Phoenix Program (Napoleon's World)

The Phoenix Program was a private-public stimulus program initiated in 1958 by Charles Morgan's transitional government in England following the resolution of the Anarchy. Lasting ten years, the Phoenix Program was designed to rebuild English infrastructure and its damaged cities and thereby provide jobs to over two million unemployed. The Phoenix Program is part of an era known as the English Reconstruction, and was modelled largely after the similar French strategy in the wake of their own internal conflict. Along with the direct funding by the English government, which was strapped for cash, the Phoenix Program relied on investment by American, Irish, Portuguese and Oceanian companies, and by 1960 there were almost twenty foreign countries, including France, providing both public and private funds to startup English projects. Between 1958 and 1968, England tripled its road capacity and quadrupled its industrial capacity, exceeding its pre-1934 levels.

During the Phoenix Program, Morgan encouraged the "Open Arms policy," in which immigrants were encouraged to come to England in exchange for cheap housing and employment, leading to a work shortage during much of the 1960's. Due to the organizational structure of the English Judaic Council, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe were often quick to find work, while immigrants from Spain, Italy and Africa often wound up struggling to find employment as even with 50,000 jobs being added per month, there were too many people to employ, resulting in the undesired effect of ethnic slums being formed in cities such as London, Birmingham, and Liverpool. The Phoenix Program also resulted in the rise of extremely wealthy industrialists, the likes of which England had not seen since before the Socialist Revolution, whom used their newfound position in society to accumulate enormous amounts of wealth and capital in the chaotic postwar atmosphere, so that by 1967, thirty-four men held almost 70% of England's internal wealth, not discounting foreign investors who held another 15% of the country's wealth.

While the Phoenix Program's ten-year mandate was allowed to expire in 1968 by Donald Sutcliffe, who favored a more controlled approach to reconstruction, historians and economists alike agree that it was a far greater success than Morgan had likely anticipated and that it had produced clear results in employment, economic growth and infrastructural development quicker than initially projected, and that it introduced a much more private enterprise-savvy class of Englishmen into the global ecomonic community.