People often ask how Britain, a damp little island full of drizzle, suet puddings and men called Keith repairing carburettors in sheds, managed to acquire an Empire covering a quarter of the globe.
The answer, I have concluded, is not naval power, industrialisation or trade. It was old British weights, measures and coinage. Specifically, the fact they forced the population into advanced mental arithmetic from the age of six.
A Victorian child could emerge from a sweet shop having calculated the cost of three ounces of pear drops at tuppence ha'penny per quarter pound, paid with a florin, received change involving a shilling, a thruppenny bit and two farthings, then gone home and helped his father calculate how many hundredweight of coal remained in the bunker. All without a calculator, spreadsheet or visible emotional distress.
Modern children can operate a smartphone containing more computing power than NASA had for Apollo, yet would regard "half a crown and tuppence farthing" as evidence of a mental health episode.
People forget what pre-decimal Britain actually required of ordinary citizens. Twelve pence to the shilling. Twenty shillings to the pound. Four farthings to the penny. Sixteen ounces to the pound. Fourteen pounds to the stone. Eight pints to the gallon. Then, just to ensure nobody became complacent, there were rods, chains, furlongs, bushels and hundredweights roaming around like escaped medieval livestock.
Buying bacon in 1954 involved mathematics now reserved for ballistic missile trajectories. Naturally, this produced a population with brains permanently wired for fractions, approximation and rapid conversion. Which, entirely coincidentally, also happens to describe artillery calculation, naval navigation and bombardment ranging.
You can immediately see the advantage. A French gunner, raised sensibly on decimal logic, receives the order:
"Adjust elevation by 0.7 degrees."
Meanwhile the British gunner hears:
"Right lads, target bearing two points off starboard, account for tide drift, compensate for windage, reduce by three-eighths and move the bloody thing half a gnat's whisker to port."
And he does it while eating a sandwich.
Nelson did not win at Trafalgar because British sailors were inherently braver. He won because every man aboard HMS Victory had spent his childhood calculating whether his mother had been cheated over a quarter pound of liver and two ounces of dripping.
The Industrial Revolution itself begins to make more sense under this theory. British engineers were effectively raised inside an administrative puzzle designed by a drunken monastery accountant. By adulthood, calculating steam tolerances in sixteenths of an inch probably felt like a pleasant break.
You still occasionally encounter survivors of this system. Elderly market traders who can mentally total seventeen purchases faster than a supermarket scanner while discussing the weather, criticising Brussels sprouts and checking whether you've slipped an Australian five-dollar note into the twenties.
Then came decimalisation, metrication and calculators. Since then Britain has struggled to build a reservoir without a public inquiry, a railway without geological despair, or an aircraft carrier without discovering halfway through that nobody ordered enough aircraft.
Coincidence? I think not.
We replaced generations trained in applied arithmetic with people who need a phone to calculate 15% off in Marks & Spencer and then hold it out to their spouse for confirmation.
Frankly, if Britain ever wants global influence again, the answer is obvious. Bring back farthings. Abolish metres. Force Year 5 pupils to buy cheese by the quarter pound while working out the change from ten bob in their heads. Within thirty years we'd probably accidentally administer half the Indian Ocean again simply because nobody else could understand our paperwork.
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