Blake held that art and science founded empire

Evidence

William Blake is unrestrained on this point: ‘The Foundation of Empire,’ he says in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses, ‘is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is No more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.’ — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 561

Categorization

• CANDY: A quotable Blake insight that flips the usual causality: empire follows art, not the reverse.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: to what extent did Blake actually follow this in his own political poetry?