Science Quote by Joseph Hume

“Fortunately for England” lands like a smug toast, then quietly reveals the machinery underneath it. Joseph Hume’s line is doing a very 19th-century kind of ideological work: turning empire and industrial capitalism into a matter of national good luck. The key trick is that “imports” are framed not as dependencies but as advantages, and “raw materials” are cast as neutral, pre-political stuff - as if cotton, sugar, timber, and ores simply drifted into English ports by the grace of economics.

The subtext is brutally transactional. If what England brings in is “raw,” then what England sends back out is, by implication, “finished”: higher-value goods stamped with British labor, British technology, British profit. That single adjective positions England at the top of a global value chain and makes the rest of the world look like a warehouse of inputs. It’s a compact justification for the factory nation: keep the home economy “productive,” keep the periphery extractive.

Context matters. Hume was a prominent reformer and political economist-adjacent figure in a period when Britain’s industrial dominance depended on cheap, reliable inputs from colonies and quasi-colonies. Calling this “fortunate” papers over how that fortune was structured - by trade policy, naval power, land seizure, plantation slavery and coerced labor, and the legal infrastructure that made “raw materials” available at scale.

The line works because it’s bland on purpose. It converts moral questions into supply-chain trivia, making England’s advantage sound as natural as geology. That calmness is the tell.