The centre of this commercial culture was the city of London. As the only real national metropolis, London was unique in its size and multiplicity of functions. By 1750 it contained more than 650,000 citizens—just under one in 10 of Britain’s population. By contrast, only one in 40 Frenchmen lived in Paris in this period. The Hague held only one in 50 of the inhabitants of the Netherlands, and Madrid was the home of just one in 80 Spaniards. Some of these great European capitals had no resident sovereign. Many others, such as Vienna and St. Petersburg, were grand ceremonial and cultural centres but effectively isolated from the economic life of their national hinterland. London was different. It was not only the location of the Court and of Parliament but also the nation’s chief port, its financial centre, the home of its printing industry, and the hub of its communications network. Britain’s rulers were brought into constant proximity with powerful economic lobbies from all parts of the nation and with a large and constantly fluctuating portion of their subjects. Britons seem to have been more mobile than their fellow Europeans in this period, and then as now many traveled to the capital to find work and excitement. Perhaps as many as one in six Britons spent a portion of their working life in London in the 18th century.
London easily dwarfed the other British towns. In 1750 its nearest rival, Norwich, had fewer than 50,000 people. Nonetheless, the provincial towns, although functioning on quite a different scale from that of the metropolis, were also growing in size and importance at this time. In 1700 only 10 of them contained more than 10,000 people. By 1750 there were 17 towns with populations of that size, and by 1800 there were more than 50. As towns grew, they became better organized and safer, more pleasant places to live in. Because more stone was used in buildings, the risk of destruction by fire began to lessen. Towns acquired insurance companies and fire engines to protect their citizens. Supplies of clean water improved. Urban planning and architecture became more sophisticated and splendid, and the results can still be seen today in towns like Stamford in Lincolnshire or Bath in Somerset. These provincial centres developed cultural lives of their own, with new theatres, assembly rooms, libraries, Freemason lodges, and coffeehouses. By mid-century there were at least nine coffeehouses in Bristol, six in both Liverpool and Chester, two in Northampton, and at least one in most substantial market towns. Such establishments supplied their customers with newspapers and a place to gossip as well as with liquid refreshments. They also often served as a base for clubs, debating societies, and spontaneous political activity. Schools grew in number, in both the towns and the surrounding countryside. In just one English county, Northamptonshire, the local newspaper press advertised the establishment of more than 100 new schools between 1720 and 1760. Change and continuity
Historians have differed sharply over the impact these commercial and cultural innovations had on British society as a whole. Some have argued that only a minority of men and women were touched by them and that the countryside, which contained the majority of the population, continued on in its traditional ways and values. This is certainly true of parts of Britain. The Scottish Highlands, the mountainous central regions of Wales, and some English regions such as East Anglia remained predominately rural and agricultural. Old beliefs and superstitions lingered on there and elsewhere, often into the late 19th century. Although Parliament repealed the laws against witchcraft in the 1730s, for example, many men and women, and not just the illiterate, continued to believe in its power. (John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was convinced that witches and the Devil had a real corporeal existence on earth.) It is true, too, that many of the new consumer goods that improved the quality of life for the prosperous—porcelain china, armchairs, fine mirrors, newspapers, and manufactured toys—were beyond the economic reach of the poor. And, although new styles of interior decoration transformed the dwellings of the landed and mercantile classes—the sale of wallpaper, for example, had risen from 197,000 yards in 1713 to more than two million yards in 1785, a 10-fold increase—they rarely reached the impoverished. Some agricultural labourers and miners had only one set of clothes and lived in mud-lined cottages, caves, or cellars. Beggars, vagrants, and the unemployed might not possess even these basic commodities.
Yet it would be wrong to postulate too stark a contrast in life-styles between the town and countryside, between the wealthy and the lower orders. Points of contact between the various layers of British society were in fact increasing at this time. More and more country landowners, their womenfolk, and their servants succumbed (without, one suspects, too much trouble) to the temptation of spending some months every year sampling the pleasures of their neighbourhood provincial town, consulting its lawyers and financial agents, and patronizing its shops. Many urban merchants, taking advantage of better roads and coach services, went to live in the countryside while maintaining their businesses in town. Lower down the social scale, hawkers and peddlers (itinerant traders) carried town-produced goods into the country areas and sold them there. Conversely, the growing demand for food in urban areas sucked in men and goods from the countryside. English drovers braved the old Roman roads and faltering bridle paths, the only routes available in Welsh counties such as Caernarvon and Anglesey, in order to purchase meat cattle for London and other towns. Every year tens of thousands of black cattle from the Scottish Highlands were driven southward until they reached the Smithfield meat market in London. Demand for manufactured goods fostered the spread of inland trade, as did increasing industrial specialization in the different British regions. Daniel Defoe illustrated this point by describing the multiple provenance of an affluent man’s suit of clothes:
A coat of woollen cloth from Yorkshire, a waistcoat of cullamancoe from Norwich, breeches of strong drugget from Devizes and Wiltshire, stockings of yarn from Westmoreland, a hat of felt from Leicestershire, gloves of leather from Somerset, shoes from Northampton, buttons from Macclesfield, or, if metal, from Birmingham, garters from Manchester, and a shirt of handmade linen from Lancashire or Scotland.
In short, Britain was not a static society, and the towns and the countryside were not entirely separate spheres. Men and women moved about to seek pleasure, to do business, to sell goods, to marry, or to find work; and their ideas and impressions shifted over time. The revolution in communications
Increased mobility was made possible by a revolution in communications. In the earlier 18th century long-distance travel was rare and the idea of long-distance travel for pleasure was a contradiction in terms. The speediest coach journey between London and Cambridge (just 60 miles) took at least a day. Traveling from the capital to the town of Shrewsbury by coach took more than three days, and the journey to Edinburgh could last as long as 10 days. Some travelers made their wills before starting, as coaches easily overturned on bad roads or in swollen rivers. By 1750, however, privately financed turnpike roads had spread from London and its environs to major English provincial centres like Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, and Birmingham. In the 1760s and ’70s they spread further into Wales and Scotland. The postal service also improved in this period, though again much more slowly in the Celtic fringe than in England. In 1765 only 30 Scottish towns enjoyed a daily postal service.
But the most dramatic advance in inland communication came in the form of the printed word. London’s first daily newspaper appeared in 1702. By 1760 it had four dailies and six tri-weekly evening papers that circulated in the country at large as well as in the capital. But the provinces also generated their own newspapers, their own books, dictionaries, magazines, printed advertisements, and primers. In 1695 Parliament passed legislation allowing printing presses to be established freely outside London. Between 1700 and 1750 presses were founded in 57 English provincial towns, and they proliferated at an even faster rate in the last third of the 18th century:
By 1725 no fewer than 22 provincial newspapers had emerged. By 1760 there were 37 such papers and by 1780, 50. In Scotland seven newspapers and periodicals were in existence by 1750, including the monthly Scots Magazine, which was printed in Edinburgh but could also be purchased from booksellers at Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling. Wales had no English-language newspaper until 1804, but many English papers found their way there.
By 1760 more than nine million newspapers were sold in Britain every year. Because they were expensive by the standards of the time (three or four pennies), one copy of a paper may have been shared and read by as many as 20 different people. There is little doubt that this explosion of newsprint helped to integrate the nation. All provincial newspapers and periodicals were parasitic on the London press. They borrowed large extracts from the more popular and controversial London papers and pamphlets. Increasingly, too, they broke the law and reprinted London journalists’ accounts of debates in the House of Commons and House of Lords (printing parliamentary debates was illegal until 1770). Consequently, by the time of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), larger numbers of Britons than ever before had some access to political information. They were more aware of their country’s military victories and defeats and more conscious of political scandals and protest. Politics was no longer just the preserve of the politicians at court, in Parliament, and in the country houses. Britain from 1754 to 1783
Henry Pelham died in 1754 and was replaced as head of the administration by his brother, the duke of Newcastle. Newcastle was shrewd, intelligent, and hard-working and possessed massive political experience. But he lacked self-confidence and a certain breadth of vision, and he was hampered by being in the House of Lords. In 1755 Henry Fox was appointed secretary of state and acted as the administration’s spokesman in the Commons. Fox’s promotion alienated a man who was far more interesting and remarkable than either of these ministers, William Pitt the Elder. Pitt had entered Parliament as an Opposition MP in the 1730s. In 1746 he had been appointed paymaster general, a highly lucrative state office. But Pitt, whose ambition was for fame and recognition rather than money, remained unsatisfied. The king, however, disliked him and successfully obstructed his career. In 1755 he dismissed Pitt, who began to attack Newcastle on imperial and foreign policy issues. Conflict abroad
Although Britain and France had technically been at peace since 1748, both powers continued to harass each other in their colonial settlements in North America, the West Indies, and India. When the French attacked the British colony of Minorca in May 1756, war broke out; Britain allied itself with Prussia and France with Austria. Like every 18th-century war, this one began badly for Britain; it lost Oswego in North America as well as Minorca. There was an outcry in the press, and Newcastle and Fox resigned. In November Pitt was appointed secretary of state with William Cavendish, duke of Devonshire, serving as nominal head of the new administration. But Pitt, still lacking royal approval or an adequate majority in the Commons, was dismissed by the king in April 1757. He returned to power in June, forming what was to be a highly effective wartime coalition with Newcastle. Pitt captured the attention and imagination of Parliament and of the people by his rhetoric and charisma; Newcastle employed his experience and industry to raise more than £160 million during the course of the war. But what cemented the coalition was Britain’s naval and military successes. In India, where Britain and France were keen competitors, General Robert Clive captured the French settlement of Chandernagore and then, with the forces of the East India Company, defeated the army of Siraj-ud-Dawlah, the nawab (ruler) of Bengal, at the Battle of Plassey on June 23, 1757. The battle lasted only a few hours but decided the fate of India by establishing British dominance in Bengal and the Carnatic, the two most profitable regions of India for European traders. The year 1757, as a consequence, is often cited as the beginning of Britain’s supremacy over India, the start of Calcutta’s significance as the headquarters of the East India Company, and the beginning of the end of French influence on the subcontinent. Two years later large sections of the French fleet were destroyed at the naval battle of Quiberon Bay. When Quebec fell to General James Wolfe in 1759, British control of Canada was effectively secured. The island of Guadeloupe was captured in the same dramatic year, as were French trading bases on the west coast of Africa.
Most of these gains were confirmed by the Treaty of Paris (1763), though Britain restored Guadeloupe to the French in return for control of Canada. In the short term these victories resulted in a mood of patriotic exultation, especially among merchants. They looked to the new colonies to provide both fresh stocks of raw materials and eager markets for British manufactured goods: “Trade,” Edmund Burke gloated, “had been made to flourish by war.” This global victory, however, had been purchased at a high price. The conquest of Canada freed the American colonists from the fear of a French invasion from the north. Anxiety on this score had helped to foster American attachment to Britain. Now these fears had been relieved, and as early as 1760 some Britons and Americans anticipated that this would lead to difficulties. Furthermore, the enormous cost of the conflict led to drastic and sometimes damaging postwar economies, not least the deterioration of the Royal Navy, which would be an important factor in Britain’s defeat in the American Revolution (1775–83). Postwar economies also forced British governments to explore new fiscal expedients, which aroused discontent at home and in the American colonies. Finally, the apparent unity and strength of Britain’s elite during the Seven Years’ War was deceptive: Newcastle and many of his allies were elderly men, Pitt was difficult and unstable, and old Whig and Tory alignments had ceased to have much meaning. All these factors helped to make the early reign of George III a period of conflict and instability. Political instability in Britain
George II died in October 1760 and was succeeded by his grandson, who became George III. The new king became one of the most controversial British monarchs. In the first 10 years of his reign administrations changed no fewer than seven times. In October 1761 Pitt resigned and Newcastle was made to share power with the royal favourite, John Stuart, earl of Bute. In May 1762 Newcastle too resigned, and Bute alone led the government until his resignation in April 1763. Bute was replaced by George Grenville, who was in turn dismissed in July 1765. For the next year Charles Watson-Wentworth, marquess of Rockingham, served as first lord of the treasury. But in July 1766 Rockingham was sacked and replaced by Pitt, now elevated to the House of Lords as earl of Chatham. Chatham soon lapsed into manic depression, and from 1768 to 1770 Augustus Henry Fitzroy, duke of Grafton, led the government. Only in 1770 did the king find a minister whom he felt he could trust and deal with: Frederick, Lord North. Such high political instability undoubtedly hampered British efforts to resolve the problem of its American colonies.
But division and instability were not just confined to the court and parliament. The 1760s were a period of bad harvests, rising food prices, and sporadic unemployment. These economic and social problems helped to fuel the public agitation over John Wilkes, a Protestant dissenter and the son of a London malt distiller. In 1757 he bribed a rotten borough to elect him as its member of Parliament. An interesting, irresponsible, and cheerfully immoral man, Wilkes became well known in London society but failed to obtain a government post. His disappointment, as well as a bent toward iconoclasm, pushed him into opposition journalism. In April 1763 issue number 45 of his paper, the North Briton (a reference to the then chief minister Lord Bute, who was Scottish), was judged seditious. The government reacted by issuing a general warrant under which Wilkes and 48 additional persons were arrested. But Sir Charles Pratt, chief justice of the court of commons pleas, determined that this was a breach of Wilkes’s parliamentary privilege, and he acquitted him. Soon after Wilkes fled to France to avoid another trial, this time for obscenity. In 1764 he was expelled from the Commons and tried in absentia for sedition, libel, and obscenity. But, as he did not return, he was declared an outlaw for impeding royal justice. In 1768, deeply in debt, he returned and was elected MP for the county of Middlesex, the most populous county constituency in England.
Since Wilkes was still an outlaw, Parliament declared him ineligible for election, and for a time he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Due in large part to Wilkes’s organizational and propaganda skills, this precipitated a nationwide agitation; Wilkes was seen not only in England but also in the American colonies as a martyr for liberty. His plight raised the question of whether the will of the people or the decision of a Parliament elected by only a fraction of the people was supreme. In 1769 the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights was founded to aid Wilkes and to press for parliamentary reform. Its members demanded parliamentary representation for important new towns such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester, the abolition of rotten boroughs, and general admission to the franchise for men of movable property (i.e., traders, merchants, and professionals). The English, as well as the American colonists, were becoming more interested in the connection between parliamentary representation (or the lack of it) and the obligation to pay taxes. The American Revolution
The American issue was the final and most volatile element in the instability of the 1760s. Tension mounted, as far as British governments were concerned, primarily for two reasons. First, from this decade onward imperial organization received increased attention, and attempts were made to tighten British rule in Ireland and India as well as in the American colonies, a development that caused friction. Fiscal need was the second and more pressing problem. In 1763 the national debt stood at £114 million, and it continued to grow. Since the burden of taxation was already heavy for Britons, the government naturally looked to other sources of revenue. This was the background to George Grenville’s decision, in 1765, to pass the Stamp Act, a measure designed to raise revenue in the American colonies by putting a tax on all legal and commercial papers. But it stirred up intense resentment in the colonies and, indirectly, in Britain, when the Americans boycotted British goods. In 1766 Rockingham repealed the Stamp Act while maintaining Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies. In 1767 Charles Townshend, then chancellor of exchequer, levied duties on certain imports into the colonies, including a duty on tea, and linked this proposal with plans to remodel colonial government. These measures exacerbated American discontent, though Parliament was not made to realize how much until 1774.
Historians have long disagreed over the question of how far George III himself was responsible for these tumultuous events. The Declaration of Independence (1776) unambiguously condemned the king as a tyrant. The so-called 19th-century British Whig historians also criticized the king in very harsh terms, maintaining, at their most extreme, that as a young prince he was indoctrinated with archaic and inflated ideas of royal power. When he came to the throne, he supposedly ousted his Whig ministers, replacing them with Tories, who were more sympathetic to royal ambitions. His arbitrary aims and policies, it was claimed, provoked the Wilkite agitation in Britain and drove the American colonists to rebel. George was consequently held directly responsible for the break-up of the British Empire. Finally, he was charged with employing bribery and corruption to persuade Parliament to do his bidding.
Twentieth-century historians, in particular the Polish-born scholar Lewis Namier, have revised many of these extreme judgments. It has now been established that the king was neither educated in arbitrary ideas, nor did he preside over a Tory revival. Ministers such as Bute, Grenville, Townshend, and North regarded themselves as Whigs. But by the 1760s and ’70s “Whig” and “Tory” were terms that had lost precise ideological significance, and the breakdown of these old partisan divisions undoubtedly contributed to ministerial instability at this time. There is little evidence that the king used corrupt influence to make Parliament accept his American policy. Indeed, it is unlikely that he initially even possessed an American policy; royal correspondence shows that he was rarely closely interested in American affairs before 1774. The colonists’ drift toward opposition and independence was probably caused as much by their distance from London and their increasing prosperity as it was by British fiscal measures.
But George III cannot be entirely exonerated. When he succeeded, he was only 22, immature, idealistic, and not well-educated. His appointment of his decorative favourite, Lord Bute, was a breach of the convention that monarchs should choose chief ministers possessed of political experience and proven abilities. In his dealings with other politicians George showed himself throughout his reign to be intransigent and obstinate, and he often confused his own personal feelings with the public welfare. He can scarcely be blamed for wanting to retain such an important part of his empire as the American colonies, but he can legitimately be criticized for insisting that the American war be continued after 1780, by which time it had become clear to his chief minister, Lord North, that Britain had lost. Domestic responses to the American Revolution
Even at its outbreak in 1775 British attitudes to the American war were mixed. Many Protestant dissenters regarded the Americans as their brethren, for political and religious reasons. The City of London, and other commercial centres such as Glasgow, Norwich, and Newcastle, objected to the war because it disrupted highly profitable Anglo-American trade. Many British newspapers and cartoons adopted a pacifist and sometimes even a pro-American line. Other Britons believed, with George III, that rebellion against a monarch was sinful and that Parliament’s authority must be preserved. Conventional patriotism became stronger after 1778, when France, Spain, and belatedly the Dutch, allied themselves with the Americans against Britain.
The next two years proved profoundly difficult. Fears that the French would invade Ireland as a prelude to invading the British mainland led ministers to encourage the creation of an Irish volunteer force some 40,000 strong. The Irish Protestant elite, led by Henry Grattan, used this force and the French threat to extract concessions from London. In 1783 Ireland was granted legislative independence, though it remained subject to George III. Declining British fortunes abroad also revived the issue of parliamentary reform. By 1779 three different reform groups had emerged, all of whom favoured peace with America. The marquess of Rockingham and his parliamentary supporters (including his secretary, Edmund Burke) wanted to reduce official corruption and George III’s influence in government. Another group, led by Christopher Wyvill, a one-time Anglican clergyman, wanted a moderate reform of the representative system. Wyvill and some of his supporters played with the idea of a national association, an assembly of reformers from each county in Britain, that would exist parallel to Parliament and be superior to it in constitutional zeal. A third small group, led by Charles James Fox, a Whig MP, and by former Wilkite activists, wanted more extensive political reform, including the secret ballot and annual general elections. In 1780 they founded the Society for Constitutional Information, which was designed to build public support for political change through the systematic production and distribution of libertarian propaganda.
It was unlikely that any of these reforms would be implemented. But the Gordon Riots of June 1780 made it certain that they would not be. In 1778 Parliament had made minor concessions to British Roman Catholics, who were excluded from civil rights. Anti-Catholic prejudice, however, had been a powerful emotion in Britain since the Reformation in the 16th century, and Roman Catholicism tended to be associated by many with political absolutism and persecution. A movement to repeal the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, the Protestant Association, started in Scotland under the leadership of an unstable individual called Lord George Gordon. The movement reached London and exploded there in riots that lasted for eight days. More than 300 people were killed, and more damage was done to property than would be done in Paris during the French Revolution. For a time these riots gave reform and popular agitation a bad name. To many, the very name of Wyvill’s National Association was dangerously suggestive of the Protestant Association, and the parliamentary reform movement lapsed until the 1790s.
Disasters at home were followed by further disasters abroad. Late in 1781 Britain learned of General Charles Cornwallis’s surrender in America at the Battle of Yorktown. Parliamentary pressure to end the war now became irresistible. When in March 1782 Lord North’s majority in the Commons fell to nine votes, he resigned, against the wishes of George III. A new administration, formed under Lord Rockingham, was committed to peace with America and moderate constitutional reform at home. When Rockingham died in July 1782, William Petty, earl of Shelburne, became first lord of the treasury. In November of that year it was he who had the thankless task of concluding peace with the Americans and formally acknowledging their independence and British defeat in the Treaty of Paris. Britain from 1783 to 1815
Defeat abroad and division at home led many Britons to believe that their country was in irreversible decline. The war had cost more than £236.4 million and had apparently brought only humiliation and the loss of one of the most profitable regions of the British Empire. Yet recovery was rapid, and by the time Britain again went to war—in 1793, against revolutionary France—it was wealthier and more powerful than it had been at the beginning of George III’s reign.
In February 1783 Britain made a far from disadvantageous peace with its European enemies. Minorca and Florida were ceded to the Spanish, but Gibraltar was retained. France was given settlements in Senegal and Tobago, but Britain recovered other West Indian islands lost during the war. Holland gave Britain freedom of navigation in its spice islands and an important trading base in India. Nonetheless, this peace damaged Shelburne’s reputation, and he resigned. A coalition administration was formed, led by Lord North and Charles James Fox. The king disliked it and ruthlessly sabotaged it. The Fox–North coalition planned to cement its authority by passing a bill to reform the government of British settlements in India, previously administered by the East India Company alone. The India Bill passed the Commons but, like every other piece of legislation not directly concerned with taxation, it had to be approved by a majority in the House of Lords. In advance of the vote the king let it be known that he would regard any peer who supported the bill with disfavour. The Lords duly threw the bill out in December 1783, providing the king with an excuse to dismiss Fox and North and replace them with William Pitt the Younger, the second son of the late earl of Chatham. The general election of 1784 supplied Pitt with a parliamentary majority. William Pitt the Younger
Pitt lived and died a bachelor, totally obsessed with political office. He was clever, single-minded, confident of his own abilities, and a natural politician. But perhaps his greatest asset in the early 1780s was his youth. He had entered Parliament in 1780 and was just 24 when he became first minister in 1783. Consequently, he was not associated in the public mind with the American debacle but seemed instead to promise a new era. Moreover, although he and George III never developed a close relationship, he did enjoy the king’s support. Knowing that the alternative to Pitt was Fox (whom he hated), the king dealt with Pitt in a responsible manner. In 1788–89 the king suffered a major bout of insanity (or, according to some scholars, porphyria, a hereditary blood disease). Although he recovered, he thereafter interfered in politics far less than in his early reign. Pitt in turn treated the king tactfully. He dropped his early enthusiasm for parliamentary reform, and in 1801 he resigned over the issue of Roman Catholic emancipation (the extension of civil rights to Catholics) rather than force the king to accept it.
Royal support aided Pitt’s control of his cabinet and political patronage. But what sustained him most in the 1780s and early 1790s was the quality and success of his measures. He reduced the national debt by £10 million between 1784 and 1793, in part by increasing tax revenue. He fostered legitimate trade and reduced smuggling by cutting import duties on certain commodities such as tea. In 1786 he signed an important commercial agreement, the Eden Treaty, with France. It was in keeping with the argument made by the economist Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations (1776) that Britain should be less economically dependent on trade with America and become more adventurous in exploring trading opportunities in continental Europe. At home, Pitt strove for cheaper and more efficient administration; for example, he set up a stationery department to supply government offices with the necessary paper at a more economical rate. Abroad, he restored Britain’s links with continental Europe and implemented imperial reorganization. In 1788 he signed the Triple Alliance between Britain, Prussia, and Holland, thereby ensuring that in a future war his country would not be bereft of allies as it had been during the American Revolution. In 1790 he demonstrated Britain’s renewed power and prestige by negotiating a peace between Austria and Turkey. In 1784 he passed his own India Act, creating a board of control regulating Indian affairs and the East India Company. The board’s members were nominated by the king from among the privy councillors. Finally, in 1791 the Canada Constitutional Act was passed. London became responsible for the government of both Lower and Upper Canada, but both provinces were given representative assemblies. Economic growth and prosperity
Many of Pitt’s reforms and policies, such as his India Act, had been devised by previous ministers. But even though he did not originate all of his schemes, Pitt nonetheless deserves credit for actually implementing them. For all his priggish ruthlessness and occasional dishonesties (perhaps because of them), Pitt undoubtedly contributed to the restoration of national confidence; indeed, for many people, he became its very personification. But British recovery had wider and more complex causes than just one man’s measures. At bottom, it was rooted in accelerating economic growth and unprecedented national prosperity:
These figures illustrate two striking points. First, in the 1770s British export performance and industrial productivity were perceptibly damaged by the American war. But, second, Britain’s economic recovery after the war was rapid and dramatic. Particularly noticeable is the fact that the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793–1802 and 1803–15) did not slow Britain’s buoyant prosperity. Although Napoleon tried to blockade Britain in 1808 and again in 1811–12, he never succeeded in cutting the lifeline of its trade. In the period 1794–96 British exports averaged £21.7 million per annum. In the period 1804–06 the equivalent figure was £37.5 million, and during 1814–16, £44.4 million. These figures demonstrate how quickly Britain regained its American markets after 1783 and how extensive its other colonial markets were. But they are also one of many signs that the nation was experiencing the first Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution
Some historians have questioned whether the term Industrial Revolution can really be applied to the economic transformation of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain. They point out that in terms of employment the industrial sector may not have overtaken the agricultural sector until the 1850s and that even then the average unit of production employed only 10 people. Large, anonymous factories did not become common until the late 19th century. Other scholars have argued, rightly, that industry did not suddenly take off in the 1780s and that even in 1700 Britain was a more industrialized state than its European competitors. But, despite all these qualifications, the available evidence suggests that by 1800 Britain was by far the most industrialized state in the world and that, because of this, its rate of economic growth must have accelerated in the last third of the 18th century.
Perhaps the most powerful evidence one can cite for these statements (which are inevitably controversial, given the ferocity and rapid fluctuations of the debate on the Industrial Revolution) is Britain’s ability to sustain an unprecedented growth in its population from 1780 onward without suffering from major famines or acute unemployment. In 1770 the population was about 8.3 million. By 1790 it had reached 9.7 million; by 1811, 12.1 million; and by 1821, 14.2 million. By the latter date, it is estimated that 60 percent of Britain’s population was 25 years of age or below. By comparison, while a similar rate of demographic growth occurred in Ireland, there was no Irish Industrial Revolution. Partly as a result of this, Ireland suffered the great famine in the 1840s, whereas there was no similar famine in Britain.
To say this is not to deny the dark side of early industrialization. The conditions of work were often brutal, particularly for the young. Industrial safety was minimal, and environmental pollution and unguarded machines led to horrific injuries. Mechanization ruined the livelihoods of some skilled craftsmen, most notably the handloom weavers. Nonetheless, it is probable that without industrialization the social costs of rapid population growth in Britain would have been far greater.
Although it is not easy to account for Britain’s early industrialization, some facts stand out. Britain, unlike its prime European rival, France, was a small, compact island. Except in northern Scotland, it had no major forests or mountains to disrupt or impede its internal communications. The country possessed a range of natural ports facing the Atlantic, plenty of coastal shipping, and a good system of internal waterways. By the 1760s there were already 1,000 miles of inland canals in Britain; over the next 70 years 3,000 more miles of canals were constructed. Britain was also richly endowed with coal and iron ore, and these minerals were often located close together in counties such as Staffordshire, Northumberland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire.
Most importantly perhaps, Britain could draw on an ample supply of customers for its goods, both at home and overseas. Its colonies fed it with raw materials while also serving as captive customers. And its expanding population meant buoyant demand at home even in wartime when foreign trade was disrupted. The best illustration of these advantages is the cotton industry. Its Indian settlements supplied Britain with ever-increasing amounts of raw cotton, and annual cloth production soared from 50,000 pieces of cloth in 1770 to 400,000 pieces in 1800. Much of this output in textiles was consumed by the home market. Some scholars have argued that the increased wearing of cotton (which could be easily washed) as distinct from woolen clothes (which could not) improved health conditions, thus contributing to Britain’s population expansion. Britain during the French Revolution
The outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789 initially heightened British national confidence. Some Britons welcomed it in the belief that civil commotion would weaken their prime European competitor. Many others, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft among them, felt confident that revolutionary France would become a new and enlightened state and that this process would in turn accelerate political, religious, and social change in Britain. By contrast, Edmund Burke’s fierce denunciation in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) met with little immediate support, even among the political elite. Only when the new French regime guillotined Louis XVI and threatened to invade Holland did mainstream opinion in Britain begin to change and harden. In February 1793 Britain and France went to war.
There has been much debate over the degree to which British opinion on the war was united. Some historians have argued that Thomas Paine’s best-seller, The Rights of Man (1791–92), fostered mass enthusiasm for democratic reform and mass alienation from Britain’s ruling class. Paine attacked the monarchy, aristocracy, and all forms of privilege, and he demanded not only manhood suffrage and peace but also public education, old-age pensions, maternity benefits, and full employment. While he did not directly advocate a redistribution of property to fund these reforms, some contemporary radicals certainly did. A Newcastle schoolmaster, Thomas Spence, for example, issued a penny periodical, Pig’s Meat (a reference to Burke’s savage description of the British masses as “the swinish multitude”), calling for the forcible nationalization of land.
These developments in radical ideology were made more significant by simultaneous developments in radical organization. In January 1792 a small coterie of London artisans led by a shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, formed a society to press for manhood suffrage. It cost only a shilling to join, and the weekly subscription was set at a penny so as to attract as many members as possible. These plebeian reformers, making use of Britain’s growing communications network, corresponded with similar societies that had sprung up in response to the Revolution in the English provinces and in Scotland. In October 1793 Scottish radicals held what they styled a British Convention in Edinburgh, and a few of the English corresponding societies managed to send delegates there. They issued a manifesto demanding universal manhood suffrage and annual elections and affirming their faith in the principles of the French Revolution.
In terms of the number of men involved, these initiatives were always limited. Corresponding societies were far more widespread in London and the industrial north than in predominantly rural areas such as central Wales. Only a small proportion of rural and industrial labourers, as distinct from artisans, seems to have joined them. Even in the radical bastion of Sheffield (population 31,000) the local corresponding society attracted only 2,000 members, and most of these did not attend its meetings regularly. A minority of these activists were overtly Francophile and some may have wanted a French invasion of Britain and the establishment of a republican regime. Most corresponding-society members, however, seem to have been deeply attached to the British constitution and to have wanted only to reform it. But if these societies were not extensive or proto-revolutionary, they were still important and recognized as such. Contemporaries realized that for the first time in the 18th century working men throughout the nation were beginning to organize to achieve political change.
Pitt’s ministry acted ruthlessly to suppress them. Leading Scottish radicals were arrested and given harsh sentences. In England habeas corpus was temporarily suspended, laws were passed prohibiting public meetings and demonstrations, and Thomas Hardy was tried for treason but acquitted. By 1795 the corresponding societies had formally ceased to meet. A minority of radicals, however, continued to agitate for reform in secret, some of them engaging in sedition. Particularly prominent in this respect were Irish dissidents. By now large numbers of Irish immigrants lived and worked in British towns. Some of them sympathized with the Irish Rising of 1798 and formed secret societies to overturn the government. Several Irish agitators were involved in the Spithead and Nore naval mutinies of 1797 that for a time immobilized the Royal Navy. In 1803 an Irishman and former shipmate of Horatio Nelson, Edward Despard, was executed in London for plotting a coup d’état. Just how dangerous and well-supported these various incidents were is uncertain. But there can be no doubt that successive British wartime administrations felt obliged to devote extensive resources to maintaining order at home. even though they were also fighting an unprecedentedly massive war abroad. The Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were massive in their geographic scope, ranging, as far as Britain was concerned, over all of the five continents. They were massive, too, in terms of expense. From 1793 to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 the wars cost Britain more than £1,650,000,000. Only 25 percent of this sum was raised by government loans, the rest coming largely from taxation, not least from the income tax that was introduced in 1798. But the wars were massive most of all in terms of manpower. Between 1789 and 1815 the British army had to expand more than sixfold, to about a quarter of a million men. The Royal Navy, bedrock of British defense, aggression, trade, and empire, grew further and faster still. Before the wars it had employed 16,000 men; by the end of them, it employed more than 140,000. Because there was an acute danger between 1797 and 1805 that France would invade Britain, the civil defense force also had to be expanded. The militia was increased, and by 1803 more than 380,000 men were acting as volunteers in home-based cavalry and infantry regiments. In all, one in four adult males in Britain may have been in uniform by the early 19th century.
Despite these financial and military exertions, British governments found it extremely difficult to defeat France. In part this was because Pitt the Younger’s abilities were more suited to peace than to war. But the main reason the conflict was so protracted was France’s overwhelming military superiority on land. The historian Paul Kennedy has written of British and French power in this period:
Like the whale and the elephant, each was by far the largest creature in its own domain. But British control of the sea routes could not by itself destroy the French hegemony in Europe, nor could Napoleon’s military mastery reduce the islanders to surrender.
The first coalition of anti-French states, consisting of Britain, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and Austria, disintegrated by 1796. A British expeditionary force to aid Flanders and Holland was defeated, and Holland was occupied by the French. By 1797 the cost of maintaining its own forces and subsidizing those of its European allies had brought Britain to the verge of bankruptcy. For a time the Bank of England suspended payments in cash.
The British response to these developments was to concentrate on home defense and to consolidate its imperial and naval assets. Britain won a string of important naval victories in 1797, and in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile, Nelson defeated the French fleet anchored off Egypt, thereby safeguarding British possessions in India. Pitt also tried to solve the problem of Ireland. In 1801 the Act of Union took effect amalgamating Ireland with Great Britain and creating the United Kingdom. The Dublin Parliament ceased to exist, and Ireland’s Protestant voters were allowed to return 100 MPs to Westminster. Pitt had hoped to sweeten the union by accompanying it with Roman Catholic emancipation, that is, by allowing Irish Catholics to vote and hold state office if they possessed the necessary property qualifications. George III opposed this concession, however, and Catholics were not admitted to full British citizenship until 1829. Pitt resigned and was succeeded as first minister by Henry Addington, the deeply conservative son of a successful doctor. It was his administration that signed the short-lived Treaty of Amiens with France in 1802.
War broke out again in May 1803. Once again, Britain demonstrated its power at sea but, until 1809, was unable to win substantial victories on land. Its fleet captured St. Lucia, Tobago, Dutch Guiana, the Cape of Good Hope, French Guiana, Java, Martinique, and other West Indian and African territories. Most importantly, in October 1805 Nelson defeated the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, thereby preventing an invasion of Britain. Napoleon, however, inflicted serious military defeats on the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians and invaded Spain. At one stage Britain’s only remaining European allies were Sweden, Portugal, Sicily, and Sardinia; in short, the country was without any significant allies at all. Political leadership was uneven and sometimes weak, and the long duration of the war and its damaging effects on trade aroused increasing criticism at home. Pitt had resumed his post as chancellor of the Exchequer and first lord of the Treasury in May 1804, but he died worn out by work and drink in January 1806. None of the three men who succeeded him as premier, William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville (1806–07), William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, duke of Portland (1807–09), and Spencer Perceval (1809–12), was able to establish himself in power for very long or to capture the public imagination.
Yet the war began to turn in Britain’s favour in 1809, in large part because of Napoleon’s strategic mistakes. When the Spanish rebelled against French rule, substantial British armed forces were dispatched to assist them under the command of Arthur Wellesley, later duke of Wellington. Spain’s new anti-French posture meant that Spain was once again open to British manufactured goods, as were its colonies in Latin America. For a time this helped to reduce the commercial community’s criticism of the conduct of the war. But demands for peace revived during the slump of 1811–12 and intensified when British relations with the United States, a vitally important market, began to deteriorate. One of the main irritants was the so-called Orders in Council, prohibiting neutral powers (like the United States) from trading with France. In 1812 commercial lobbies in Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and Birmingham succeeded in getting the orders repealed, an indication of the growing political weight exercised by the manufacturing interest in Britain. Although this failed to prevent the Anglo-American War of 1812, neither Britain’s trade nor its war efforts in Europe was seriously damaged by that conflict. Russia’s break with Napoleon in 1812 opened up large markets for British goods in the Baltic and in northern Europe.
From 1812 onward Napoleon’s defeat was merely a matter of time. In June 1813 Wellington defeated the French army in Spain at Victoria. The forces of Austria, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia expelled the French from Germany in the Battle of Leipzig (October 1813). This victory allowed Wellington, who had already crossed the Pyrenees, to advance upon Bayonne and Toulouse. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, played the leading part in negotiating the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814, which clarified allied war aims (including the expulsion of Napoleon), tightened allied unity, and made provision for a durable European settlement. The subsequent squabbles over the spoils of war were interrupted for a time when Napoleon escaped from his genteel exile on Elba and fought his last campaign from March to June 1815. Although his final defeat at Waterloo was accomplished by the allied armies, Britain secured prime credit. This textbook victory was to help Britain dominate Europe and much of the world for the next 100 years. Imperial expansion
Britain’s ultimate success against Napoleon, like its importance in this period as a whole, owed much to its wealth—its capacity to raise loans through its financial machinery and revenue through the prosperity of its inhabitants and the extent of its trade. But British success also owed much to the power of its navy and to the energy and aggressiveness of its ruling class, which was particularly apparent in the imperial expansion of this period. Britain sought to extend its control by legislation, by war, and by individual enterprise. The Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707 and with Ireland in 1801 tightened London’s rule over its Celtic periphery, as did the laws passed to erode the autonomy of the Scottish Highlands after the rebellion of 1745. In the 1760s Britain sought not only to increase the revenue it gained from its North American colonies but also to shore up its military and administrative influence there. These measures failed, but Britain had more success with its Indian possessions. Between 1768 and 1774, in fact, the House of Commons devoted far more time to Indian affairs than to those of North America. Its discussions culminated in the passing of the India Act in 1784, which indicatively increased the government’s authority over the East India Company and therefore over Britain’s possessions in India.
Every major war Britain engaged in during this period increased its colonial power. The Seven Years’ War was particularly successful in this respect, and so were the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1793 and 1815 Britain gained 20 colonies, including Tobago, Mauritius, Malta, St. Lucia, the Cape, and the United Provinces of Āgra and Oudh in India. By 1820 the total population of the territories it governed was 200 million, 26 percent of the world’s total population. Not all of these acquisitions were formally directed by London. Captain James Cook’s explorations of Australia and New Zealand after 1770 were in part an exercise in private enterprise and scientific inquiry. Nonetheless, British settlement of Australia at New South Wales began in 1787, in part because the mother country needed another repository for transported convicts previously sent to the North American colonies. The East India Company also retained considerable initiative in its military strategies. In 1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles seized Singapore for the company and not on London’s instructions. But, however acquired, all these acquisitions added to Britain’s power and reputation. It was no accident, perhaps, that its two national anthems, “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” were composed in this period. For the privileged and the rich, this was preeminently an era of confidence and arrogance. Linda J. Colley Great Britain, 1815–1914 Britain after the Napoleonic Wars State and society
The relationship between state and society in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars assumed the shape that was to remain apparent into the 20th and 21st centuries. In contrast to most other European societies, many of the functions performed by central government elsewhere were performed in Britain by groups of self-governing citizens, either on an elective, but unpaid, official basis, as in the institutions of local government, or through voluntary organizations. Britain in the 19th century did not develop a strong bureaucratic element with interests of its own, a strong sense of popular expectations concerning the role of the state, nor a strong popular sense of identification with it. This understanding of the limited role of government (contemporaries would have used this term rather than the “state”) reflected and served to further entrench what in the 18th century had become a relatively homogeneous and stable society—relative to the great majority of European states, that is. This was particularly so after the integration of Scotland into what was increasingly, with the clear exception of Ireland, a United Kingdom. Internal differences of course remained strong, but, nonetheless, linguistic and geographical unity was paralleled by the increasing integration of communications, seen in the improved road system of the first three decades of the new century, a precursor of the integration later evident in the railway system.
However, this decentralized state combined considerable strength with considerable flexibility; indeed, these two characteristics were mutually reinforcing. Even in the 18th century, central government showed sensitivity to the dangers of trespassing upon the limits of consent. Although in no sense a democratic state, this combination of strength and liberality was made possible by the close link between central government and the decentralized channels through which it ruled. If ruling at a distance often, this rule was all the stronger for being experienced as a kind of freedom. This experience in turn strengthened central government, enabling it all the more firmly to coordinate decentralized rule.
Nonetheless, if liberal, the late 18th- and early 19th-century state was marked by a strong sense of rights, enforceable by law and enjoyed by all members of the community, however unequally, including rights of subsistence by means of the poor-relief system. However limited, the propertied and the powerful felt it their responsibility to uphold these rights, rights that they and the poor and unpropertied regarded as the birthright of the “Free-Born Englishman.” Those with governmental responsibility did not generally try to exclude the mass of the population from at least some participation in the regulation of their own lives. In the courts, by the means of petition, and through attendance at parish meetings, for example, the less powerful could exert some influence. This influence, among both the high and the low in society, was felt to operate at the level of the representation of communities, rather than the individual, and was reflected in the system of parliamentary representation itself. This sense of rights also took the form of strong attachments to customary observances and regulations—for instance, those associated with particular trades and localities, such as the parish. The country was governed through a process of negotiation and reciprocity, albeit between unequal sides, in which what has been called a “rebellious but traditional popular culture” set limits on the power of the governors, while at the same time respecting this power when justly implemented.
This was to change in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The moves of William Pitt, the Younger, toward more professional, economically liberal, politically authoritarian government were carried forward by the “liberal Tory” governments of the years after 1815. This new understanding of government built upon the old liberality of the 18th-century state but divested it of many of the rights intrinsic to it. This involved a reconstruction of the roles of Parliament, the executive, and the party, with the purpose of reducing these to the provision of a framework within which individuals and institutions could operate with maximum safety and freedom. While retaining and modernizing its basic public order and foreign policy functions—thereby retaining at the centre a strong directive power—this new notion of government involved stripping away what were perceived to be the great premodern accretions of intrusive legislation, regulation, and custom, particularly in relation to economic activity and the “Old Corruption” of the ancien régime.
Instead, what would be constructed were mechanisms that would facilitate the automatic operations of the “natural order” believed to lie beneath and to be prevented from its beneficial operation by the unnecessary weight of custom and regulation created over the centuries. Liberated in this way, it was thought, individuals and the economy would be set free to achieve their full potential. This understanding of government was supported by particular appropriations of political economy, utilitarian thought, and evangelical religion, whereby the workings of the political system could be equated with the workings of Providence. This understanding of government conflicted with older notions of rights and responsibilities, so that arguments about the role of a strong central state and institutional and personal freedom, as well as the question of what was public and what was private, were at the heart of political discussion throughout the century and, indeed, through the course of the 20th century too. These arguments were reflected in the uneven movement toward the liberalization of society and the economy in the first two decades of the century, though of the direction of this movement there could be no doubt. The political situation
The end of the long wars against Napoleon did not usher in a period of peace and contentment in Britain. Instead, the postwar period was marked by open social conflicts, most of them exacerbated by an economic slump. As the long-run process of industrialization continued, with a rising population and a cyclic pattern of relative prosperity and depression, many social conflicts centred on questions of what contemporaries called “corn and currency”—that is, agriculture and credit. Others were directly related to the growth of factories and towns and to the parallel development of middle-class and working-class consciousness.
The agriculturalists, who were predominant in Parliament, attempted to safeguard their wartime economic position by securing, in 1815, a new Corn Law designed to keep up grain prices and rents by taxing imported grain. Their political power enabled them to maintain economic protection. Many of the industrialists, an increasingly vociferous group outside Parliament, resented the passing of the Corn Law because it favoured the landed interests. Others objected to the return in 1819 of the gold standard, which was put into effect in 1821. Whatever their outlook, industrialists were beginning to demand a voice in Parliament.
The term middle classes began to be used more frequently in social and political debate. So too were working class and classes. Recent historical research indicates that the awareness of class identity was not simply the direct outcome of economic and social experience but was articulated in terms of public discourse, particularly in the political sphere. For example, claims to be middle-class were actively contested in the political life of the time, and different groups, for different purposes, sought to appropriate or stigmatize the term. In the same manner, working-class identity was formed differently by different political and social movements, and the poorer sections of society were politically mobilized around collective identities that were not only about class but also about the poor (versus the propertied) and especially “the people” (versus the privileged and the powerful). This understanding of how collective identity was politically shaped according to the cultural contexts of the time has marked the formation of collective identities more broadly in British history down to the present.
Town and village labourers were also unrepresented in Parliament, and they bore the main brunt of the postwar difficulties. Bad harvests and high food prices left them hungry and discontented, but it was as much their political as their economic situation that served as the basis of their mobilization. However, new forms of industrial production, as well as the growth of towns with structures of communication that were quite different from those of villages or preindustrial urban communities, enabled new kinds of political appeal and of collective identity to take root. There were radical riots in 1816, in 1817, and particularly in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre, when there was a clash in Manchester between workers and troops of the yeomanry, or local citizenry.
The Six Acts of 1819, associated with Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, the home secretary, were designed to reduce disturbances and to check the extension of radical propaganda and organization. They provoked sharp criticism even from the more moderate Whigs as well as from the radicals, and they did not dispel the fear and suspicion that seemed to be threatening the stability of the whole social order. There was a revival of confidence after 1821, as economic conditions improved and the government itself embarked on a program of economic reform. Even after the collapse of the economic boom of 1824–25, no attempt was made to return to policies of repression.
There was a change of tone, if not of principle, in foreign policy, as in home affairs, after the suicide of the foreign secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. Castlereagh, who had represented Britain at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, pursued a policy of nonintervention, refusing to follow up the peace settlement he had signed, which entailed provisions for converting the Quadruple Alliance of the victorious wartime allies into an instrument of police action to suppress liberalism and nationalism anywhere in Europe. His successor at the Foreign Office, George Canning, propounded British objectives with a strong appeal to British public opinion and emphasized differences between British viewpoints and interests and those of the European great powers more than their common interests. In 1824 he recognized the independence of Spain’s American colonies, declaring in a famous phrase that he was calling “the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.” In 1826 he used British force to defend constitutional government in Portugal, whereas in the tension-ridden area of the eastern Mediterranean, he supported the cause of Greek independence. His policies and styles were reasserted by Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, who became foreign minister in 1830.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
The situation in Ireland heralded the end of one pillar of the old order—namely, legal restrictions on the civil liberties of Roman Catholics. Irish disorders centred, as they had since the Act of Union in 1801, on the issue of Catholic emancipation, a favourite cause of the Whigs, who had been out of power since 1807. During the 18th century, Catholics in England had achieved a measure of unofficial toleration, but in Ireland restrictions against Catholics holding office were still rigorously enforced. In 1823 Daniel O’Connell, a Dublin Roman Catholic lawyer, founded the Catholic Association, the object of which was to give Roman Catholics in Ireland the same political and civil freedoms as Protestants. Employing pioneering techniques of organization, involving the mobilization of the large numbers of the poor and the excluded in great open-air demonstrations, O’Connell introduced a new form of mass politics that galvanized opinion in Ireland while at the same time mobilized radical allies in England. The result was the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829.
The death in June 1830 of George IV (whose reign had begun in 1820) heralded the end of another pillar of the old order, the unreformed system of parliamentary representation. In a year of renewed economic distress and of revolution in France, when the political reform issue was being raised again at public meetings in different parts of Britain, Wellington, the military hero of the Napoleonic Wars who had assumed the premiership in 1828, had not made matters easier for himself by expressing complete confidence in the constitution as it stood. In consequence he resigned, and the new king, William IV (1830–37), invited Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, to form a government. Grey’s cabinet was predominantly aristocratic—including Canningites as well as Whigs—but the new prime minister, like most of his colleagues, was committed to introducing a measure of parliamentary reform. For this reason, 1830 marked a real parting of the ways. At last there was a break in the continuity of regime that dated from the victory of William Pitt, the Younger, over Charles James Fox in the 1780s and that had only temporarily been interrupted in 1806–07. Moreover, the new government, aristocratic or not, was the parent of most of the Whig-Liberal administrations of the next 35 years.
2nd Earl Grey, painting attributed to Thomas Phillips, about 1820; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
The year 1830 was also one of economic and social grievances, with religious issues still being thrown into the melee. In the Midlands and in northern towns and cities, well-organized political reform movements were winning widespread support. Corn Laws and Poor Laws, as well as currency and game laws, were all being attacked, while in the industrial north the demand was growing for new laws to protect factory labour. It was in such an atmosphere that the new Whig-led government prepared its promised reform bill. Early and mid-Victorian Britain State and society
The implementation of the liberal, regulative state emerging after the Napoleonic Wars involved a number of new departures. The first of these concerned the new machinery of government, which, instead of relying on patronage and custom, involved an institutionalized bureaucracy. This was evident in the development of the factory inspectorate, established by the 1833 Factory Act, though the characteristic way in which the state institutionalized itself was by means of local bodies administering such areas as the fast-developing realm of “public health” and the Poor Law. In fact, towns and cities themselves became very important new locations for the expression of the power of the decentralized state. After the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, local government, if developing unevenly, was a major part of the new machinery of government. There was a great flowering of civic administration and civic pride during the early and mid-Victorian period in Britain. This was particularly reflected in the architecture and infrastructure of British cities—one of the most notable legacies of the period. Magnificent town halls, libraries, concert halls, museums, and, not least, the great civil engineering projects of the time all inculcated the virtues of civic identity and therefore of instituting civic power.
Beyond the machinery of government, the Poor Law of 1834 represented the clearest example of the new ideological departures that characterized the liberal state. Its encouragement of self-supporting actors within the greater scheme of a natural order expressed the mixture of utilitarianism and evangelicalism that was characteristic of the new order. New areas of state action were also evident in education as well as in factory reform, and with these departures a new kind of bureaucratic expertise arose. Expert bureaucrats from outside of government, including the physician and medical reformer James Kay-Shuttleworth in education and the lawyer Edwin Chadwick in Poor Law and health reform, were brought in to advise the government. Figures such as these indicate the permeability of the Victorian state and its closeness to civil society, for they established their reputations and gained their expertise outside the attenuated structure of the state bureaucracy. From the 1850s onward, however, centralized bureaucracy accrued to itself increasing powers. The reforms of 1853–54 engineered by Charles Edward Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote instituted, by means of public and competitive examination, a system based not on patronage but on merit. In fact, public examination was designed to create meritocracy of a very particular sort, one based on the classically educated Englishman of Oxford and Cambridge universities. For the first time in British history and the history of Oxbridge (the two universities viewed as an institution), though in both cases decidedly not the last time, the ideology of merit was employed to reproduce a particular kind of ruling elite. This elite was built upon the idea of public duty, inculcated by an Oxbridge education, but above all it was based upon the notion that the state and its bureaucracy could be neutral. This neutrality was to stem from the open, competitive examination itself but also from the idea of that the neutrality of the civil service could be guaranteed by the ethics of the Oxbridge-educated English gentleman.
Nonetheless, gentleman of an even higher social station than that of these new civil servants—that is, the aristocracy and gentry—were still very much a part of government, and, despite all these reforms, the role of patronage remained important. The mid-Victorian implementation of the liberal state by the government of William Gladstone therefore still had considerable work to do. Gladstone, Whig and later Liberal prime minister, was the major single influence on the 19th-century liberal state and arguably the most gifted British politician of his time. The liberal state’s attempt to rule through freedom and through the natural order was implemented not merely in social but also in economic terms: Gladstonian finance, particularly the taxation system, was aimed at encouraging the belief that all groups in society had a responsibility for sanctioning and financing government activity and that therefore they should have an incentive to keep it under control. Economic and social government came together dramatically in the case of the Irish Potato Famine in the late 1840s. The outcome of the famine, a disaster for Ireland involving the death or emigration of millions of people, has to be seen in the context of the long-term agenda of the liberal state, which included Ireland as a sort of laboratory for experimentation in this new kind of government (India was a similar kind of laboratory). The experimental methods in the Irish case involved an agenda including population control, the Poor Law relief system, and the consolidation of property through a variety of means, including emigration, the elimination of smallholdings, and the sale of large but bankrupt estates. The government measured the success of its relief policies in terms of this agenda rather than its effectiveness in addressing the immediate question of need. The goal of this agenda was the creation of a society of “rational” small-farm production on the model of the natural order of the free market, rather than the “irrational” production of a mass of small peasant proprietors.
William E. Gladstone.Culver Pictures
However, subsequent implementation of the liberal state—for instance, that of Gladstone—should not be seen simply as guided by the amoral market. In the third quarter of the century, Gladstone’s version of the liberal state represented the apotheosis of the approach to government favoured by the reformer Sir Robert Peel (the Conservative prime minister from 1834 to 1835 and again from 1841 to 1846). This version of the liberal state took the form of an individualism ostensibly based not upon greed and self-interest but upon probity, self-control, and a sense of duty and Christian morality. In this regard, as indeed much more widely in British history, this version of individualism accorded with many of the beliefs of society in general—not least those held by the working classes—so that the attempt to rule through the moral characteristics of society proved in many respects to be an extraordinarily successful venture in government. Rather like the thinking behind the reformed civil service, the moral rule at the heart of Gladstonian economic reform was designed to establish the neutrality, and therefore the high moral ground, of government: if government were independent of a self-regulating economy, it would also be free from the influence of powerful economic interests. This view of liberal government in the period of Tory power instituted after 1874 changed little and went unchallenged until the late 19th century, even if Tory administrations had a somewhat more positive idea of the state. The political situation Whig reforms
Whig interest in parliamentary reform went back to the 18th century, and Grey himself provided a link between two separate periods of public agitation. Yet, in the country as a whole, there were at least three approaches to the reform question. Middle-class reformers were anxious to secure representation for commercial and industrial interests and for towns and cities such as Birmingham and Manchester that had no direct voice in Parliament. “Popular radicals,” of both middle-class and working-class origin, were concerned with asserting rights as well as with relieving distress. “Philosophic radicals,” the followers of the utilitarianism of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, were strong ideological protagonists of parliamentary reform but were deeply hostile to both the arguments and the tactics of the popular radicals, except when confident that they were in a position to deploy or control them. Agitation in the country kept the reform question on the boil between 1830 and 1832, while an aloof Grey faced unprecedented constitutional difficulties with both the king and Parliament.
Membership change, by county, in the House of Commons as a result of the Reform Act of 1832 (England only).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The Reform Act of 1832 (see Reform Bill) was in no sense a democratic measure. It defined more clearly than ever before the distinction between those who were and those who were not sanctioned to wield power, and it did so entirely in terms of property ownership, entrenching the power of landed wealth as well as acknowledging new sources of power in the middle classes and the consequent claims upon the rights and virtues of their new political identity. The bill entailed a substantial redistribution of parliamentary constituencies and a change in the franchise. The total electorate was increased by 57 percent to 217,000, but artisans, labourers, and large sections of the lower middle classes still remained disenfranchised. No radical demands were met, even though the manner of passing the bill had demonstrated the force of organized opinion in the country, particularly in the large cities, which were also now given representation.
Returned with a huge majority in the general election of December 1832, the Whigs carried out a number of other important reforms. A statute in 1833 ended slavery in the British colonies; in that same year the East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade and became a purely governing body with no commercial functions.
The new Poor Law of 1834 turned out to be an unpopular measure in many parts of the country, however, and led to violent outbreaks of disorder. Its basic principle—that “outdoor poor relief” (i.e., outside the workhouse) should cease and that conditions in workhouses should be “less eligible” (i.e., less inviting) than the worst conditions in the labour market outside—was as bitterly attacked by writers such as Thomas Carlyle as it was by the workingmen themselves.
All of these contentious issues multiplied after 1836, when a financial crisis ushered in a period of economic depression accompanied by a series of bad harvests. Social conflict, never far from the surface, became more open and dramatic. Grey’s successor, William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, proved incapable of finding effective answers to any of the pressing financial, economic, and social questions of the day, but he did prove adept in his dealings with Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1837.
Queen Victoria's coronation, 1837.Photos.com/Jupiterimages Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League
As the economic skies darkened after 1836 and prophets such as Carlyle anticipated cataclysmic upheaval, the two most disgruntled groups in society were the industrial workers and their employers. Each group developed new forms of organization, and each turned from local to national extra-parliamentary action. The two most important organizations were the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League. Chartism drew on a multiplicity of workers’ grievances, extending working-class consciousness as it grew. The Anti-Corn Law League, founded as a national organization in Manchester in 1839, was the spearhead of middle-class energies, and it enjoyed the advantage not only of lavish funds but also of a single-point program—the repeal of the restrictive Corn Laws.
Chartist demonstration, Kennington Common, 1848; illustration from The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (1900) by Robert Wilson.From The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, volume II, by Robert Wilson (Cassell and Company, Limited, 1900)
Taking its name from the People’s Charter published in London in May 1838, Chartism aimed at parliamentary reform. The charter contained six points, all of them political and all with a radical pedigree: (1) annual parliaments, (2) universal male suffrage, (3) the ballot, (4) no property qualifications for members of Parliament, (5) payment of members of Parliament, and (6) equal electoral districts. These were old demands that would have been supported by 18th-century radicals. Localized Poor Law and factory reform agitations centring on such grievances were subsumed in Chartism because of its commitment to national political action. However, for a variety of reasons—not least that the politicians had been able again to convey the sense that the state was benign and neutral and not, as Chartists perceived it, repressive and sectional—the mass movement of Chartism ultimately failed.
By contrast, the Anti-Corn Law League, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, met with success. It employed every device of propaganda, including the use of new media of communication, such as the Penny Post, which was introduced in 1840. The formula of the league was a simple one designed to secure working-class as well as middle-class support. Repeal of the Corn Laws, it was argued, would settle the two great issues that faced Britain in the “hungry forties”—securing the prosperity of industry and guaranteeing the livelihood of the poor. So enormous was religion’s influence on the league that when it identified the landlord as the only barrier to salvation, it meant religious as well economic salvation. Most Chartists were unconvinced by this logic, but, in a landed Parliament, Peel carried the measure against his own party.
John Bright.Photos.com/Jupiterimages Peel and the Peelite heritage
Peel was the presiding genius of a powerful administration, strictly supervising the business of each separate branch of government; nevertheless, a substantial section of the squirearchy rebelled, roused by the brilliant speeches of a young politician, Benjamin Disraeli, who in his writings had already approached the “condition of England question” in a totally different style than that of Peel. The results of repeal were important politically as well as economically. As a result of the split, party boundaries remained blurred until 1859, with the “Peelites” retaining a sense of identity even after Peel’s premature death following a riding accident in 1850. Some of them, particularly Gladstone, eventually became leaders of the late 19th-century Liberal Party, which emerged from the mid-century confusion. The protectionists, most of whom abandoned protection after 1852, formed the nucleus (around Edward Stanley, earl of Derby, and Disraeli) of the later Conservative Party, but they were unable to secure a majority in any election until 1874. The minority governments they formed in 1852, 1858, and 1866 lacked any secure sense of authority. The Whigs, themselves divided into factions, returned to office in 1847 and held it for most of the mid-century years, but they were often dependent on support from radical and Irish colleagues. There was no time between 1846 and 1866, however, when extra-parliamentary agitation assumed the dimensions it had between 1838 and 1846.
Sir Robert Peel, detail of an oil painting by John Linnell, 1838; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London
Matters of religion helped divide the limited mid-Victorian electorate, with the Nonconformists (Dissenters) encouraging, from their local bases, the development of liberalism and with the Anglican churchmen often—but by no means universally—supporting the Conservative Party. Nonelectors’ associations (representing the disenfranchised) tried with varying degrees of success to keep radical issues alive, but party divisions remained based on customary allegiance as much as on careful scrutiny of issues, and there was still considerable scope for bribery at election times. The civil service might be pure, but the electors often were not. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1854 provided a more exact definition of bribery than there had been before, but it was not until a further act of 1883 that election expenses were rigorously controlled. It was then that, quite emphatically, parliamentary representation became not a matter of communities but of individuals, a process taken a considerable step further in 1872 with institution of electoral secrecy by the Ballot Act.
The prestige of the individual members of Parliament was high, and the fragmentation of parties after 1846 allowed them considerable independence. Groups of members supporting particular economic interests, especially the railways, could often determine parliamentary strategies. Nevertheless, contemporaries feared such interests less than they feared what was often called the most dangerous of all interests, executive government. Powerful government and large-scale “organic” reform were considered dangerous, and even those radicals who supported organic reform, like Cobden and Bright, were suspicious of powerful government. Palmerston
Lord Palmerston, who became prime minister for the first time in 1855, stood out as the dominant political personality of mid-Victorian Britain precisely because he was opposed to dramatic change and because he knew through long experience how to maneuver politics within the half-reformed constitution. In a period when it was difficult to collect parliamentary majorities, he often forced decisions, as in the general election of 1857, on the simple question “Are you for or against me?” He also was skillful in using the growing power of the press to reinforce his influence. At a time of party confusion, when the queen might well have played a key part in politics, Palmerston found the answer to royal opposition in popular prestige, carefully stage-managed. His chief preoccupation was with foreign affairs, and his approach was, on several occasions, diametrically opposed to that of the court.
Lord Palmerston, c. 1860BBC Hulton Picture Library
There was no contradiction between his views on domestic and foreign policy. He preferred the British system of constitutional government, resting on secure social foundations, to Continental absolutism, but, like Canning, his predecessor as foreign secretary, Palmerston was anxious above all else to advance the interests of Britain as he saw them. The supremacy of British sea power, British economic ascendancy, and political divisions inside each of the main countries of Europe before and after the Revolutions of 1848 gave him his opportunity.
His interventions were not confined to Europe. In 1840–41 he had forced the Chinese ports open to foreign trade, and, by the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), he had acquired Hong Kong for Britain. In 1857 he went to war in China again and, when defeated in Parliament, appealed triumphantly to the country. He also intervened in Russia. The Crimean War (1853–56) was designed to curb what were interpreted as Russian designs on the Ottoman Empire and a Russian threat to British power in the eastern Mediterranean. The outcome greatly favoured the British and their main allies, the French and the Ottoman Empire. Although Palmerston’s government was defeated in 1858, he was back again as prime minister, for the last time, a year later.
During Palmerston’s remarkable ministry of 1859–65, which included Peel’s successor as prime minister, Lord John Russell, as foreign secretary and the Peelite Gladstone as chancellor of the Exchequer, it was impossible for Britain to dominate the international scene as effectively as in previous periods of Palmerstonian power. With efficient military power at his disposal, the Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, proved more than a match for Palmerston. The union of modern Italy, which Palmerston supported, the American Civil War, in which his sympathies were with the Confederacy, and the rise of Bismarck’s Germany, which he did not understand, were developments that reshaped the world in which he had been able to achieve so much by forceful opportunism. When Palmerston died, in October 1865, it was clear that in foreign relations as well as in home politics there would have to be what Gladstone described as “a new commencement.” Gladstone and Disraeli
In the large urban constituencies the demand for a new and active liberalism had already been gaining ground, and at Westminster itself Gladstone was beginning to identify himself not only with the continued advance of free trade but also with the demand for parliamentary reform. In 1864 he forecast new directions in politics when he stated that the burden of proof concerning the case for reform rested not with the reformers but with their opponents. A year later he lost his seat representing the University of Oxford and was returned as member of Parliament for a populous Lancashire constituency. The timing was right, because, after the death of Palmerston, the question of parliamentary reform was reopened and the Second Reform Bill was passed in 1867.
New Prime Minister William Gladstone and outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, cartoon from Punch, or the London Charivari, Feb. 27, 1969.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
The reform of 1867 almost doubled the electorate, adding 938,000 new names to the register and extending the franchise to many workingmen in the towns and cities. The county franchise was not substantially changed, but 45 new seats were created by taking one seat from existing borough constituencies with a population of fewer than 10,000. Disraeli hoped that, in return for his support in passing this measure, urban workers would vote for him. He believed rightly that many of them were Conservatives already by instinct and allegiance, but in 1868, in the first general election under the new system, it was Gladstone who was returned as prime minister.
In both parties, new forces were stirring at the local level, and energetic efforts were under way to organize the electorate and the political parties along new lines. Even though Gladstone resumed power, it became apparent that the popular vote was not Liberal by divine right. In several parts of England, particularly in the industrial north, there developed a strong popular Toryism, which in Lancashire, a great centre of the cotton industry, was based partly upon deference to industrial employers, partly upon dislike of Irish immigrants, partly upon popular Protestant associations with Englishness, and not least upon what to many was a surprisingly strong support for the principles of church and state.
With the development of central party machinery and local organization, the role of the crown was reduced during this period to that of merely ratifying the result of elections. Although the queen greatly preferred Disraeli to Gladstone, she could not keep Gladstone out. Her obvious partisanship made some of her acts look unconstitutional, but they would not have been deemed unconstitutional in any previous period of history. The public during this period was more interested in the political leaders than in the queen, who lived in retirement and was sharply criticized in sections of the press.
Gladstone’s first administration had several notable achievements: the disestablishment and partial disendowment of the Irish church, accomplished in 1869 in face of the opposition of the House of Lords; the Irish Land Act of 1870, providing some safeguards to Irish tenant farmers; William Edward Forster’s Education Act of the same year, the first national act dealing with primary education; the Trade-Union Act of 1871, legalizing unions and giving them the protection of the courts; and the Ballot Act of 1872, introducing secret voting. Moreover, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were opened to Nonconformists, or Dissenters (Protestants who did not conform to the practices of the Church of England), while between 1868 and 1873 the cumbrous military machine was renovated by Gladstone’s secretary for war, Edward Cardwell. The system of dual responsibility of commander in chief and secretary for war also was abolished, and the subordination of the former to the latter was asserted. In 1873 the Judicature Act, amended in 1876, simplified the tangle of legal institutions and procedures. Gladstone, throughout his life, preferred cheap and free government to expensive and socially committed government. He was anxious indeed in 1873 to abolish income tax, on which the public finances of the future were to depend.
Many of these reforms did not satisfy affected interests. The Irish Church Disestablishment Act failed to placate the Irish and alarmed many English churchmen, while the Education Act was passed only in the face of bitter opposition from Nonconformists, who objected that Forster’s system did not break the power of the church over primary education. Although the act was extended in 1880 when primary education was made compulsory and in 1891 when it became free, there were often noisy struggles between churchmen and Nonconformists on the new school boards set up locally under Forster’s act. If the Education Act alienated many Nonconformists, the Licensing Bills of 1871 and 1872 alienated their enemies, the brewers. In the general election of 1874, therefore, months after Disraeli had described the Liberal leaders in one of his many memorable phrases as a “range of exhausted volcanoes,” the brewers threw all their influence behind the Conservatives. “We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer,” Gladstone complained.
In his subsequent ministry, with the assistance of men like Richard Cross, the home secretary, Disraeli justified at last his reputation as a social reformer. By the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875, “masters” and “men” were put on an equal footing regarding breaches of contract, while by the Trade-Union Act of 1875, which went much further than the Liberal Act of 1871, trade unionists were allowed to engage in peaceful picketing and to do whatever would not be criminal if done by an individual. The Public Health Act of 1875 created a public health authority in every area; the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of the same year enabled local authorities to embark upon schemes of slum clearance; a factory act of 1878 fixed a 56-hour workweek; while further legislation dealt with friendly societies (private societies for mutual-health and old-age insurance), the protection of seamen, land improvements carried out by tenants, and the adulteration of food. There was no similar burst of social legislation until after 1906.
Benjamin Disraeli.© Georgios Kollidas/Fotolia
If there were significant, though not fully acknowledged, differences between the records of the two governments on domestic issues, there were open, even strident differences on questions of foreign policy. Gladstone had never been a Palmerstonian. He was always anxious to avoid the resort to force, and he put his trust not in national prejudices but in an enlightened public opinion in Europe as well as in Britain. His object was justice rather than power. In practice, however, he often gave the impression of a man who vacillated and could not act firmly. Disraeli, on the other hand, was willing to take risks to enhance British prestige and to seek to profit from, rather than to moralize about, foreign dissensions. His first ventures in “imperialism”—a speech at the Crystal Palace in 1872, the purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, and the proclamation of the queen as “Empress of India”—showed that he had abandoned the view, popular during the middle years of the century, that colonies were millstones around the mother country’s neck. But these moves did not involve him in any European entanglements, nor did the costly, if brilliantly led, campaigns of Maj. Gen. Frederick Roberts in Afghanistan (1878–80) and the annexation of the Transvaal in South Africa in 1877.
“Getting Gladstone's Collar Up,” cartoon by Harry Furniss, c. 1876–84Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.
It was the Middle Eastern crisis of 1875–78 that produced the liveliest 19th-century debate on foreign policy issues. In May 1876 Disraeli rejected overtures made by Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany to deal jointly with the Ottoman Empire, which was faced with revolt in Serbia. His pro-Turkish sympathies irritated many Liberals, and, after Turkey had gone on to suppress with great violence a revolt in Bulgaria in 1876, the Liberal conscience was stirred, and mass meetings were held in many parts of the country. Gladstone, who had gone into retirement as Liberal leader in 1875, was slower to respond to the issue than many of his followers, but, once roused, he emerged from retirement, wrote an immensely influential pamphlet on the atrocities, and led a public campaign on the platform and in the press. For him the Turks were “inhuman and despotic,” and, whatever the national interests involved, Britain, in his view, should do nothing to support them. Disraeli’s calculations concerned strategic and imperial necessities rather than ideals of conduct, and his suspicions were justified when the Russians attacked Turkey in April 1877. Opinion swung back to his side, and in 1878 Disraeli sent a British fleet to the Dardanelles. London was seized by war fever—the term jingoism was coined to describe it—which intensified when news arrived that a peace agreement, the Treaty of San Stefano, had been signed whereby Turkey accepted maximum Russian demands. Reservists were mobilized in Britain, and Indian troops were sent to the Mediterranean. Disraeli’s foreign minister, who disapproved of such action, resigned, to be succeeded by Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, marquess of Salisbury, who was eventually to serve as prime minister in the last Conservative administrations of the 19th century. The immediate crisis passed, and, at the Congress of Berlin, an international conference held in June and July 1878, which Disraeli attended, the inroads into Turkish territory were reduced, Russia was kept well away from Constantinople, and Britain acquired Cyprus. Disraeli brought back “peace with honour.” But the swings of public opinion continued, and in 1879 Gladstone, starting at Midlothian in Scotland, fought a nationwide political campaign of unprecedented excitement and drama. In the general election of April 1880, the Liberals returned to power triumphantly, with a majority of 137 over the Conservatives. Disraeli, who had moved to the House of Lords in 1876, died in 1881. Economy and society
Although the Industrial Revolution traditionally has dominated accounts of change over the course of this period, recent research has emphasized the uneven and complex nature of this change. Nevertheless, over the course of the 19th century, the rise of manufacturing industry was striking, with the decisive shift occurring in the first three decades of the century. In 1801, 22 percent of the active British workforce was employed in manufacturing, mining, and construction, while 36 percent was involved in agriculture; by 1851, manufacturing, mining, and construction had increased to 40 percent, while agriculture had dropped to 21 percent. By 1901, agriculture had fallen even farther, to only 9 percent.
Cotton textiles remained the dominant new industry, centred in Manchester, with the textile factory being thought of by one of its contemporary admirers, the Leeds manufacturer Edward Baines, as “the most striking example of the dominion obtained by human science over the powers of nature of which modern times can boast.” By 1851 there were some 1,800 cotton factories in Britain. From 1815 to 1851 raw cotton imports had increased unevenly from 101 million pounds to 757 million pounds, while exports of manufactured cotton piece goods increased from 253 million yards to 1.543 billion yards. Manchester was the centre of the cotton industry. During the same period, however, similar steam-driven technology accounted for the expansion of the woolen textiles industry, with Australia, which had provided no raw wool for Britain in 1815, supplying about 30 million pounds in 1851. Bradford and Leeds were the centres of the woolen textile industry. It was the textiles industry more than any other that illustrated Britain’s dependence on international trade, a trade that it commanded not only through the volume of its imports and of its manufacturing output but also through the strength of its banking and other financial institutions, as well as the extent of its shipping industry.
Cotton manufacture c. 1830 using an automatic spinning mule of the type devised by Richard Roberts in 1825. Wellcome Library, London
The second, capital goods, phase of industrialization, beginning in the mid-19th century, broadened the manufacturing base into areas such as shipping and engineering. In tandem with this advance was the growth of the service industry as the economy expanded over time. The advent of mass consumption in the second half of the 19th-century—resulting in the slow development of mass retailing by multiple stores—was one consequence of this. While the factory and mechanized production played important roles in the process of industrialization, this process has been usefully described as “combined and uneven development.” Undoubtedly, hand technology and muscle power continued to play a considerable role far beyond the mid-19th century, and, as older forms of production continued alongside new, they were incorporated in, and to some extent regenerated by, factory production. The artisan sector, the conduct of work in people’s homes, and subcontracting all remained central to many industries—for example, the hosiery industry in Nottingham.
Much production was in fact small-scale and characterized to varying degrees by employers’ dependence on the skills and authority of the worker; if in some areas—for example, the trades in London—capitalism made progress by degrading the status of craft workers, in other areas workers were able to hold their own and adapt to new situations by organizing through the trade unions that gave them leverage over employers. Even in mechanized industries, managerial hierarchies were weakly elaborated, and there was a considerable dependence on worker skill and authority as well as a limited penetration of technology. Also of great importance were domestic service and small shop keeping. The upshot was not a linear process of change in which the end result was de-skilled factory production and the homogenization of the condition of workers but rather a complex set of outcomes in which the relations of capital and labour represented a variegated division of power.
In fact the decentralized nature of industrial production paralleled the decentralized state, and workers’ understanding of the economy was in many ways similar to their view of the state—namely, one of guarded acceptance. As it did with all other sectors of British life, the state for the most part studiously stayed outside the field of industrial relations; nonetheless, developments in the economy and in labour relations had a decisive role in shaping British workers’ views of the state. Within labour itself, there were divisions between “honourable” (traditional, apprenticeship-based, well-paid) and “dishonourable” (low-status, corner-cutting) trades, between those with a trade and those without, between the skilled and the unskilled, between union and nonunion workers, and between men and women. The labour movement itself reflected these divisions, as the increasingly strong trade union movement of this period was in fact largely shaped to meet the interests and demands of the skilled male head of household.
People were concerned too about the rising population as well as the nature and pace of economic change. In the first census of 1801, the population of England and Wales was about 9 million and that of Scotland about 1.5 million. By 1851 the comparable figures were 18 million and 3 million. At its peak in the decade between 1811 and 1821, the growth rate for Britain as a whole was 17 percent. It took time to realize that Thomas Malthus’s eloquently expressed fears that population would outrun subsistence were exaggerated and that, as population grew, national production would also grow. Indeed, national income at constant prices increased nearly threefold between 1801 and 1851, substantially more than the increase in population.
The new technology reached its peak in the age of the railway and the steamship. Coal production, about 13 million tons in 1815, increased five times during the next 50 years, and by 1850 Britain was producing more than 2 million tons of pig iron, half the world’s output. Both coal and iron exports increased dramatically, with coal exports amounting to 3.3 million tons in 1851, as opposed to less than 250,000 tons at the end of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Coal mining was scattered in the coal-producing districts; there were few large towns, and miners lived a distinctive life, having their own patterns of work and leisure. Iron production was associated with larger plants and considerable urbanization. In South Wales, for example, one of the areas of industrial expansion, the Dowlais works employed 6,000 people and turned out 20,000 tons of pig iron each year during the 1840s. Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, was the centre of a broad range of metallurgical industries that were organized mainly in small workshops that differed sharply in character from the huge textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Industrialization preceded the coming of the railway, but the railroad did much to lower transport costs, to consume raw materials, to stimulate investment through an extended capital market, and to influence the location of industry. The railway age may be said to have begun in 1830, when the line from Manchester to Liverpool, the country’s most vigorously expanding port, was opened, and to have gone through its most hectic phases during the 1840s, when contemporaries talked of a “railway mania.” By 1851, 6,800 miles (11,000 km) of railway were open, some of which involved engineering feats of great complexity. There was as much argument among contemporaries about the impact of railways as there was about the impact of steam engines in factories, but there was general agreement about the fact that the coming of the railway marked a great divide in British social history. It was not until the 1870s and ’80s that steamship production came to its full realization, and by then British engineers and workers had been responsible for building railways in all parts of the world. By 1890 Britain had more registered shipping tonnage than the rest of the world put together. Cultural change The development of private life
It was in this period that private life achieved a new prominence in British society. The very term “Victorianism,” perhaps the only “ism” in history attached to the name of a sovereign, not only became synonymous with a cluster of restraining moral attributes—character, duty, will, earnestness, hard work, respectable comportment and behaviour, and thrift—but also came to be strongly associated with a new version of private life. Victoria herself symbolized much of these new patterns of life, particularly through her married life with her husband, Albert, and—much later in her reign—through the early emergence of the phenomenon of the “royal family.” That private, conjugal life was played out on the public stage of the monarchy was only one of the contradictions marking the new privacy.
However, privacy was more apparent for the better-off in society than for the poor. Restrictions on privacy among the latter were apparent in what were by modern standards large households, in which space was often shared with those outside the immediate, conjugal family of the head of household, including relatives, servants, and lodgers. Privacy was also restricted by the small size of dwellings; for example, in Scotland in 1861, 26 percent of the population lived in single-room dwellings, 39 percent in two-room dwellings, and 57 percent lived more than two to a room. It was not until the 20th century that this situation changed dramatically. Nonetheless, differences within Britain were important, and flat living in a Glasgow tenement was very different from residence in a self-contained house characteristic of large parts of the north of England. This British kind of residential pattern as a whole was itself very different from continental Europe, and despite other differences between the classes, there were similarities among the British in terms of the house as the cradle of modern privacy. The suggestive term “social privacy” has been coined to describe the experience of domestic space prior to the intervention of the municipality and the state in the provision of housing, which occurred with increasing effect after mid-century. The older cellular structure of housing, evident in the tangle of courts and alleys in the old city centres, often with cellar habitations as well, resulted in the distinction between public and private taking extremely ambiguous form. In the municipal housing that was increasingly widespread after mid-century, this gave way to a more open layout in which single elements were connected to each other.
Among housing reformers there was a dislike of dead ends, courts, and the old situation where habitations were turned in upon themselves in their own social privacy. In the new order, space became neutral and connective, and, in the new “bylaw housing,” streets were regular in layout and width, with side streets at right angles and back alleys in parallel lines. The streets outside were (and remain) surprisingly wide in contrast to the narrow alleys behind. Such streets allowed a maximum of free passage. The street outside was public and communal. The alley or lane behind was less socially neutral than the street, still rather secret. It was not a traffic thoroughfare for the public at large, being reserved for the immediate inhabitants, for the hanging of washing, and perhaps for the playing of football (soccer). In between these public and semipublic spheres and the house within was the space of the yard at the back, which in contradistinction to the street was private and individual (if less so, potentially, than the house itself). In this fashion, municipal authorities sought to inculcate privacy in the lower classes. However, conditions worked against domestic privacy for them, and it was in the homes of the better-off that privacy was most developed.
Within the dwellings of the more privileged, there was a trend towards the specialization of rooms, the separation of the public from the private sides of life, and the development of distinct spheres for women and children. A society based on achieved status, as British society was slowly becoming, was very concerned to regulate and legitimize social relationships of gender and status, and the spaces of the home served as a means of doing this. From about the 1820s a family pattern developed that was conditioned by spatial environments that resulted from the new significance of home and domesticity. The home was to be a retreat from the stress of the world and a haven of security. This change in perspective was associated with other developments, namely the retreat from the centre of cities to the suburbs—evident in Manchester, for example, as early as the 1820s—along with a concomitant switch in housing style from the 18th-century terrace (row houses) to the detached or semidetached villa. In the move from the terrace, what was once the common garden of the square gave way to a separate, private garden. The common and more public rooms of the house, which were once for use by all members of the family, were relocated on the ground floor, with the other stories of the house being limited to the use of family members in a distinct domestic sphere. In terms of the development of working-class domesticity, by mid-century there was a clear gender division of labour between men and women (though it was often contradicted in practice by economic necessity and local employment conditions), based on the assumption that a man was to be the main and preferably sole breadwinner and head of the household. This pattern of gender relationships had profound influence on working-class institutions, not only on the trade union movement but also on the club and association life that was so central to the leisure activity of the less well-off.
However, the Victorian middle-class family should not be confused with the small nuclear family of the 20th century. Families were large and intermarried so that the boundaries between the categories of relative, dependent, and friend were indistinct, recalling an older notion of family as the circle of dependents. The relationship between public and private was therefore similarly complicated. Because the domestic interior could be the site of all sorts of familial and extra-familial interactions and obligations, the nexus of private life might also be distinctly public. Of course, privacy was accelerated by means other than family and domestic arrangements. The spread of reading on one’s own and of letter writing, the latter of which increased massively with the development of the cheap Penny Post, were both conducive to privacy.
Moreover, privacy in life led to privacy in death, as what may be called social burial in the old churchyard gave way to the new privacy of the cemetery. An invention of this time (Kensal Green, the first specialist London cemetery, opened in 1831), the cemetery was a new sort of public space, which in theory welcomed all comers, though in practice it was open only to the better-off, at least at first. Communal, spatially particular parish rights of burial were replaced by absolute, abstract property rights, and the hugger-mugger of the old churchyard was replaced by the possibility of the individuation of the dead person, by means of the memorial and the deployment of the clearly demarcated burial site. One could really have eternal rest, instead of being dug up every few decades. The individual had his or her space in death as in life. Religion
Victorian doubt about inherited biblical religion was as much an acknowledged theme of the period as was Victorian belief. Discoveries in geology and biology continued to challenge all accepted views of religious chronology handed down from the past. Perhaps the most profound challenge to religion came with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Yet the challenge was neither unprecedented nor unique. In 1860 Essays and Reviews was published; a lively appraisal of fundamental religious questions by a number of liberal-minded religious thinkers, it provoked the sharpest religious controversy of the century.
Behind such controversies there were many signs of a confident belief on all sides that inquiry itself, if freely and honestly pursued, would do nothing to dissolve shared ideals of conduct. Even writers who were “agnostic” talked of the “religion of humanity” or tried to be good “for good’s sake, not God’s.” Standards were felt to count in institutional as well as in private life.
Emphasis on conduct was, of course, related to religion. The British religious spectrum was of many colours. The Church of England was flanked on one side by Rome and on the other by religious dissent. Both were active forces to be reckoned with. The Roman Catholic Church was growing in importance not only in the Irish sections of the industrial cities but also among university students and teachers. Dissent had a grip on the whole culture of large sections of the middle classes, dismissed abruptly by Matthew Arnold as classes of “mutilated and incomplete men.” Sometimes the local battle between the Church of England and dissent was bitterly contested, with Nonconformists opposing church rates (taxes), challenging closed foundations, and preaching educational reform and total abstinence from intoxicating beverages. A whole network of local voluntary bodies, led either by Anglicans or Nonconformists, usually in rivalry, came into existence, representing a tribute to the energies of the age and to its fear of state intervention.
The Church of England itself was a divided family, with different groups contending for positions of influence. The High Church movement (which emphasized the “Catholic” side of Anglicanism) was given a distinctive character, first by the Oxford movement, or Tractarianism, which had grown up in the 1830s as a reaction against the new liberal theology, and then by the often provocative and always controversial ritualist agitation of the 1850s and ’60s. The fact that prominent members of the Church of England flirted with “Romanism” and even crossed the Rubicon often raised the popular Protestant cry of “church in danger.” Peel’s conversion to free trade in 1846 scarcely created any more excitement than John Henry Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism the previous year, while in 1850 Lord Russell, the prime minister, tried to capitalize politically on violent antipapal feelings stimulated by the pope’s decision to create Roman Catholic dioceses in England.
The Evangelicals, in many ways the most influential as well as the most distinctively English religious group, were suspicious both of ritual and of appeals to any authority other than the Bible. Their concern with individual conduct was a force for social conformity during the middle years of the century rather than for that depth of individual religious experience that the first advocates of “vital religion” had preached in the 18th century. Yet leaders such as Lord Ashley were prepared to probe some Evangelical social issues (e.g., housing) and to stir men’s consciences, and, even if their preoccupation was with saving souls, their missionary zeal influenced developments overseas as well as domestic legislation. There were other members of the church who urged the cause of Christian socialism. Their intellectual guide was the outstanding Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice. The Evangelicals in particular were drawn into substantial missionary activity in the empire and other parts of the world, frequently clashing with settlers and administrators and sometimes with soldiers. They regarded it as their sacred duty to spread the gospel from, in the words of one of the period’s best-known missionary hymns, “Greenland’s icy mountains” to “India’s coral strand.”
Beyond the influence of both church and chapel, there were thousands of people in mid-Victorian England who were ignorant of, or indifferent toward, the message of Christianity, a fact demonstrated by England’s one religious census in 1851. Although movements such as the Salvation Army, founded by William Booth in 1865, attempted to rally the poor of the great cities, there were many signs of apathy or even hostility. There was also a small but active secularist agitation; particularly in London, forces making for what came to be described as “secularism” (more goods, more leisure, more travel) could undermine spiritual concerns. The great religious controversies of mid-Victorian England were not so much to be settled as to be shelved.
In Scotland, where the Church of Scotland had been fashioned by the people against the crown, there was a revival of Presbyterianism in the 1820s and ’30s. A complex and protracted controversy, centring on the right of congregations to exclude candidates for the ministry whom they thought unsuitable, ended in schism. In 1843, 474 ministers left the Church of Scotland and established the Free Church of Scotland. Within four years they had raised more than £1.25 million and built 654 churches. This was a remarkable effort, even in a great age of church and chapel building. It left Scotland with a religious pattern even more different from that of England than it had been in 1815. Yet many of the most influential voices in mid-Victorian Britain, including Carlyle and Samuel Smiles (Self-Help; 1859), were Scottish, and the conception of the gospel of work, in particular, owed much in content and tone, even if often indirectly, to Scottish Calvinism. In Wales there was a particularly vigorous upsurge of Nonconformity, and the Welsh chapel was to influence late 19th-century and 20th-century British politics. Leisure
Leisure emerged as a distinct concept and activity, at least on a mass scale, only when the hours of labour diminished and became more regular. Before then, work and nonwork activities had been closely related to each other—for example, in the popular observance of the weekly “Saint Monday,” when furious bouts of working were followed by equally furious bouts of enjoyment on a day supposedly given over to work. In the 1850s, in textiles, the leading sector of the economy, there was a more regular working day and week, and a half-day of leisure, Saturday, also eventually emerged. Hours of labour began to approximate nine per day in the 1870s and eight per day after World War I. The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 further regularized leisure time. Yet, obviously, for the majority of people, work was the dominant activity.
For the privileged minority, however, leisure defined a good deal of their existence, the model of aristocratic “society” being redeployed in the early 19th century. Even in the 18th century the “middling sort” well-to-do of the towns, the urban gentry, had adopted the assembly room (where the elite had gathered to dance and socialize), the theatre, and the promenade as a means of regulating and enjoying urban life. This growth of a provincial urban culture had a serious side too, in the literary and philosophical societies of the late 18th century. In the first three decades of the new century this more serious aspect became increasingly apparent through the impact of the growth of Evangelical religion and of political events both at home and in Europe, so that there was a shift from the older sociability of propertied urban culture to a new emphasis on the deployment of leisure and culture as means of negotiating social and political difficulties, especially in the new and growing towns and cities.
The idea of “recreation” began to emerge; that is, that nonwork time should be a time of re-creating the body and mind for the chief purpose of work. The idea grew too that this recreation should be “rational.” The characteristic institutions of these new initiatives were the Mechanics Institutes for labourers and the Atheneaums for the sons—though not the daughters—of the more wealthy. Beyond these institutions there was the remarkable growth of those concerned with bringing culture to propertied urbanites, notably art galleries. However, it was not until mid-century that such initiatives began to develop rapidly, as in Manchester in the 1850s, where the Halle Orchestra was established on a professional basis and its concerts opened to anyone who could pay admission, unlike earlier, purely subscription-based music organizations. In the same decade, Owens College, the forerunner of the University of Manchester, was founded. The development of these institutions marked the emergence a more self-consciously public middle-class culture, one remodelled around a more open and inclusive notion of what public life involved.
In terms of popular culture, a more regularized and less demanding working day and week became part of a new kind of working year, so that old calendrical observances and rituals were lost. At the same time, a number were retained, being transformed to serve new purposes in the changed circumstances of increasing urbanization and industrialization. For instance, the old, established local “feast” and “wake” days of the industrial districts in the north of England were retained, serving many of the old communal functions yet also changing character and obtaining new functions in light of the spread of the railway and the advent of the modern vacation. Communal identities might now be formed by leaving the towns en masse, either for the railway excursion or on holiday, when large sections of the workers from particular towns took their leisure together at the new seaside resorts such as Blackpool. In urban Britain, restrictions upon space as well as upon time shaped the new culture, with old places of congregation, such as common lands on which fairs had been held, now being built over as towns grew. In the process, leisure often moved indoors, becoming more regular and more commercial in its organization. Commercial pressures in fact were most responsible for reshaping what had at least from the late 18th century been identified as popular culture, as opposed to forms of high culture. (Institutions such as the new urban concert halls of the mid-19th century were important in fostering a notion of the sublime and sacral nature of classical music, in contrast to the “low” music of the other sort of urban concert hall, namely the music hall.)
Commercialization of public culture was evident in the music hall from the 1850s, though more so in the late 19th century, with the construction of large purpose-built halls and the development of a nationwide chain of venues and a national “star” system. Before then, even if commercial, organizations were smaller-scale, less commercial, and more locally rooted. Commercial pressures were accompanied by political and moral pressures from above. The civic provision of culture was intended not only for the well-to-do but also for the mass of the population. For example, the public park, from its introduction in the 1840s, was an attempt to reproduce rational recreation among the lower classes through the design of the park as a place where civilized and rational behaviour and deportment could be encouraged. Of course, in practice, parks served other purposes, but their place in what was a widespread and marked reshaping of popular manners should not be underestimated. This reshaping owed a great deal to the beneficiaries of reform themselves, in that some of the most vocal supporters of the reform of the old order of “superstition and brutality” were radical workingmen whose conception of reason pitted them against the old culture. They were joined by Dissenter workingmen who were equally uncomfortable with traditional culture. Commercial and reform interests combined in the proliferation of reading matter for the “popular classes.” Indeed, the creation of a literate population was one of the most striking achievements of the century, but, while journals and books advocating self-improvement reached a surprisingly wide audience, this readership was not as wide as that of the sensational popular literature of the 1830s and ’40s. About this time a mass popular press also developed, though at this stage a Sunday press only, in the form of Lloyd’s News and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The explosion of the provincial press in the 1850s reached a somewhat different social constituency but was tremendously important in constituting the sense of identity of the towns that it served. Late Victorian Britain State and society
From the 1880s a mounting sense of the limits of the liberal, regulative state became apparent. One reflection of this awareness was the increasing perception of national decline, relative to the increasing strength of other European countries and the United States. This awareness was reinforced by British military failures in the South African War (Boer War) of 1899–1902, a “free enterprise war” in which free enterprise was found wanting. One consequence of this and other developments was the growth of movements aimed at “national efficiency” as a means of establishing a more effective state machine. The recognition of social problems at home—such as the “discovery” of urban poverty in 1880s in the assumed presence of plenty and increasing anxiety about the “labour question”—also raised questions about the adequacy of the state in dealing with the mounting problems of an increasingly populous and complex society. Toward the end of the century, the possibility of a violent outcome in the increasingly intractable problem of Ireland brought existing constitutional methods into question. Behind much of this anxiety was a sense that the Third Reform Act of 1884 (see Reform Bill) and changes in local government were precipitating a much more democratic polity, for which the classical liberal state had no easy answers. The example of what was called at the time municipal socialism, especially as it existed in Birmingham under the direction of its mayor, Joseph Chamberlain (1873–76), indicated what the local state could accomplish. Instead of the old “natural order” religion that had underpinned the state previously, different currents of thought emerged that saw the state and community as necessary for individual self-realization. German idealism, socialism, and new liberalism (see libertarianism) all encompassed different ways of rethinking the state.
This rethinking revolved around the belief that the operation of the state must incorporate consideration of the collective characteristics of society—that is, solidarity, interdependence, and common identity—in a much more direct way than hitherto. Indeed, the idea of the “social” came to characterize the entire period and even much later eras. Notions of a distinct social sphere, separate from the economic and political realms, had emerged much earlier, based upon the idea that the characteristics of this social realm were evident in the biological, vital characteristics of populations, so that society was very often understood in organic terms. The influence of Malthus in the early 19th century and Darwin in the mid-19th century contributed powerfully to this worldview, giving rise to late 19th-century representations of society in the strongly biological terms of “social eugenics” and other variations of “racial” thought, such as the idea of the “degeneration” of the working class. From about the turn of the 20th century, the concept of the social realm as autonomous developed alongside and partly incorporated older understandings. The social question became a sociological question, as indeed it has remained until very recently in British history. Society was now understood, unlike in earlier times, to work according to its own laws and to be divorced from moral questions, although, in practice, political interventions were invariably designed to change moral behaviour.
One major result of this questioning of the state and of new conceptions of society was the extensive social legislation of the Liberal administrations after 1905, which is widely seen as the foundation of the 20th-century welfare state. The new Liberal government embarked upon a program of social legislation that involved free school meals (1905), a school medical service (1907), and the Children’s Act (1908). The Old Age Pensions Act (1908) granted pensions under prescribed conditions to people over age 70, and in 1908 the miners were given a statutory working day of eight hours. In 1909 trade boards were set up to fix wages in designated industries in which there was little or no trade union strength, and labour exchanges were created to try to reduce unemployment. In 1911 the National Insurance Act was passed, whereby the state and employers supplemented employees’ contributions towards protection against unemployment and ill health. This act clearly represented a departure from the manner in which government had been carried out, as it began to be executed in supposed accordance with the social characteristics of the governed (age, family circumstances, gender, labour). Under this new dispensation, individual rights, as well as the rights of families, were secured not by individual economic action but by state action and by the provision of pensions and benefits. These new rights were secured as social rights, so that individual rights were connected to a web of obligations, rights, and solidarities extending across the individual’s life, across the lives of all individuals in a population, and between individuals across generations—in short, a network of relations that was in fact one early version of society as a sui generis entity.
However, much of this new relationship of state and society was still recognizably liberal in the older sense, constituting a compact of social and individual responsibility. At the heart of this compact was the belief that it was necessary to safeguard the individual from the unfettered operation of the free market, while at the same time making sure that there must be an obligation to obtain gainful employment. Contributory pension schemes required individuals to make regular payments into them rather than providing social insurance from general taxation. The National Insurance Act provided a framework within which workers were to practice self-help, and, although involvement was mandatory, the administration of the legislation was largely through voluntary institutions. David Lloyd George, who did most to push the legislation through, himself combined these characteristics of old and new liberalism. At the same time, in practice this new formula of government emerged in a very piecemeal and haphazard way, often driven by the circumstances of the moment, not least the circumstances of party politics. Moreover, the circumstances of war were of overwhelming importance. It was World War I in particular that fostered the idea of the increased importance of the interventionist, collectivist state. The demands of winning the war required an unparalleled intervention in a running of the economy and in the operations of social life, particularly when the radical Liberal Lloyd George took power in 1916. Perhaps the most important factor legitimizing the increased role of the state was conscription in the armed services, and the most important general outcome was the idea that “planning” (understood in many different ways) was from this point forward a fully legitimate part of governmental enterprise. Nonetheless, despite the piecemeal nature of the change, what is striking is how this understanding of the relationship between state and society obtained across the whole political spectrum and how it lasted so long. This increased role of the state was accompanied, after World War I, by the increasing specialization and professionalization of an expanding civil service. The political situation Gladstone and Chamberlain
Gladstone’s second administration (1880–85) did not live up to the promise of its election victory. Indeed, in terms of political logic, it seemed likely in 1880 that the Gladstonian Liberal Party would eventually split into Whig and radical components, the latter to be led by Joseph Chamberlain. This development was already foreshadowed in the cabinet that Gladstone assembled, which was neither socially uniform nor politically united. Eight of the 11 members were Whigs, but one of the other three—Chamberlain—represented a new and aggressive urban radicalism, less interested in orthodox statements of liberal individualism than in the uncertain aspiration and striving of the different elements in the mass electorate. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Chamberlain’s municipal socialism were the Whigs, the largest group in the cabinet but the smallest group in the country. Many of them were already abandoning the Liberal Party; all of them were nervous about the kind of radical program that Chamberlain and the newly founded National Liberal Federation (1877) were advocating and about the kind of caucus-based party organization that Chamberlain favoured locally and nationally. For the moment, however, Gladstone was the man of the hour, and Chamberlain himself conceded that he was indispensable.
Joseph Chamberlain, detail of an oil painting by Frank Holl, 1886; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
The government carried out a number of important reforms culminating in the Third Reform Act of 1884 and the Redistribution Act of 1885. The former continued the trend toward universal male suffrage by giving the vote to agricultural labourers, thereby tripling the electorate, and the latter robbed 79 towns with populations under 15,000 of their separate representation. For the first time the franchise reforms ignored the traditional claims of property and wealth and rested firmly on the democratic principle that the vote ought to be given to people as a matter of right, not of expediency.
The most difficult problems continued to arise in relation to foreign affairs and, above all, to Ireland. When in 1881 the Boers defeated the British at Majuba Hill and Gladstone abandoned the attempt to hold the Transvaal, there was considerable public criticism. And in the same year, when he agreed to the bombardment of Alexandria in a successful effort to break a nationalist revolt in Egypt, he lost the support of the aged radical John Bright. In 1882 Egypt was occupied, thereby adding, against Gladstone’s own inclinations, to British imperial commitments. A rebellion in the Sudan in 1885 led to the massacre of Gen. Gordon" class="md-crosslink">Charles Gordon and his garrison at Khartoum (see Siege of Khartoum) two days before the arrival of a mission to relieve him. Large numbers of Englishmen held Gladstone personally responsible, and in June 1885 he resigned after a defeat on an amendment to the budget. The Irish question
The Irish question loomed ominously as soon as Parliament assembled in 1880, for there was now an Irish nationalist group of more than 60 members led by Charles Stewart Parnell, most of them committed to Irish Home Rule; in Ireland itself, the Land League, founded in 1879, was struggling to destroy the power of the landlord. Parnell embarked on a program of agrarian agitation in 1881, at the same time that his followers at Westminster were engaged in various kinds of parliamentary obstructionism. Gladstone’s response was the Irish Land Act, based on guaranteeing “three fs”—fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale—and a tightening up of the rules of closure in parliamentary debate. The Land Act did not go far enough to satisfy Parnell, who continued to make speeches couched in violent language, and, after a coercion act was passed by Parliament in the face of Irish obstructionism, he was arrested. Parnell was released in April 1882, however, after an understanding had been reached that he would abandon the land war and the government would abandon coercion. Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish, a close friend of Gladstone and the brother of the Whig leader, Lord Spencer Hartington, was sent to Dublin as chief secretary on a mission of peace, but the whole policy was undermined when Cavendish, along with the permanent undersecretary, was murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, within a few hours of landing in Ireland.
Between 1881 and 1885 Gladstone coupled a somewhat stiffer policy in Ireland with minor measures of reform, but in 1885, when the Conservatives returned to power under Robert Arthur Salisbury, the Irish question forced itself to the forefront again. Henry Herbert, earl of Carnarvon, the new lord lieutenant of Ireland, was a convert to Home Rule and followed a more liberal policy than his predecessor. In the subsequent general election of November 1885, Parnell secured every Irish seat but one outside Ulster and urged Irish voters in British constituencies—a large group mostly concentrated in a limited number of places such as Lancashire and Clydeside—to vote Conservative. The result of the election was a Liberal majority of 86 over the Conservatives, which was almost exactly equivalent to the number of seats held by the Irish group, who thus controlled the balance of power in Parliament. The Conservatives stayed in office, but when in December 1885 the newspapers reported a confidential interview with Gladstone’s son, in which he had stated (rightly) that his father had been converted to Home Rule, Salisbury made it clear that he himself was not a convert, and Carnarvon resigned. All Conservative contacts with Parnell ceased, and a few weeks later, in January 1886, after the Conservatives had been defeated in Parliament on a radical amendment for agrarian reform, Salisbury, lacking continued Irish support, resigned and Gladstone returned to power. Split of the Liberal Party
Gladstone’s conversion had been gradual but profound, and it had more far-reaching political consequences for Britain than for Ireland. It immediately alienated him further from most of the Whigs and from a considerable number of radicals led by Chamberlain. He had hoped at first that Home Rule would be carried by an agreement between the parties, but Salisbury had no intention of imitating Peel. Gladstone made his intentions clear by appointing John Morley, a Home Rule advocate, as Irish secretary, and in April 1886 he introduced a Home Rule bill. The Liberals remained divided, and 93 of them united with the Conservatives to defeat the measure. Gladstone appealed to the country and was decisively beaten in the general election, in which 316 Conservatives were returned to Westminster along with 78 Liberal Unionists, the new name chosen by those Liberals who refused to back Home Rule. The Liberals mustered only 191 seats, and there were 85 Irish nationalists. Whigs and radicals, who had often seemed likely to split Gladstone’s 1880 government on left-right lines, were now united against the Gladstonians, and all attempts at Liberal reunion failed.
Chamberlain, the astute radical leader, like many others of his class and generation, ceased to regard social reform as a top priority and worked in harness with Hartington, his Whig counterpart. In 1895 they both joined a Salisbury government. The Liberals were, in effect, pushed into the wilderness, although they held office briefly and unhappily from 1892 to 1895. Gladstone, 82 years old when he formed his last government, actually succeeded in carrying a Home Rule bill in the Commons in 1893, with the help of Irish votes (Parnell’s power had been broken as a result of a divorce case in 1890, and he died in 1891), but the bill was thrown out by the Lords. He resigned in 1894, to be succeeded by Archibald Primrose, earl of Rosebery, who further split the party; in the general election of 1895, the Conservatives could claim that they were the genuinely popular party, backed by the urban as well as the rural electorate. Although Salisbury usually stressed the defensive aspects of Conservatism, both at home and abroad, Chamberlain and his supporters were able to mobilize considerable working-class as well as middle-class support for a policy of crusading imperialism. Imperialism and British politics
Imperialism was the key word of the 1890s, just as Home Rule had been in the critical decade of the 1880s, and the cause of empire was associated not merely with the economic interests of businessmen looking for materials and markets and the enthusiasm of crowds excited by the adventure of empire but also with the traditional lustre of the crown. Disraeli had emphasized the last of these associations, just as Chamberlain emphasized the first. In the middle years of the century it had been widely held that colonies were burdens and that materials and markets were most effectively acquired through trade. Thus, an “informal empire” had been created that was as much dependent on Britain as the formal empire was. Nonetheless, even during these years, as a result of pressure from the periphery, the process of establishing protectorates or of acquiring colonies had never halted, despite a number of colonial crises and small colonial wars in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Most of the new acquisitions were located in tropical areas of the world and were populated mainly by non-Europeans.
There were further crises during the 1880s and ’90s, when the Liberals were divided on both tactics and objectives, and public opinion was stirred. When Chamberlain chose to take over the Colonial Office in 1895, he was acknowledging the opportunities, both economic and political, afforded by a vast “undeveloped estate.” The same radical energies that he had once devoted to civic improvement were now directed toward imperial problems. The argument about empire assumed an increasingly popular dimension. Boys’ books and magazines, for example, focused on the adventure of empire and the courage and sense of duty of empire builders, and textbooks often taught the same lessons. So also did the popular press. In consequence, the language of imperialism changed.
However, it was difficult to pull the empire together politically or constitutionally. Certainly, moving toward federation was a challenging task since the interests of different parts were already diverging, and in the last resort only British power—above all, sea power—held the empire together. The processes of imperial expansion were always complex, and there was neither one dominant theory of empire nor one single explanation of why it grew. Colonies that were dominated by people of British descent, such as Canada or New Zealand and the states of Australia, had been given substantial powers of self-government since the Durham Report of 1839 and the Canada Union Act of 1840. Yet India, “the brightest jewel in the British crown,” was held not by consent but by conquest. The Indian Mutiny of 1857–58 was suppressed, and a year later the East India Company was abolished and the new title of viceroy was instituted. Imperial control was tightened too, through the construction of a network of railways. Thomas Macaulay’s dream that India would one day be free and that such a day would be the happiest in British history seemed to have receded, although the nationalist movement that emerged after the first Indian National Congress in 1885 was eventually to gain in strength. Meanwhile, given the strategic importance of India to the military establishment, attempts were made to justify British rule in terms of benefits of law and order that were said to accrue to Indians. “The white man’s burden,” as the writer and poet Rudyard Kipling saw it, was a burden of responsibility.
It was difficult for the British voter to understand or to appreciate this network of motives and interests. Chamberlain himself was always far less interested in India than in the “kith-and-kin dominions” (populated primarily by those of British descent) and in the new tropical empire that was greatly extended in area between 1884 and 1896, when 2.5 million square miles (6.5 million square km) of territory fell under British control. Even he did not fully understand either the rival aspirations of different dominions or the relationship between economic development in the “formal” empire and trade and investment in the “informal” empire where the British flag did not fly.
Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897 involved both imperial pageantry and imperial conferences, but, between 1896 and 1902, public interest in problems of empire was intensified not so much by pageantry as by crisis. British-Boer relations in South Africa, always tense, were further worsened after the Jameson raid of December 1895, and, in October 1899, war began. The early stages of the struggle were favourable to the Boers, and it was not until spring 1900 that superior British equipment began to count. British troops entered Pretoria in June 1900 and Paul Kruger, the Boer president, fled to Europe, where most governments had given him moral support against the British. Thereafter, the Boers employed guerrilla tactics, and the war did not end until May 1902. It was the most expensive of all the 19th-century “little wars,” with the British employing 450,000 troops, of whom 22,000 never returned. Just as the Crimean War had focused attention on “mismanagement,” so the South African (Boer) War led to demands not only for greater “efficiency” but also for more enlightened social policies in relation to health and education.
While the war lasted, it emphasized the political differences within the Liberal Party and consolidated Conservative-Liberal Unionist strength. The imperialism of the Liberal prime minister, Lord Rosebery, was totally uncongenial to young pro-Boer Liberals like Lloyd George. A middle group of Liberals emerged, but it was not until after 1903 that party rifts were healed. The Unionists won the “khaki election” of 1900 (which took its name from the uniforms of the British army, a reflection of its occurrence in the middle of the war) and secured a new lease of power for nearly six years, but their unity also was threatened after the Peace of Vereeniging, which ended the war in May 1902. Salisbury retired in 1902, to be succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, a brilliant man but a tortuous and insecure politician. There had been an even bigger break in January 1901 when the queen died, after a brief illness, at age 81. She had ruled for 64 years and her death seemed to mark not so much the end of a reign as the end of an age.
There were significant changes in terms of the impression organized labour made on politics. Some of the new union leaders were confessed socialists, anxious to use political as well as economic power to secure their objectives, and a number of socialist organizations emerged between 1880 and 1900—all conscious, at least intermittently, that, whatever their differences, they were part of a “labour movement.” The Social Democratic Federation, influenced by Marxism, was founded in 1884; however, it was never more than a tiny and increasingly sectarian organization. The Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford in 1893, had a more general appeal, while the Fabian Society, founded in 1883–84, included intellectuals who were to play a large part in 20th-century labour politics. In February 1900 a labour representation conference was held in London at which trade unionists and socialists agreed to found a committee (the Labour Representation Committee), with Ramsay MacDonald as first secretary, to promote the return of Labour members to Parliament. This conference marked the beginning of the 20th-century Labour Party, which, with Liberal support, won 29 seats in the general election of 1906. Although until 1914 the party at Westminster for the most part supported the Liberals, in 1909 it secured the allegiance of the “Lib-Lab” miners’ members. Financially backed by the trade unions, it was eventually to take the place of the Liberal Party as the second party in the British state. The return of the Liberals
The Liberals returned to power in December 1905 after Balfour had resigned. Between the end of the South African War and this date, they had become more united as the Conservatives had disintegrated. In 1903 Chamberlain had taken up the cause of protection, thereby disturbing an already uneasy balance within Balfour’s cabinet. He failed to win large-scale middle- or working-class support outside Parliament, as he had hoped, and the main effect of his propaganda was to draw rival groups of Liberals together. In the general election of 1906, the Liberals, led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a cautious Scot who had stayed clear of the extreme factions during the South African War, won 377 seats, giving them an enormous majority of 84 over all other parties combined. The new cabinet included radicals and Liberal imperialists, and when Campbell-Bannerman retired in 1908, H.H. Asquith moved from the Home Office to the premiership.
Asquith, H.H.H.H. Asquith.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Social reform had not been the chief cry at the general election, which was fought mainly on the old issues of free trade, temperance reform, and education. In many constituencies there was evidence of Nonconformist grievances against the Balfour-engineered education act of 1902 that had abolished the school boards, transferred educational responsibilities to the all-purpose local authorities, and laid the foundations of a national system of secondary education. Yet local and national inquiries, official and unofficial, into the incidence of poverty had pointed to the need for public action to relieve distress, and from the start the budget of 1909, fashioned by Lloyd George, as chancellor of the Exchequer, set out deliberately to raise money to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.” The money was to come in part from a supertax on high incomes and from capital gains on land sales. The budget so enraged Conservative opinion, inside and outside Parliament, that the Lords, already hostile to the trend of Liberal legislation, rejected it, thereby turning a political debate into a constitutional one concerning the powers of the House of Lords. Passions were as strong as they had been in 1831, yet, in the ensuing general election of January 1910, the Liberal majority was greatly reduced, and the balance of power in Parliament was now held by Labour and Irish nationalist members. The death of King Edward VII in May 1910 and the succession of the politically inexperienced George V added to the confusion, and it proved impossible to reach an agreement between the parties on the outlines of a Parliament bill to define or curb the powers of the House of Lords. After a Liberal Parliament bill had been defeated, a second general election in December 1910 produced political results similar to those earlier in the year, and it was not until August 1911 that the peers eventually passed the Parliament Act of 1911 by 131 votes to 114. The act provided that finance-related bills could become law without the assent of the Lords and that other bills would also become law if they passed in the Commons but failed in the Lords three times within two years. The act was finally passed only after the Conservative leadership had repudiated the “diehard peers” who refused to be intimidated by a threat to create more peers.
David Lloyd George, 1908.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In the course of the struggle over the Parliament bill, strong, even violent, feelings had been roused among lords who had seldom bothered hitherto to attend their house. Their intransigence provided a keynote to four years of equally fierce struggle on many other issues in the country, with different sectional groups turning to noisy direct action. The Liberals remained in power, carrying important new legislation, but they faced so much opposition from extremists, who cared little about either conventional political behaviour or the rule of law, that these years have been called by the American historian George Dangerfield “the strange death of Liberal England.” The most important legislation was once more associated with Lloyd George—the National Insurance Act of 1911, which Parliament accepted without difficulty but which was the subject of much hostile criticism in the press and was bitterly opposed by doctors and duchesses. Nor did it win unanimous support from labour. The parliamentary Labour Party itself mattered less during these years, however, than extra-parliamentary trade union protests, some of them violent in character—“a great upsurge of elemental forces.” There was a wave of strikes in 1911 and 1912, some of them tinged with syndicalist ideology, all of them asserting, in difficult economic circumstances for the workingman, claims that had seldom been made before. Old-fashioned trade unionists were almost as unpopular with the rank and file as they were with capitalists. In June 1914, less than two months before the outbreak of World War I, a “triple alliance” of transport workers, miners, and railwaymen was formed to buttress labour solidarity. In parallel to labour agitation, the suffragists, fighting for women’s rights, resorted to militant tactics that not only embarrassed Asquith’s government but tested the whole local and national machinery for maintaining order. The Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903, was prepared to encourage illegal acts, including bombing and arson, which led to sharp police retaliation, severe sentences, harsh and controversial treatment in prison, and even martyrdom.
The issue that created the greatest difficulties, however, was one of the oldest: Ireland. In April 1912, armed with the new powers of the Parliament Act, Asquith introduced a new Home Rule bill. Conservative opposition to it was reinforced on this occasion by a popular Protestant movement in Ulster, and the new Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, who had replaced Balfour in 1911, gave his covert support to army mutineers in Ulster. No compromises were acceptable, and the struggle to settle the fate of Ireland was still in full spate when war broke out in August 1914. Most ominously for the Liberals, the Irish Home Rule supporters at Westminster were losing ground in southern Ireland, where in 1913 a militant working-class movement entered into close alliance with the nationalist forces of Sinn Féin. Ireland was obviously on the brink of civil war. The international crisis
The seeds of international war, sown long before 1900, were nourished between the resignation of Salisbury in 1902 and August 1914. Two intricate systems of agreements and alliances—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain—faced each other in 1914. Both were backed by a military and naval apparatus (Britain had been building a large fleet, and Richard Haldane had been reforming the army), and both could appeal to half-informed or uninformed public opinion. The result was that a war that was to break the continuities of history started as a popular war.
The Liberal government under Asquith faced a number of diplomatic crises from 1908 onward. Throughout a period of recurring tension, its foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, often making decisions that were not discussed by the cabinet as a whole, strengthened the understanding with France that had been initiated by his Conservative predecessor in 1903. An alliance had already been signed with Japan in 1902, and in 1907 agreements were reached with Russia. Meanwhile, naval rivalry with Germany familiarized Britons with the notion that, if war came, it would be with Germany. The 1914 crisis began in the Balkans, where the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in June 1914. Soon Austria (backed by Germany) and Russia (supported by France) faced off. The British cabinet was divided, but, after the Germans invaded Belgium on August 4, thereby violating a neutrality that Britain was committed by treaty to support, Britain and Germany went to war. Asa Briggs Patrick Joyce Economy and society
Changes in economic conditions during the last decades of the 19th century were of crucial importance. Mid-Victorian prosperity had reached its peak in a boom that collapsed in 1873. Thereafter, although national income continued to increase (nearly quadrupling between 1851 and 1911), there was persistent pressure on profit margins, with a price fall that lasted until the mid-1890s. Contemporaries talked misleadingly of a “great depression,” but, however misleading the phrase was as a description of the movement of economic indexes, the period as a whole was one of doubt and tension. There was anxious concern about both markets and materials, but the retardation in the national rate of growth to below 2 percent per annum was even harder to bear because the growth rates of competitors were rising, sometimes in spectacular fashion.
The interests of different sections of the community diverged between 1870 and 1900 as they had before the mid-Victorian period. In particular, grain- and meat-producing farmers bore the full weight of foreign competition in cereals, and many, though not all, industrialists felt the growing pressure of foreign competition in both old and new industries. As a result of improved transport, including storage and refrigeration facilities, along with the application of improved agricultural machinery, overseas cereal producers fully penetrated the British market. In 1877 the price of English wheat stood at 56 shillings 9 pence a quarter (compared with 54 shillings 6 pence in 1846); for the rest of the century, it never again came within 10 shillings of that figure. During the 1890s, therefore, there was a sharp fall in rent, a shift in land ownership, and a challenge to the large estate in the cereal-growing and meat-producing areas of the country. The fact that dairy and fruit farmers flourished did not relieve the pessimism of most spokesmen for the threatened landed interests.
In industry, there were new forms of power and a trend toward bigger plants and more impersonal organization. There were also efforts throughout the period to increase cartels and amalgamations. Britain was never as strong or as innovative in the age of steel as it had been in the earlier age of iron. By 1896 British steel output was less than that of either the United States or Germany, while the British textile industry was declining sharply. Exports fell between 1880 and 1900 from £105 million to £95 million.
Yet the country’s economic position would have been completely different had it not been for Britain’s international economic strength as banker and financier. During years of economic challenge at home, capital exports greatly increased, until they reached a figure of almost £200 million per annum before 1914, and investment income poured in to rectify adverse balance of trade accounts. Investing during these years in both “formal” and “informal” empire was more profitable, if more risky, than investing at home. But it also contributed to domestic obsolescence, particularly in the old industries. Thus, ultimately, there was a price to pay for imperial glory. During the last 20 years of peace before 1914, when Britain’s role as rentier was at its height, international prices began to rise again, and they continued to rise, with fluctuations, until after the end of World War I. Against this backdrop, the City of London was at the centre of international markets of capital, money, and commodities.
Meanwhile, whether prices were falling or rising, labour in Britain was increasingly discontented, articulate, and organized. Throughout the period, national income per capita grew faster than the continuing population growth (which stayed at above 10 percent per decade until 1911, although the birth rate had fallen sharply after 1900), but neither the growth of income nor the falling level of retail prices until the mid-1890s made for industrial peace. By the end of the century, when pressure on real wages was once again increasing, there were two million trade unionists in unskilled unions as well as in skilled unions of the mid-century type, and by 1914 the figure had doubled.
In terms of the distribution of the labour force in this period, among the most striking changes was the development of white-collar occupations. Between 1881 and 1921, of male workers, those in public administration, professional occupations, and subordinate services, along with those in commercial occupations, increased from some 700,000 to 1,700,000 (out of a total workforce of some 9,000,000 in 1881 and 13,500,000 in 1921). Those in transport and communications almost doubled in number to 1,500,000, while those who worked in the manufacture of metal, machines, implements, and vehicles increased from almost 1,000,000 to over 2,000,000. Those in mining also doubled in number, to 1,200,000 in 1921. These were the real growth areas in the economy. The number of individuals involved in the agricultural sector, on the other hand, declined but exceeded 1,250,000 in 1921 and thus made up a still important component of the occupational structure of the country. All other sectors remained stable or lost workers, with the growth industry of the early 19th century, textiles and clothing, decreasing from about 1,000,000 to 750,000 workers in 1921.
The economy lost a good deal of its old artisan character. Accompanying this erosion of artisan power at the point of production were some tendencies toward increases of scale in factory production. To some degree there also was a decline in the old hierarchies of skill, most notably in the erosion of the position of artisans, the mid-Victorian labour aristocracy. At the same time, the characteristics of the social structure of production in the preceding period were still apparent, namely “combined and uneven” development, whereby old and new forms of industrial organization and production methods were often combined, and overall development was not uniform. The result was that skill and authority were still distributed in a very complex way throughout industry. Older historical accounts concerning the late 19th- and early 20th-century formation of an increasingly de-skilled and uniform labour force have given way to a more nuanced picture, so that the rise of the Labour Party is no longer interpreted, as it earlier was, simply as a consequence of the supposed emergence of this de-skilled labour force. Moreover, in line with more recent scholarship, the emergence of the Labour Party in the late 19th and early 20th century is no longer viewed as a reflex reaction to economic conditions or to the situation of workers; instead, it is understood in terms of the role of political intervention and political language in shaping what was indeed a new sense of class unity and not as a direct expression of the labour force itself, which was in fact still strikingly divided not only by skill but by many other characteristics of workplace experience.
The number of women in professional occupations and subordinate services doubled to 440,000 in 1921, out of a total workforce of some 5,500,000 women. This shift did much to reshape women’s changing understanding of themselves, particularly among the middle classes, where the more public world of work called into question exclusively domestic definitions of femininity. Women’s employment in textile and clothing manufacture was, however, still massive, with the real decline in the production of textiles not coming until after World War I. In 1881 the textile and clothing industry employed nearly 1,500,000 women; though by 1921 this number had shrunk, it remained considerable, at 1,300,000. Within the textile industry, women’s trade unions made some headway, but it is testimony to the power of traditional paternalist understandings of gender relationships among workers that male authority still obtained for the most part in both the home and the workplace, where women were excluded from the better-paid and more-skilled jobs. Domestic service was still the bedrock of women’s employment, comprising some 1,750,000 workers in 1881 out of a total of 3,900,000, though by 1921 this number had grown to 1,800,000 but shrunk in relative importance. Family and gender
The structure of families in this period was still relatively diverse and significantly unlike 21st-century versions of the nuclear family based upon co-residing parents and young children. There is some evidence to suggest that industrialization strengthened rather than weakened kinship ties and intergenerational co-residence, because of the practical help resident grandparents could render to working mothers. Relationships across generations, both within and outside the household, continued to be important. Despite the migration of production from home to factory, the traditional identity of the family as a productive unit survived quite strongly into the 20th century, notably among shopkeepers and other self-employed workers, among tenant farmers, and particularly among the still important area of “homework” production, which, as a component of the late 19th-century clothing industry, went through a massive revival. The family retained many residual economic roles and acquired some new ones. For example, there was still a strong tendency for occupations to pass from father to son in all classes. The economy of workers, however, was much more likely to involve the collective earnings of father, mother, and children, compared with the family economy of those who were better-off.
In mid-19th-century England and Wales (Scotland had its own divorce, custody, and property rights), a husband had absolute right of control over his wife’s person, as well as considerable rights over her property. He also had sole responsibility for the rearing and guardianship of children, and the common law gave him absolute freedom to bequeath his property outside his family. A wife, in contrast, had neither legal duties nor enforceable legal rights, and, indeed, under common law her juridical personality was totally submerged in that of her husband. During this period, the situation was to undergo remarkable changes as the law began to make inroads into not only the rights of husbands but also the rights of parents generally. By the end of this period, legal intervention had largely eroded the absolute paternal rights enshrined in the common law, although sexual relations between husbands and wives remained largely untouched by legal change. However, cultural changes were to lag behind legal ones.
For the better-off in society, marriage was gradually transformed from what was in large measure a property contract into a union in which companionship and consumerism played a larger role. That women were increasingly becoming consumers was reflected in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1882, which allowed women to control their own income. The period was therefore to see changes within marriage in the direction of greater independence for women, as well as changes in the status and independence of women outside marriage. At the same time, the legal and administrative code remained decidedly biased against women; for instance, income tax was framed as a duty of the male head of household. In terms of what might be called upper-middle-class society, traditional gender roles were still extremely powerful: girls were educated at home up to World War I and were trained for the social conventions of home life and home management; boys were sent to school, often to boarding school; and more companionate versions of spousal relationship were accompanied by the preservation of distance between parents and children, with much child care still being left to servants. Lower down the scale, things were much the same, although few middle-class households could afford a wholly idle wife.
In this period it was widely established that natural processes no longer gave an adequate account of motherhood, which was increasingly seen as an activity of great moral, intellectual, and technical complexity that had to be learned artificially like any other skill. Indeed, there was an unprecedented concern with the nature of motherhood, which was not seen as a private matter but as something involving the future of society, the country, the empire, and indeed the “race.” This concern was an expression of changing gender roles; but, while on one hand it embodied a reaction against forces of change, in some respects it also signaled the movement toward greater gender equality. The role of the state was to reflect these changes, as its intervention in family life also reached unprecedented levels.
From the 1860s to the ’80s, the agitation surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts—an attempt to control venereal disease in the armed forces that involved state regulation and inspection of prostitution—laid the foundations for subsequent feminism. The campaign for the repeal of the acts generated public discussion of the double standard of licence for men and chastity for women. This agitation brought women into the public sphere much more directly than before and in new ways. Moreover, it served to complement changes in education, charity work, political organization, and associational life (which for women expanded considerably in this period), all of which took women outside the home, especially better-off women. This was also the case with the growth of women’s role as consumers, with shopping and the new department stores further increasing women’s involvement in public urban life.
The discussion generated by these acts resulted in a series of feminist responses varying from the more socially, sometimes politically, conservative emphasis on traditional family roles and on maternalism, seen in the “social purity” campaigns of the late 19th century (with their links to “social hygiene” movements espousing hygiene as the gateway to moral betterment), to the more radical, egalitarian political feminism of the early 20th century. The latter form was itself split into radical, socialist, and constitutional variants. In 1903 the women’s suffrage movement split dramatically over the issue of the parliamentary vote, some pursuing the vote as merely one item on a long list of political and extra-political reforms and others concentrating on the single aim of obtaining the vote. These agitations also influenced men’s conception of themselves, notably in response to the social purity movement’s emphasis on the importance of chastity for men as well as women. Male roles were further defined in the 1880s with the consolidation of male homosexuality as a distinct social identity, given legal definition at the time (in the Labouchere amendment of 1885, which criminalized homosexuality as gross indecency), not least in the famous case involving the arrest and imprisonment of Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde. From this time the rise of “scientific” understandings of sexuality, including the science of sexology, also served to redefine gender roles. However, there as in so many other realms, recognition for women lagged behind that for men, and it was not until the 1920s that a similar delineation of lesbian identity became fully apparent. Mass culture
Class distinctions in cultural life continued to be very important. “Rational recreation” (productive and socially responsible recreation) remained an aim of those who wished to reform the culture of the lower classes. However, it also came to characterize the provision of recreation for the upper classes too. The idea of “playing the game” and “the game for its own sake” represented an extension of rational recreation into the sphere of sports, particularly as developed in the public schools, which in this period were reformed so as to institute a sense of public duty and private responsibility among the propertied classes. The cult of the disinterested amateur was part of the notion of the classically trained English gentleman, whose education and sense of moral duty purportedly created a moral superiority and disinterestedness that uniquely fitted him to rule. The development of popular forms of literature aimed at boys in this period served to glorify this particular manifestation of gentlemanly rule. More broadly, the model of the reformed public school itself, as well as a reformed Oxbridge (the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been restructured in large part somewhat earlier to meet the needs of a changing, moralized civil service), came to have a considerable influence on educational institutions in Britain. The masculine emphasis in sports was complemented by the club life of the upper classes, which, while always decidedly masculine, in the 1880s and ’90s, in terms of the development of London clubland, served even more to emphasize expressions of masculine identity in leisure activities.
The move from the sociability that characterized upper-class culture in the 18th century to the more didactic, socially concerned interventions of the early and mid-19th century gave way to a gradual involvement in hitherto forbidden forms, forms now suitably sanitized and made rational (or, as in the case of classical music, made sacred). It was not only music that became respectable but also the reading of novels, the playing of cards, and theatre attendance. The growth of the “legitimate” theatre from the 1880s, in distinction to more popular, melodramatic forms, is indicative of this development. Institutions and locations that were defined by associations with class especially harboured these changes, most notably the school and the suburb. As the transport system developed, especially the expansion of railway commuting from the 1870s and ’80s, suburban life grew in importance, most notably in London. However, it was not only the propertied in society who sought to create rational recreation: in continuance of earlier attempts to influence change from within the labouring population, the reform of low culture was sought by the appeal to high culture in radical and socialist movements such as the Cooperative movement, the Workers Educational Association, and, after World War I, the Left Book Club. Radical rationalist recreation took the form of rambling, bicycling, and educational holidays.
However, this very negotiation of the hitherto forbidden cultural forms also represented a qualification of the class character of culture and the development of what came increasingly to be called “mass culture.” In part this represented a nationalization of cultural life that reflected the increasing importance of a mass polity. Britain also became a more centralized, homogeneous national society. But a simple, linear development toward uniform experience had not characterized British history. The earlier development of modern British society had seen an emphasis on the significance of local and regional cultures, which echoed and reflected the relationship between state and society. While the four nations of the British Isles had constituted a unitary state since the end of the 18th century, Britain remained in the early and mid-19th century a society that was highly diverse and localized. Different cultural, religious, and legal traditions reinforced the very diverse occupational and manufacturing structure that industrialization brought with it. The importance of political decentralization was reflected in very strong municipal cultures, so that the centre of gravity of a good deal of British artistic and literary life long continued to remain in the English provinces and within each of the constituent nations. The growth of organized sports reflected not only the social separation between classes but also the strength of regional and local attachments.
Nationalization was apparent in an increasingly elaborate and integrated communications structure represented in the railway, the telegraph, the postal service, and later the telephone. By the beginning of the 20th century, the local press, while strong, was beginning to give way to mass-circulation newspapers, most famously the Daily Mail. The nationwide retailing revolution apparent from the 1880s, along with the development of an increasingly nationally coordinated and centrally based entertainment industry, which could be seen, for example, in the development of music hall, were part of the process too. So was the migration of intellectual life into the universities, which tended to be dominated by Oxbridge and University of London colleges, despite strong provincial resistance and pride. London itself became the cultural centre of the country and therefore the cultural centre of the British Empire. A fundamental influence on this change was the shift in the British economy from manufacturing industry to international finance and, with it, the migration of wealth, prestige, fashion, and social status away from the provinces to London.
While organized sports might express regional loyalties, their increasingly organized and commercialized basis—whereby rules were drawn up, leagues founded, and competitions inaugurated—served to coordinate local loyalties on a national basis. National bodies were created, along with national audiences. Spectatorship gave way to participation among all classes. In this sense, a “mass” culture was evident. This culture, however, might occur within and across class lines. For example, professional football (soccer) and county cricket, the best-known instances of mass sports, particularly in the early days, witnessed the class distinction between “gentleman” and “players,” as well as north-south differences. Particular sports developed along class lines: tennis and golf, at least in England, were played by the higher orders of society, and rugby was divided along the class lines, with rugby union for the higher classes and rugby league for the lower classes. (See rugby for the history and development of both traditions.) Indeed, professional football has only relatively recently lost its working-class character in Britain. Nonetheless, in the 20th century, developments of mass culture across class lines were increasingly important—with cultural and social homogeneity increasingly going hand in hand. Patrick Joyce Britain from 1914 to the present The political situation World War I
The British declaration of war on Germany on August 4, 1914, brought an end to the threat of civil war in Ireland, which since March had occupied Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet almost to the exclusion of everything else. Formally at least, party warfare came to an end. The Conservatives agreed not to contest by-elections and to support the government in matters pertaining to the war. The Asquith coalition
Such compromises were easy to make in autumn 1914, when the excitement over the outbreak of war was high, causing a crush of enlistments, and when it was still generally believed that the war would be over within six months. By spring 1915, however, enthusiasm for the war began to cool and recruiting fell off. Moreover, Asquith’s government seemed to have lost its grip on affairs; newspapers carried reports of an inadequate supply of ammunition on the Western Front, and on May 15 the first sea lord, Adm. John Fisher, resigned. The Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, under pressure from his followers to take a stronger stand, announced that his party would demand a debate on the conduct of the war. Asquith quickly offered to form a coalition, thereby ending the last Liberal government. The coalition consisted of Liberals, Conservatives, and one Labourite.
Bonar Law, 1919BBC Hulton Picture Library
In the new cabinet, announced on May 25, Arthur James Balfour replaced Winston Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty. More important, a new department, the Ministry of Munitions, was established with the Liberal David Lloyd George at its head.
The coalition, which was supposed to allay tension among parties over the conduct of the war, worked badly. Although the Ministry of Munitions did indeed resolve the armament crisis surprisingly quickly, dissatisfaction with Asquith’s relaxed management of affairs continued and centred in the autumn of 1915 upon the rising demand, in the press and among the Conservatives, for compulsory military service. With apparent reluctance, the prime minister allowed an inadequate measure for the conscription of unmarried men to be passed in January 1916. But it was not until May 1916, after more controversy and threats of resignation, that a comprehensive bill was passed for compulsory enlistment of all men between ages 18 and 41.
Meanwhile, on April 24, 1916, Monday of Easter Week, a rebellion broke out in Dublin directed at securing Irish independence. Violence was suppressed within six days, and the surviving rebels were arrested amid general derision from the Irish population. But Britain’s punishment of the rebels, including 14 summary executions, quickly turned Irish sympathy toward the men, who were now regarded as martyrs. The Easter Rising was the beginning of the Irish war for independence.
Even though the rebellion was quelled, the problems of Ireland needed to be addressed. Prime Minister Asquith called upon Lloyd George to try to arrange for an immediate grant of Home Rule to be shared by the Irish nationalist and unionist parties (the former being fully committed to the principle of Home Rule, the latter only partially). Although a compromise was in fact reached, discontent among senior unionists prevented a bill from going forward. Thereafter Home Rule ceased to be an issue because southern Ireland now wanted nothing but independence. Asquith was further weakened.
The government also drew criticism for its war policies. For one, Britain was unable to help Romania when it declared war upon the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. More significantly, Britain launched its first major independent military operation, the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 13, 1916), with disastrous results. On the first day of battle, the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties. Although little of strategic significance was accomplished, the battle brought the reality of war home to Britain. (For details on the military aspects of the war, see World War I.) Dissatisfaction with the government mounted until, in the first week of December, Asquith and most of the senior Liberal ministers were forced to resign. Lloyd George became prime minister with a cabinet consisting largely of Conservatives. Lloyd George
Lloyd George governed Britain with a small “War Cabinet” of five permanent members, only one of whom was a politician of standing. Although Lloyd George had to take note of the opinions of Parliament and of those around him and pay attention to the tides of public political sentiment, the power to make decisions rested entirely with him. He was faced with the same sentiments of apathy, discontent with the country’s leadership, and war weariness that had brought down the Asquith government. Not only had Britain’s supreme military effort in 1916 failed, but the war had lost its meaning. The British commitment to defend Belgium (which had brought Britain into the war in the first place) was forgotten, still more the Austro-Hungarian actions against Serbia (which had not particularly troubled Britain anyway). Thus, in the next two years, Lloyd George set out to reinvest the war with meaning. Its purpose would be to create a better Britain and a safer world. Victory promised hope for the future. Toward that goal he established new ministries and brought workingmen into government. Lloyd George’s reconstruction program was built on principles that were later enunciated by U.S. Pres.Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points and his slogan of “making the world safe for democracy.” Lloyd George’s own slogan of 1918 was “to forge a nation fit for heroes to live in.”
Lloyd George controlled the government but not the Liberal Party; only a minority of Liberals in the House of Commons supported him, the rest remaining loyal to Asquith. Worse, Lloyd George had no party organization in the country. The division within the Liberal Party hardened during the controversy over a statement he made in April 1918 concerning the strength of troops in France. Although this controversy, the so-called Maurice Debate (which took place on May 9), strengthened Lloyd George temporarily, it also made clear his dependence upon the Conservatives. Soon afterward, in the summer of 1918, he began to plan what he expected to be a wartime general election to be entered into in coalition with the Conservatives. The sudden armistice of November 11, 1918, however, intervened, and the wartime election became a victory election. Meanwhile, the Labour Party had withdrawn its support from the coalition and called upon Labour members to resign. Most, but not all, did. Between the wars The election of 1918
The general election of December 14, 1918, was a landmark in 20th-century British history and may have helped to set the course of politics through the interwar period. To begin, the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which gave the vote to all men over age 21 and all women over age 30 and removed the property disqualifications of the older household franchise, tripled the electorate. Ironically, the election registered the lowest voter turnout of any election in the 20th century, reflecting in part the teething troubles of the Labour Party, whose share of the vote was only 20 percent. Further, 37 seats were added to the House of Commons. Even though the coalition was returned to office, the real winners of the election were the Conservatives. Lloyd George’s Liberals and the Conservatives, who had arranged not to contest seats against each other, together won 473 of the 707 seats. Liberals loyal to Lloyd George won 127 seats, while the Asquithian Liberal Party was nearly wiped out, returning only 36 members as compared with the Labour Party’s 57. (Similarly, the old Irish Nationalist Party was destroyed and replaced by Sinn Féin, the party of independence.) Thus, despite the coalition’s overwhelming victory, Lloyd George remained dependent on the Conservatives. The Liberal organization in the country was in shambles. Finally, the election had focused not upon the reconstruction of Britain, as the leaders of each party had intended, but on the punishment of Germany after the war, a matter the government had hoped to defer. The election had committed the British government to a harsh peace.
Harsh peace and hard times
The peace treaty with Germany—drawn up far too rapidly and without German participation, between January and May 1919—went into effect on June 28. Even as peace with Germany was declared, the British people, as well as members of the government, were beginning to realize that the punitive treaty, burdening Germany with the responsibility and much of the cost of the war, was a mistake. Accordingly, British foreign policy for much of the decade of the 1920s aimed at rehabilitating Germany and bringing it back into the family of nations. In general, this attempt was opposed by France and resulted in a rupture between Britain and its wartime ally, forcing France into a position of isolation that would have prodigious consequences for Europe and indeed for the rest of the world with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s.
Lloyd George spent a great deal of time in the four postwar years of his administration on foreign affairs. As a consequence, issues within the United Kingdom, such as unemployment, poor housing, Irish separatism, and the revival of industry, were too frequently neglected. Many of the promises for reconstruction made in speeches and papers during the war were never carried out. The government, however, tried to diminish the habitual confrontation between newly powerful organized labour and industry. Unemployment insurance was extended to virtually all workers, and a serious attempt was made to begin a public housing program. Railroads were reorganized, and for three years after the war coal mines remained in public hands. This restructuring of industry, however, came to an end with the serious rise in unemployment that began in 1920 and culminated in 1921 in a full-scale industrial depression with nearly one-fourth of the labour force out of work. One of the factors in the depression was a disastrous coal strike in April 1921, caused in considerable measure by the collapse of world coal prices resulting from German coal reparations to France. The immediate effect of the economic depression was a demand by the Conservatives for government economy that the prime minister could not ignore. Ireland and the return of the Conservatives
In 1919 revolutionary disorder broke out in the south of Ireland when the provisional government of Ireland, organized by the Sinn Féin party, began guerrilla military operations against the British administration. Through 1920 the British government attempted to put down violence with violence, while passing an act allowing Home Rule for both the south of Ireland and for Ulster. The six Protestant unionist counties of the north accepted Home Rule and in 1921 set up in Belfast an autonomous government. In the 26 counties of the south, Home Rule was defiantly rejected. By the spring of 1921, however, with the Belfast government in operation and with demands both in Britain and in the rest of the world that the fighting in Ireland come to an end, compromise became possible. In the summer a truce was arranged, and on December 6, 1921, after prolonged negotiations, the British government and the Irish rebels signed a so-called treaty allowing the establishment of what was, in effect, a dominion government in Dublin.
Lloyd George’s insistence that the Irish be granted the substance, if not the letter, of their demands, as well as the clearly declining popularity of the coalition government, caused general unhappiness, not among the Conservative leadership but among the members of the Conservative back bench in the House of Commons. Finally, in October 1922, when the proposal to join forces in a second coalition election was decisively rejected, largely by the Conservative rank and file, the Conservative Party withdrew from the coalition. Lloyd George resigned on October 20, and George V invited the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, to form a government. On November 15, 1922, the hastily established Conservative government won a solid victory in a general election. The decline of the Liberal Party was confirmed by the fact that the two wings of the party together returned only 116 members of Parliament compared with Labour’s 142. The Baldwin era
Law remained prime minister only until May 20, 1923, when, ill with cancer, he resigned. He was succeeded by an almost unknown politician, Stanley Baldwin, who would nonetheless dominate British politics until his resignation from his third government, in May 1937. Baldwin seemed an unlikely leader for a major party; he had been in Parliament for 15 years without making a mark. Yet behind the unassuming demeanour was a crafty politician. Baldwin understood, as perhaps his predecessors had not, that the British voter, certainly the middle-class voter, desired not excitement and reform but tranquillity. Nostalgia for the assumed stability of prewar Britain was strong and indeed a key to the politics of the 1920s. This frame of mind would contrast sharply with Britain’s mood after World War II.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, 1932.Bassano and Vandyk
The new Conservative government was faced with high unemployment, industrial stagnation, foreign debts, and continuing demand for economy in government. Baldwin’s response was to abandon Britain’s historic policy of free trade and to return to import duties. Although he was supported in this by a majority of his party, he nonetheless promised to hold an election on the subject before implementing such a policy. Consequently, on December 6, 1923, a second election was held in which the Conservatives lost their comfortable majority; indeed, though they controlled the largest number of seats (258) in the House of Commons, the now-united Liberal Party (159) and Labour (191) combined to win a majority. As a result, on January 22, 1924, the first Labour government in British history, under Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, came to power with Liberal support.
MacDonald remained in office only nine months and accomplished little except the revival of the public housing program abandoned by the Lloyd George administration under Conservative pressure. During his time in office he was continually charged in the House of Commons and in the newspapers with unseemly weakness toward the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union and with an unwillingness to deal firmly with purported revolutionary socialist conspiracies within the United Kingdom. Over this matter the Liberals finally turned against him, and on October 29, 1924, in an election dominated by charges of Soviet influence, MacDonald was heavily defeated. Baldwin returned to the prime ministership, backed by a majority of more than two to one over Labour and the Liberals combined. The Liberal representation in the House of Commons was reduced to 40.
Baldwin’s return to office coincided with the French evacuation of the Ruhr valley in Germany and the revival of Germany as an economic power. In the nearly five years of the second Baldwin government, Britain experienced relative economic prosperity, although unemployment never went below the 10 percent of the working population covered by unemployment insurance. A new collapse in domestic coal prices, however, caused by the revival of German coal mining, produced the threat of a second strike by British coal miners. It erupted in May 1926 with a walkout in the coal industry and a sympathy strike by the rest of Britain’s organized labour. Except as a monument in the history of British labour, however, this so-called general strike is as unimportant as it was unsuccessful. As a general strike, it lasted only 10 days, from May 3 to May 12. The miners themselves held out for nearly eight months and were finally starved into returning as winter began, at lower wages and with longer hours. Economically, the chief effect of the strike was to hasten the decay of the huge British coal industry. However, Baldwin’s handling of it—he prepared emergency services but then did nothing—greatly increased his popularity; indeed, he is remembered as a peacemaker, although his government passed an act declaring general strikes to be revolutionary and hence illegal. Yet beyond that his administration, particularly the ministry of health under Neville Chamberlain, accomplished a good deal; it vastly extended old-age pensions and pensions for widows and orphans, reformed local government, and, finally, in 1928, extended the franchise to women ages 21 to 30 on the same terms as those for men.
Baldwin dissolved the House of Commons in the spring of 1929, expecting to be returned. Instead, on May 30 MacDonald’s Labour Party received 288 seats compared with the Conservative Party’s 260, with the Liberals again holding the balance of power, with 59 seats. Thus, MacDonald formed his second government, again with Liberal consent, if not support. The Liberals could do little else. In 1924 Labour, by its inaction, had proved itself as a responsible rather than a revolutionary party. In the minds of Britons, Labour had replaced the Liberals as the natural alternative party. Baldwin and the abdication crisis
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