Nation State to Empire

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

Welcome

I hope this blog will give you a clear picture of the profound changes that took place in Britain changed between 1700 and 1914.

Be sure to check the sidebar on the right in order to view these posts in the correct order. You will see that most of them were created in 2009.

Monday, 7 December 2009

Towards 1914

Britain’s alliances
In 1902 Britain ended its long period of isolation, which the South African War had so strikingly demonstrated, by entering into an alliance with Japan. It was strictly limited and was inspired by concerns over Russian and German influence in China and Manchuria and was only to last for five years. This gave the Japanese the assurance of Britain’s neutrality if Japan went to war with Russia. But it did not address British concerns about Russian activities in Afghanistan and Tibet.

The 'Woman Question'

There is a useful timeline here on the legal milestones for women between 1832 and 1828.

The question of women’s roles and women’s rights came to the fore in public debate in the 1860s. In 1869 John Stuart Mill published his Subjection of Women (1869). The decade also saw the (unsuccessful) demand for female enfranchisement and the (partially successful) demand for women’s secondary and higher education. By 1870 the ‘Woman Question’ was hotly debated. The word ‘feminism’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1901 but it was cited in the Supplement from a French usage of 1895 to mean ‘advocacy of the rights of women’. By 1914 the term had achieved a wider currency.

The dawn of feminism
Middle-class women had first gained valuable experience of political organization and political campaigning in the 1840s in the Anti-Corn Law League. Although anti-slavery campaigning never politicized British women as much as American women, there is some evidence that women from anti-slavery families in Britain began to link abolitionism to the emancipation of their own sex in the years following the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. Among the four American women delegates was the influential Quaker, Lucretia Mott. But after a lengthy debate, the women were excluded from the debates. Mott went on to become a prominent figure in the Seneca Falls Convention, 1848.

One group of friends who took a particular interest in the 1840 convention also went on to take a pioneering role in calling for women rights. They included Quakers and Unitarians. From the mid 1850s, Florence Nightingale's illegitimate cousin, Barbara Leigh Smith (1827-1901) and her close friend Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), a grandaugher of Joseph Priestley, began to rouse public debate over a range of issues concerning the rights of women: education, employment opportunities and family law. This last question led Leigh Smith to form a committee in pursuit of Parliamentary reform of the marriage laws, especially those laws that limited a married woman’s right to own property.

A circle of women was established round Leigh Smith and Rayner Parks, and this was subsequently given focus by the provision of meeting rooms in London, in Langham Place. A vehicle of communication was established, the English Woman’s Journal. The editorship was eventually taken over by Emily Davies (1830-1921), who later became the first Principal of Girton.

The Suffragettes

The situation before 1903
The end of the 19th century saw a new emphasis on the distinctive contribution women could make to politics, while at the same time improving themselves through their participation in public life. As elective local government expanded owing to the creation of school boards, county councils and parish, urban and rural district councils, women were able to stand for office. In the first London County Council elections of 1888 Jane Cobden and Lady Margaret Sandhurst were returned while Emma Cons was nominated as an alderman by the Liberal majority on the council. Jane Cobden (daughter of Richard) sat for Bow and Bromley, where the socialist, George Lansbury had ably managed her election. However, the legality of her position was questioned in a series of actions brought against her, with the result that, while she continued to serve on the council until 1892, she faced financial penalties and was not able to vote at its meetings; only in

1907 would women acquire full rights in local government.

Britain 1902-11

The following posts deal with a particularly turbulent period of British political history: the fall of the Conservatives, following a nearly unbroken twenty years in power, the Liberal landslide, following their catastrophic split in 1886, the introduction of a proto-welfare state, and the titanic clash between the governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith over the House of Lords.

Later posts will look at the suffragettes and the coming of the First World War. To refresh your memory of the Irish crisis, see here.

The Conservatives: from victory to disaster

In January 1901 Victoria died and was succeeded by Edward VII. In May 1902 Lord Salisbury's Conservative government signed a treaty with the Boers, ending the Anglo-Boer War. On 11 July 1902 he retired, having served the fourth-longest premiership after Walpole, Pitt the Younger and Liverpool. He was also the last Prime Minister to sit in the Lords. He died at Hatfield in August 1903. The end of his premiership can be seen as a symbolic marker of the end of the Victorian period.

There was never any doubt that Salisbury would be succeeded by his nephew, A. J. Balfour (left) hence [possibly] the phrase, ‘Bob’s your uncle’ - though it might have an earlier origin). Joseph Chamberlain, the only possible rival, was unacceptable to large sections of Conservative opinion (and was recovering from a fall through a plate glass window at the time).

The 1906 general election

On assuming office in December 1905 the elderly Henry Campbell-Bannerman formed a cabinet:
Herbert Henry Asquith: Chancellor of the Exchequer;
Sir Edward Grey: Foreign Secretary;
R.B. Haldane: Minister for War;
Herbert Gladstone: Home Secretary
Two younger men came into the government. David Lloyd George, aged 42, became President of the Board of Trade. Winston Churchill, recently defected from the Tories, became Under-Secretary for the Colonies. The Lib-Lab John Burns became President of the Local Government Board, the first working man to reach the cabinet.

Though the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (right) was elected in a landslide victory, it made little initial progress in its general legislative programme. During the election campaign (in a speech delivered at Nottingham on 15 January 1906) the Conservative leader, A. J. Balfour had said:

‘the great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or whether in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire’.

This was no empty threat. At the beginning of the new Parliament there were 602 peers, including 25 bishops. Of these only 88 were Liberals, 124 were Liberal Unionists and 355 were Conservatives. In December 1908 only 102 peers took the Liberal whip as against 459 Unionists.

Early in 1908 Campbell-Bannerman’s health began to fail. He resigned on 3 April), and died two weeks later). On 4 April the King summoned the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Henry Asquith (left) to Biarritz.

Asquith was succeeded at the Treasury by David Lloyd George, (right) a man born outside the British elite. He had been an effective and high profile President of the Board of Trade: he had settled a threatened rail strike, had prepared legislation for the establishment of the Port of London Authority to take over the management of a vast area of London’s dockyards. The new President of the Board of Trade was Winston Churchill. The elevation of these two men gave the government a new aggressiveness which goaded the Conservatives into a succession of political errors. But all was not well for the government. Churchill, standing for re-election on his appointment as President of the Board of Trade was defeated in North-West Manchester and forced to find another seat in Dundee.

The Liberals in Power: III Old Age Pensions

Pensions were the main plank of the 1908 budget. The pensions bill received its second reading in the Commons on 15 June 1908. It was introduced by Lloyd George (though Asquith had devised the scheme) and came to be popularly known as ‘the Lloyd George’. The measure was a disappointment to those who had wanted universal pensions. It was finally agreed that: British citizens over 70 with incomes of up to £21 pa would receive the full non-contributory pension of £13 p.a. (5s per week) for single persons and of £19.10.00 (7s. 6d. per week) for married couples. Incomes of up to £31.10s would qualify for a pension reduced by one shilling a week for each shilling of income above £21. The minimum pension would be one shilling. Those with incomes as low as £26 p.a. would receive only 3s a week (this caused Labour members to vote against the amendment). Asquith estimated that about half a million persons would qualify for the pensions and that the annual cost would be £6m; but by 1912 the government was spending £11.7m. and by 1914 £12.5m.

The Liberals in power: IV the 'People's Budget' and the fight with the Lords

This was the title Lloyd George gave his 1909 budget and it sprang from his temperance, Nonconformist background. It was in part the product of the government’s greatly increased need for income: the Dreadnought building programme and the increased social security costs. Because it was also extremely redistributivist, it was not a traditional Liberal budget (Gladstone would have regarded it with horror).

Ireland in song

If you want to hear 'The Wearing of the Green' on Youtube, go here. If on the other hand you want 'The Sash my Father Wore', this is the place.

Sunday, 22 November 2009

Ireland 1798: The Year of the French

The following posts on Ireland owe a great deal to R.R.Foster's classic Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (Penguin, 1988)

The Protestant Ascendancy
In 1800 the population of Ireland comprised:
Roman Catholic Irish: 3,150,000
Protestant Anglo-Irish 450,000
Presbyterians 900,000

The Act of Union (1801)

One of the most direct results of the uprising was that in 1801 the Dublin Parliament was abolished and a single Parliament at Westminster ruled both countries. From 1801 until 1918 there were a substantial number of Irish Members of Parliament at Westminster. As we will see, Daniel O' Connell was to campaign for repeal of the Act and Gladstone would come to think it was a mistake.

Daniel O'Connell and the Catholic Question

For the formation of the Catholic League see here. Go here to refresh your memory of the County Clare election.

The Irish Famine

The BBC has a very good account of this difficult and very contested subject. There is another account here.

About a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55). Comparison with other modern and contemporary famines establishes beyond any doubt that the Irish famine of the late 1840s, which killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population, was proportionally much more destructive of human life than the vast majority of famines in modern times.

The December issue of History Today (out now) has a useful article on Gladstone and Ireland.

When William Ewart Gladstone (seen here engaged in one of his favourite activities) became Prime Minister in 1868 he famously declared: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’, though he had already acknowledged to John Bright that this might ‘lead the Liberal party to martyrdom’. This mission was to rend and distort British politics for the next thirty years and his failure to carry it out was a disaster.

Home Rule splits the Liberals

Gladstone’s Conversion
In his brief period out of office Gladstone came to the conclusion that the Irish, like the Italians, the Afghans, the Zulus and the Sudanese were a people rightly struggling to be free, and that Parnell’s demand for Home Rule ought to be conceded. The conversion was a bombshell comparable to Peel's conversion to free trade.

The election of 1885: The conversion to Home Rule was not a single moment of decision and was not the result of an inner struggle. He believed he needed time to educate his party and for this reason his manifesto for the election was vague on Ireland. Most Liberal candidates ignored the Home Rule issue.

The Liberals and Ireland 1912-14

Of the three rebellions which presaged the ‘strange death of Liberal England’, Home Rule and Ulster were undoubtedly the most intractable.

The Liberals were committed by their need for Nationalist votes to pass a Home Rule act, but this had never been approved by the British electorate, and it involved coercing a quarter of the population of the island of Ireland into (as they saw it) giving up their British allegiance.

The Labour movement

Socialism in Europe
Throughout Europe the period from the 1880s onwards saw considerable labour unrest – some of it violent - in the relatively advanced industrial regions. Much of this discontent arose out of the changes in industrial society: the growth of communications, transport, urbanization and the dissemination of news; newspapers were cheaper, the provincial and national press was growing, and deference was weakening; old craft unions now co-existed with newer unions of the unskilled.