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Article: A royal joke after a hard day's work
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- October 6, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1994 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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THE STORY of the week may not be such bad news for the Royal
Family as is being popularly supposed. For there are powerful
historical reasons to believe that the new relationship that is
evolving between the royals and the British people is one which has
in the past been the most comfortable and, in economic terms, the
most successful.
We have somehow gone back to an 18th and early 19th century
monarchy. The key point here is that the country's greatest period
of relative economic success was from the late 1600s to around
1860. For example, in the 1690s British living standards were not
materially higher than they were in its closest neighbour, France.
Amsterdam, not London, was still the ...