewish congregation of Ireland.

11:05David McWilliams: Now, why did he do that? It is thought that he did this because of his long, long deliberations with Itchak Herzog, who he was a mate of, and they were bonded by a love of mathematics. Right, okay. Right? Yeah, yeah. Ben Briscoe, on the other hand, who was the gunrunner for the IRA, he got very angry with de Valera because de Valera didn't let in any Jews into this country either before the Holocaust or after the Holocaust. He didn't allow any survivors in. Right, okay. And Briscoe and the Briscoe family, I think, felt this very, very deeply because they thought, look, we helped you in the fight for Irish freedom.

11:50We took risks. We were gunrunners. We're even Fianna Fáil people now. We're Fianna Fáil TDs. And all we're asking to do is open up the door to a number of thousands of Jewish refugees, and De Valera said no. Now, De Valera went to... Why? That's where you get into the tricky area. Right, okay. Was it... De Valera blamed the Justice Department, but I'm not too sure, because De Valera was a really, a proper autocratic leader. Like, he could have done what he wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is the background noise.

12:19David McWilliams: Now, the fascinating background noise is that at the time, the various different Jewish terrorist groups in what was the Palestine mandate, which was being run by Britain, were exclusively fighting the Brits. Yeah. And they cut and paste what happened here in Ireland. The guerrilla campaign from the IRA, the spectacular bombs going off every now and then, they replicated what happened here and they felt very proximate to what happened here. So they both saw it and we saw it, this is the fascinating thing, as two small countries, two peoples, fighting for sovereignty after hundreds of years of not having a place, both plucky and both ejecting the Brits out of the country.

13:08But that was prior to the Second World War and prior to the state of Israel being established. Yes. So basically what happens is, right, and again, this is why history matters and economics matters and cartography matters and where you were at the time. So basically, you have in the Middle East, you have the Ottoman Empire collapses. Yeah. Ottoman Empire collapses. It's a 400-year-old empire. It rules all this part of the world. It collapses, and it doesn't collapse on its own. It is collapsed by France, Britain, and Russia. Yeah. The tripartite alliance of the First World War. Russia was promised Constantinople.

13:45Imagine that price. Right. An actual fact. And they were almost going to get it until our friend Ataturk rose up with the new Turkish army and kick their arses. Right. And kick the British arses, right? But the southern end of the Ottoman Empire, which is now Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, that was divided up in the Sykes-Picot arrangement. Yes. This is drawing your lines in the sand between France and England. And Britain owned what was called Jordan and Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, and that was their area. So what the Brits did was they decided, okay, this is fine. Now, the Brits originally sided with the Arabs.

14:21So the British, like Lawrence of Arabia, encouraged the Arabs, who are Arabic-speaking Islamic folk, to rise up against the Ottomans, who were Turkish-speaking Islamic folk. And they said, once you rise up against the Ottomans and you help us here in the First World War, because we're bogged down fighting in the Western Front, we will give you a big chunk of land. We will administer it. It'll be called the Palestinian mandate, but we'll give it to you. Don't be worried, right? And we give you that in reward for your assistance to us. But at the same time, the Balfour Agreement of 1917 was signed to give the Jewish folk a piece of this action too.

15:03Yeah, yeah. So, of course, you've got two competing ethnicities, both promised by the Brits. Look, we look after you after the event.

15:13David McWilliams: So what happened all through the 1920s and 1930s as Jewish migration increases into Palestine from Europe, the Arabs naturally get pissed off. They're like, hold on a second, who are these people? These are Polish. These are people who speak German in Maine, right? They're not indigenous to here. And anyway, this is our land. And so there's a series of Arab revolts. And this is a fascinating part of Irish history. Lots and lots of Irish policemen, or IC men, like my granddad, okay, and former black and tans were actually sent to Palestine. Right. To stamp out the indigenous rebellions. In the beginning, the indigenous rebellions were the Arabs.

15:59But then what the Brits did was said, okay, fine, you're fed up about all the Jews coming here. We're going to stop Jewish migration to Palestine in the 30s. But at this stage, Nazism is on the rise and Jews are desperate to get out of Europe. Yeah. But the Brits have done a promise with the Arabs that, no, they're not going to come here. They can go to America or whatever. They're not going to come here because we hear you. Right. That is why the Jewish freedom fighters, terrorists, insurrectionists, you want to call them, there was three groups. There was one called Haganah, one called Palmak, and one called Irgun.

16:34And there were three different, one more extreme than the other. Yeah, yeah. That's why they turned against the Brits. Right. So ironically, the black and tans and Irish policemen who went over to Palestine ended up fighting for the Brits against the Jewish underground. Right. And this is where our friend Briscoe and the Jews who fought with the old IRA here end up being gun runners, as they had been into Ireland in the War of Independence, into Israel. Right, okay. And this is where people like de Valera are completely compromised because de Valera is thinking, hold on a second,

17:11David McWilliams: it's the Jews now are the IRA of 20 years ago. They're looking for their freedom. And this is why in the beginning, this is a fascinating thing, in the beginning of the history in Ireland and Israel, there was a real admiration and symbiotic relationship between the Sean Lamasses, the Eamon de Valera's of this world, and the likes of Herzog. Yeah. And the likes of Briscoe, but particularly Herzog, which is why de Valera in 1950 visited Israel. That's only a year after the Israeli state is really established, two years after the first Arab war. That was a state visit with all the bells and whistles, was it?

17:50Now listen, de Valera visited Israel after being invited by Rabbi Isaac Herzog. The same man who hid Michael Collins is now the chief rabbi of Israel. The guy was the chief rabbi of Ireland. He's Herzog's dad.

18:04David McWilliams: The visit included De Valera, his sons, Bobby Briscoe, I told you about the gun runner, and they went over and they stayed with the Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. Okay. So this was a really close interpersonal link that the people who set up this state had with the people who set up Israel. And that is the story, I think, of the first maybe 20 or 30 years. But then there was a kind of a parting of ways and a parting of ideas and ideology. You're absolutely right. And that's the problem with the Herzog Park now. But the Herzog Park was about the Herzog who was the son of the chief rabbi. Yes.

18:50Who goes to fight in the British army, like 5 ,000 Irish soldiers who deserted and fought with the Brits. One of which happened to be my great uncle again. Have you seen a pattern here, John? Have you seen a pattern, right? But this is the story that is rarely told.

19:05David McWilliams: And it seems to me that the change begins to happen in Irish attitudes. And I'm going to come back to the maps because I want to talk about it. In the 1970s, so the PLO and the IRA trained together in Tripoli. and I think that's where you begin to see the beginning of this link between Irish republicanism and Palestinian self-rule and that is something that happens in the 70s and 80s and it's very much located in the republican movement here yeah and it then spreads out gradually but it was in around that time then that this kind of separation of ways between Ireland and Israel began to happen because of what Israel were beginning to do in the West Bank.

19:59And it was the beginnings of the apartheid state. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And so I think what you have is these two phases, which are very distinct.

20:10David McWilliams: As always, Irish hypocrisy allows us to ignore the fact that in the first phase of that relationship, there was the Nakba, which is what really the catastrophe. Yeah. Like, De Valera visited Herzog and stayed with Ben-Gurion a year after the Nakba. Right? Right, yeah. But was he fully aware of what was going on? Of course he was. Right. The same way he's fully aware of the Holocaust. Yeah. You know? But, I mean, the interesting thing is the Israelis must have known that De Valera had signed the Book of Contollants for Hitler. Yeah, I never quite understood that or why he did. But they still took him in.

20:50Anyway, my point is that something changed. And there's something that changed then, I think, is the behavior of Israel. But also, you know, their view is that we are constantly being attacked from the outside and we have to respond. And the point is that, yes, but if you are a democracy and you're going about democracy, you hold yourself to a higher standard. You can't live like Europeans or Americans, particularly like Europeans, and then behave like this. So again, what you gradually see is that the whole political establishment in Ireland shifts. And this is the sort of story, but you're interested in you talk about the Irish connection, right?

21:31David McWilliams: Yeah. And I think the reason it really resonates with Ireland is because of William Petty. Ooh, yes. I'm going to take you back to 1641. So very, very brief history, very, very brief economic history. Britain at this stage is not a big power under Henry VIII. Mm. It is a Protestant power. They've converted to Protestantism simply because he understood that if he converts to Protestantism, he can rob all the land of the Catholic Church and this will fill his coffers and away he goes again. It's a second. Right, okay. This guy, his nickname was Henry the Debaser. He was always debasing the gold quantity of his coins, putting copper into it and putting a few quid in his back pocket, right?

22:11David McWilliams: Right, okay. This is his tactic, right? Dodgy, dodgy. Dodgy. And then he realized those fellows in Germany who are converted to Protestantism, those little principalities, They're also managing to rob all the land of the church. Wow, wouldn't that be a great deal? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was basically a massive big financial heist, right? Right. So, of course, then you have Scots convert and the English convert to Protestantism. Ireland remains Catholic. It remains, for them, the back door through which Spain and then later France can launch an invasion. So how do we pacify these Irish people? We send over English and Scottish settlers to settle the place.

22:49David McWilliams: This is how the Israeli narrative begins in the Irish mind. So you get the settlers going to particularly Northern Ireland, and they settle parts of Northern Ireland. And this is around 1620, 1630. Then 1641, the locals respond. The locals have a rebellion, right? So in the uprising of 1641, John, the rebels, i.e. us, the local lads, slaughter about 400 ,000 English and Scottish settlers, And there was an event like the Portadown Massacre. If you talk to Nordic Unionists, they'd be well aware of this. Apparently, 100 Protestants were forced off a bridge into the River Ban. And then they shot the survivors, right?

23:31Nine women and children. So this wasn't nice stuff. But of course, this gets over to England. And at the time, remember we talked about the role of pamphleteers? Yes.

23:39David McWilliams: So the pamphleteers are saying, they're basically like tabloids. They're saying, how many pamphlets can we sell? Well, you know what we're going to do? We're going to up the ante here. and we're going to say as many as 200 ,000 Protestants were killed in Ireland by savage, rebellious, barbaric Catholics. Right. So they create a... So their tabloid accuracy is... As ever thus. As ever thus. So basically it's the accuracy for selling news because the tabloids now are the great, great, great grandfathers of the pamphleteers of the Elizabethan age, right? So no massacre is big enough. No bloodshed is bloody enough.

24:17It has to be mad, mad, mad stuff. If it bleeds, it bleeds. If it bleeds, it bleeds, exactly. So this is 1641. 1642, the English Parliament passes the Adventurers Act, John. Right. So the Adventurers Act, which raised money to fund the military reconquest of Ireland through public subscriptions. The repayment of this would be funded by extensive confiscation of Irish land. Okay. So basically, you could say, I'm John Davis. I have a few quid in my back pocket. and the Adventurers Act said there's a public subscription like the National Lottery. So you buy your lotto ticket, okay, and your lotto ticket is predicated on a bunch of English head kickers going over to Ireland, kicking lumps out of the Fenians and then you get paid back because they confiscate all the Fenian land.

25:05And I just get a lump of land. And you get a lump of money or a lump of land. Wow, okay. Initially you get a lump of land. Yeah. And this is where cartography comes in. Because the problem for you, John Davis, having just won the lottery in Norwich or in Aldershot or wherever you are, right? That's all very well, but maybe you don't want a lump of land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, I'm happy here as a yeoman drinking my cider with my embarrassed dancing. Going into South of Spain. Yeah, exactly. So how am I going to turn this lump of land into money? Right, go on. This is where you get a second act.

25:41So the Adventurers Act is 1642. Yeah. John winning the lotto, But then the English Civil War gets in the way. So the Civil War is over. What happens after the Civil War is over? You have loads and loads of soldiers with nothing to do. Right, yeah, of course. This happens all over the world, right? Of course, yeah. Because they're all mobilized and they have nothing to do. And more importantly, the winner has to pay them back in England. Yeah.

26:03David McWilliams: So Cromwell says, well, why don't we go over to Ireland? This is 1649. Kick the lumps out of the local paddies and rob their land. And in so doing, then we can pay back all our unpaid soldiers. and we can give the soldiers a job because they're loafing around England now. That's not healthy. Yeah, yeah, that's a win-win. Yeah, so we need to get all these fellas and they're battle-hardened and they've kicked their heads in England. So they come over, right? And it's estimated that between either 10 to 40 % of the Irish population was massacred by Cromwell. Yeah, yeah. The rest was sent to Connacht.

26:36This is why the West Bank and Gaza

26:40David McWilliams: resonate with us so much because the people are displaced. They're humiliated. they are murdered, but more to the point they're dispossessed of their land. And they're sent into an arid part, arid in the case of Gaza, in the case of Connacht, waterlogged, freezing cold, really bad land part of the country. And they're basically sealed off, in effect, in an Irish ghetto in their own country. And that's why I think all this resonates so much with Irish people. because the dispossession, the act of dispossession is so similar. And the evocativeness of that goes down through generations and generations and generations.

27:21But the English weren't finished yet, John. They weren't finished yet, right? So the English government is beginning to think, okay, how do we repay our war debts? What about the debts that have been generated by the Adventurers Act? You know, we've promised people lots and lots of stuff. and what they do is in 1652 they pass another bill which is called the Act of Settlement which lays out how to dispossess the rebels of their land and that way they can redistribute the soldiers to cover all the unpaid wages and the surviving native population can fuck off to Connacht or Barbados or wherever, right?

27:56David McWilliams: Now, the problem with that is they have no precise maps. Of course, yeah. They have a notion that I'll give you a little bit of land But if you've given me money, or if you're a soldier, you don't want like a kind of a blob. Okay, you want an accurate map. Yeah, because there was no kind of defined county borders or... Exactly. So this is where you get the difference between the very first map of Ireland, the Mercator map, 1570, and William Petty's maps of Ireland in 1670, which were called the Down Survey map. Right, okay. And this is the key to everything. So you remember the very first maps of Ireland, there's kind of a blob where the country's sitting on his side.

28:40I did, I saw those maps and it's just, it doesn't actually look like Ireland at all, really. It's very, very rough. It's like a blob with a few fingers. Yeah. And the whole of the North Coast is flat. Yes. Right, it's just completely flat, okay?

28:53David McWilliams: You go from that map to something much, much more intricate. How did this happen? Why did this happen? And what has this got to do with colonialism? general. That's the next part, John. Well, let's come back and talk about that after a bit of this.

29:34over a trillion dollars in secure transactions. Eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.com slash proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a$250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip-off and Grainger is your trusted partner. Offering the products you need all in one place from HVAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win.

30:14Call 1-800-GRAINGER, visit grainger.com or just stop by. Grainger for the ones who get it done. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things so why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way. Mail and ship when you want, how you want, with Stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days.

30:55So in the 17th century, was this the first time Ireland had been mapped? Yes. In any sort of way? And that's what they came up with? That's what they came up with. So listen, let's go back. So William Petty is the man we're talking about now.

31:08David McWilliams: William Petty went on to be one of the great economists of the 17th century. Wrote a lot about taxation, a lot about productivity. Was the first man to come up with notions of GDP to try and figure things out. But he was a really, really advanced economic thinker. He was originally a doctor, but he learned his economics in Ireland. Now, this is the interesting thing. He was a doctor who was a little bit out of sorts. And when Cromwell put the word around, we're going for a scrap. We need all sorts of characters. And if you come with us, you may well enrich yourself greatly because this is a turkey shoot against the Catholics and against the Papists and against the Royalists over there.

31:45And Petty said, fuck it, I'll go. So off he goes, right? Now, what he brought to the gig was the following. Once Cromwell realized they were winning, he then had to satisfy his men's yearning to get paid. Yeah. And he had to turn promises of land in Ireland of the dispossessed Irish into money. How do you do that? With selling it? This is the thing. But he didn't know what he was going to sell. Yeah. Right? So he needed somebody to come back. and William Petty, who was a sort of a tinkerer and discoverer, innovator as well, came up with a way to map the country, which was called, it was a new technique called the Gunter chain.

32:31Right. The Gunter chain was a measurement chain of a hundred links, which was invented by a clergyman and a mathematician, fellow Edmund Gunter. And it was simple enough to allow ordinary soldiers to measure things. So what typically happened in the past... It's just like a ruler. It's a ruler. A massive big ruler. And it says, you five lads, you've got nothing to do now. You've killed all the people in Dada. You've beheaded all the women and you've done all the horrible thing. Oliver Plunkett's head. Remember Jeff Gordon? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. School tour to see Oliver Plunkett's head. The smell of Oliver Plunkett's head combined with Cadet Cola and Tato Crisps is my memory of school tours.

33:11Anyway, once you've done all that head kicking, what are you going to do? Yeah. And they started to map. They mapped the whole of Ireland in 13 months. Wow.

33:18David McWilliams: Which is amazing, with extraordinary accuracy. Now, why was that important? Because William Petty's map then was used to dispossess the Irish. But the more important part of it was a map that was so accurate and so precise and so scientific did one other thing. it allowed people to sell land that they'd never seen before to bundle it up in packages right why was this important is because prior to this as you said somebody's land might be a field or this that and the other but in the feudal days your land would be defined by natural landmarks yeah so john's land would go out there to the river to the bend in the river and then you'd go down and there's a big you know see where the mountain stars a hill is rising just there There's an oak on top of that.

34:12Then you go down, there's a stream, the far end. Then there's four or five huge big fields. Then there's a little wood. And then that's the boundary, yeah. So you had to know the area to know your land. Right, yeah. So you had to be of the area to be of the land. Petty's mathematical, cartographical way of looking at things meant you didn't have to be from the area. Now, this facilitated colonialism on a monumental scale, because then you could trade these pieces of land. You could say, I'll swap your land in Kerry for land in Leitrim. And then you'd say, well, how many people live in Leitrim?

34:52Okay, that's important because that's going to be generating the tax revenue from you.

34:57David McWilliams: Exactly. And so in so doing, William Petty weaponizes colonialism through the use of cartography, which they learned in Ireland. which the British then replicated all over the world. Right, okay. Which is why you get your straight lines, John. Yeah, yeah. Because they are simple quadrants that were used and the quadrants could only be used if the maps were accurate and the maps were made accurate by the Down survey. So-called, they think, because you laid down these metal markers, these rulers on the ground and you measured from there and that is why we get these incredibly detailed maps, which are unbelievably accurate, of Ireland in 1670, whereas in 1570 we had these kind of blobs.

35:47Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

35:49David McWilliams: Heffy, of course, comes out and he makes himself really, really rich because everyone's like, who's this geezer with the great invention? So much so, John, that he ends up owning vast estates in County Kerry, vast estates around Kenmare. Right. not given to him, drawn up by him, by his own thing. He becomes an MP. For Inishtig and Kerry, he becomes an MP. Right. He's a fellow who didn't talk to the locals at all. And of course, he becomes a national hero in England. Now, the interesting thing is, we started with Sharmok Rovers, we will end with Shelburne. Right, go on. Shelburne Football Club's name comes from Shelburne Road in Ringsend.

36:33Yeah, it does. Where Shelburne originated from. And that is named after Lord Shelburne. And who was the first Lord Shelburne? Don't know. William Petty. That is the title he took for himself. So all the shells out there. Tolkien made up. Tolkien Park, made up, okay. But I'll just end here, John.

36:54David McWilliams: William Petty was the person who turned land into something tangible that you could trade. and then of course what happened is all those English soldiers loads of them said oh well I'll become you know Lord this that and the other like Lord Shelburne but most of them said I'm going back to England yeah I don't want to be hanging out here right but how do I cash in my chips back to you in the lotto they created companies that bought the shares that were underpinned by Petty's cartography and in that way you could encourage absentee landlordism because you didn't have to know the land or the people to know how much you owned because the actual map was accurate.

37:41David McWilliams: And then of course what you get is you get companies that own vast tracts of land. That vast tracts of land in Ireland, which has been dispossessed from the Irish people, is then traded on the open market in London on the stock exchange. It's all coming at the same time. But the revenue was coming from the peasants. the peasants and the produce of the land. The produce of the land, and that's why you have the shonin class and the middlemen and the gombians and others, in the middle, collecting the tariffs, the absentee landlords, and then the absentee landlords could use the land as collateral for banks to borrow for other stuff, which is the beginning of the financialization of the industrial evolution of the 18th century, And it all comes back to William Petty, his lines in the sand, his cartography, and how economics advanced, weaponized, and ultimately drove colonialization.

38:43David McWilliams: And it all started here.

39:28We'll be right back. Hi, Grainger. For the ones who get it done. Over 90 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to handle bill pay processes. Why? Because our tools are built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. We're not just moving money. We're powering financial workflows for half a million customers. That's a level of expertise you just can't fake. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven to get started and grab a$250 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details.