Soulful Sundays: Causation

“A good story is always more convincing than a good analysis.” — Dani Rodrik

Although only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, more than 20% of conversations happening right now are likely in English. No other language commands such global presence with so few native roots. The rise of a small island nation's influence unfolded over the course of roughly 250 years—and continues to grow today. But English did not become the lingua franca of business, science, politics, and the internet through compulsion or decree. The truth is far more subtle. The causation, far more elusive.

In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, launching one of history’s most intriguing competitions. The Act promised £20,000—a fortune at the time—to anyone who could devise a method of determining a ship’s longitude within half a degree (about 30 nautical miles). While latitude could be easily derived from the position of the sun or stars, longitude remained elusive. Up to that point, methods for determining east–west position at sea were unreliable, leaving ships vulnerable to shipwreck and miscalculation.

Enter John Harrison.

Harrison, a carpenter and self-taught clockmaker, began his quest in 1727. Over the next four decades, he would devote his life to solving the problem—not by calculating the moon’s position, as most of his more learned contemporaries insisted—but by building a clock that could keep time at sea. He believed the solution did not lie in astronomy but in precision timekeeping. It was already well understood that the Earth rotates 15 degrees of longitude per hour (360° ÷ 24 hrs), and that if a sailor could compare the local time (determined by the sun’s zenith) to the time at a fixed reference point (like Greenwich Mean Time), they could calculate their exact longitude. The only missing piece was a clock that could survive the sea—its moisture, its salt air, its constant movement, and its violent, variable climates—without losing accuracy.

After years of toil, Harrison unveiled his masterpiece in 1761: the H4, a marine chronometer unlike anything the world had seen. Just five inches in diameter, it resembled a large pocket watch but was engineered with extraordinary ingenuity. It used a system of bimetallic temperature compensation, a high-frequency balance wheel, and anti-friction mechanisms that allowed it to perform flawlessly in extreme conditions. On its maiden voyage to Jamaica, the H4 deviated by just 5.1 seconds over 81 days at sea—a level of accuracy once thought impossible.

Yet the British scientific establishment was not quick to celebrate. The Board of Longitude, dominated by astronomers and mathematicians invested in the rival lunar distance method, cast doubt on Harrison’s results. Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, led efforts to discredit Harrison’s achievement. The Board delayed, withheld funds, and demanded additional tests and disclosures. Harrison had solved the problem. But he had done so as a mechanic, not a gentleman scientist.

It wasn’t until Harrison appealed directly to King George III that Parliament finally awarded him most of the prize—46 years after he began. By then, the design had been replicated, improved upon, and commercialized by other clockmakers, who were paid to copy Harrison’s innovations. Harrison changed the world—but did not profit from it.

With accurate timekeeping, British ships could now navigate with unrivaled precision. This gave the empire an unprecedented logistical advantage: faster voyages, fewer shipwrecks, tighter trade routes. English merchants became indispensable partners in global commerce, and where they went, their language went too. But language is a two-way street. The expansion of the empire also expanded English itself, absorbing words from Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Malay, Nahuatl, and more. English did not remain pure—it survived by assimilation.

Today, English has the largest vocabulary of any written language, a result of its willingness to adopt, hybridize, and evolve.

After World War II, the baton passed to the United States. Through its dominance in telecommunications, finance, academia, and eventually the internet, America entrenched English as the operating system of the modern world. And to think—it all began with a single clock.

In psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes our tendency to overemphasize personal character and underemphasize situational forces when explaining behavior.

Applied to history, it can distort our view of empires, languages, and power. We often assume that Britain conquered the world because of ambition, ruthlessness, or racial superiority. But what if that’s the wrong story? What if the deeper explanation is not domination, but infrastructure?

Longitude allowed for better navigation. Better navigation enabled faster, safer trade. Trade fostered dependency. Dependency led to diplomatic leverage and political protection. From there emerged governance, then administration, and finally language.

What looks like malice may in fact be momentum. What appears as imperial design might be a cascade of causation, triggered by a clock. We do not speak English because the English were destined to rule the world. We speak English because their ships arrived on time.

What else are we wrong about?