History of Great Britain

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Chartists and Corn Law Reformers

The Whig reform spirit ebbed during the ministry of Lord Melbourne, and an economic depression in 1837 brought to public attention two powerful protest organizations. The Chartists urged the immediate adoption of the
People’s Charter, which would have transformed Britain into a political democracy (with universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, and secret ballot) and which was somehow expected to improve living standards as well. Millions of workers signed Charter petitions in 1839, 1842, and
1848, and some Chartist demonstrations turned into riots. Parliament repeatedly rejected the People’s Charter, but it proved more receptive to the creed of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League. League leaders such as Richard Cobden expected the repeal of tariffs on imported food to advance the welfare of manufacturers and workers alike, while promoting international trade and peace among nations. Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative ministry succeeded Melbourne, and became active in reducing Britain’s tariffs but brought back the income tax to make up for lost revenue. In the winter of 1845 and 1846, spurred by an Irish potato blight and consequent famine, Peel proposed the complete repeal of the Corn Laws. With Whig aid the measure passed, but two-thirds of Peel’s fellow Conservatives condemned the action as a sellout of the party’s agricultural supporters. The
Conservatives divided between Peelites and protectionists, and the Whigs returned to power under Lord John Russell in 1846.

During the Peel and Russell years the trend toward free trade continued, aided by the 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts, and a system of administrative regulation was gradually established. Women and children were barred from underground work in mines and limited to 10-hour working days in factories. Regulations were also imposed on urban sanitation facilities and passenger-carrying railroads, and commissions were set up to oversee prisons, insane asylums, merchant shipping, and private charities.
Attempts to subsidize elementary education, however, were hampered by conflict over the church’s role in running schools.

Mid-Victorian Prosperity
From the late 1840s until the late 1860s, Britons were less concerned with domestic conflict than with an economic boom occasionally affected by wars and threats of war on the Continent and overseas. The Great Exhibition of
1851 in London symbolized Britain’s industrial supremacy. The 10,600-km
(6600-mi) railroad network of 1850 more than doubled during the mid-
Victorian years, and the number of passengers carried annually went up by seven times. The telegraph provided instant communication. Inexpensive steel was made possible by Henry Bessemer’s process, developed in 1856, and a boom in steamship building began in the 1860s. The value of British exports tripled, and overseas capital investments quadrupled. Working-class living standards improved also, and the growth of trade unionism among engineers, carpenters, and others led to the founding of the Trades Union
Congress in 1868. In the aftermath of the Continental revolutions of 1848, a Britain governed by the Peelite-Liberal coalition of Lord Aberdeen drifted into war with an autocratic, expansionist Russia. In alliance with the France of Napoleon III, Britain entered the Crimean War in 1854.
Parliamentary criticism of army mismanagement, however, caused the downfall of Aberdeen. He was replaced by Lord Palmerston, a staunch English nationalist and champion of European liberalism, who saw the war to its conclusion—a limited Anglo-French victory in 1856. In 1857 and 1858, the
Sepoy Mutiny was suppressed, and Britain abolished the East India Company, making British India a crown colony. In contrast, domestic self-government was encouraged in Britain’s settlement colonies: Canada (federated under the British North America Act of 1867), Australia, New Zealand, and Cape
Colony (South Africa). Britain maintained a difficult neutrality during the
American Civil War (1861-1865). It encouraged the unification of Italy, but witnessed with apprehension Prince Otto von Bismarck’s creation of a German
Empire under Prussian domination.

The Gladstone-Disraeli Rivalry

During the 16 years after Palmerston’s death in 1865, the rivalry of
William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli dominated British politics. Both had begun as Tories, but in 1846 Gladstone had become a Peelite and had thereafter gradually moved toward liberalism. As Palmerston’s chancellor of the*************************************************************************
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*********************************************************** ultimately came up with the Reform Bill of 1867, which Disraeli successfully piloted through the House of Commons. The measure enfranchised most urban workers.
It almost doubled the English and Welsh electorates and more than doubled the Scottish. It also launched the era of mass political organization and of increasingly polarized and disciplined parliamentary parties.

Disraeli succeeded Derby as prime minister early in 1868, but a Liberal election victory in December of that year gave the post to Gladstone.
Gladstone’s first cabinet was responsible for numerous reforms: the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; the creation of a national system of elementary education; the full admission of religious dissenters to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; a merit-based civil service; the secret ballot; and judicial and army reform. During the Disraeli ministry that followed, the Conservatives passed legislation advancing
“Tory democracy”—trade union legalization, slum clearance, and public health—but Disraeli became more concerned with upholding the British Empire in Africa and Asia and scoring a diplomatic triumph at the Congress of
Berlin (1878).

A whistle-stop campaign by Gladstone in 1879 and 1880 restored him to the prime ministership. His second cabinet curbed electoral corruption and, with the Reform Act of 1884, extended the vote to almost all males who owned or rented housing. The measure made the single-member parliamentary district the general rule. Gladstone became increasingly concerned with bringing peace and land reform to Ireland, which was represented in
Parliament by the Irish Nationalist Party of Charles Stewart Parnell. When
Gladstone became a convert to the cause of home rule—the creation of a semi- independent Irish legislature and cabinet—he divided the Liberal Party and led his brief third ministry to defeat in 1886. A second effort to enact home rule during Gladstone’s fourth ministry, which lasted from 1892 to
1894, was blocked by the House of Lords.

Late Victorian Economic and Social Change
The same agricultural depression that led to unrest among Irish tenant farmers in the second half of the 19th century also undermined British agriculture and the prosperity of country squires. The mid-Victorian boom gave way to an era of deflation, falling profit margins, and occasional large-scale unemployment. Both the United States and Germany overtook
Britain in the production of steel and other manufactured goods. At the same time, Britain remained the world’s prime shipbuilder, shipper, and banker, and a majority of British workers gained in purchasing power. The number of trade unionists grew, and significant attempts were made to organize the semiskilled; the London Dock Strike of 1889 was the result of one such effort. Social investigators and professed socialists discovered large pockets of poverty in the slums of London and other cities, and the national government as well as voluntary agencies were called on to remedy social evils. Despite a high level of emigration to British colonies and the United States—more than 200,000 per year during the 1880s—the population of England and Wales doubled between 1851 and 1911 (to more than
36 million) and that of Scotland grew by more than 60 percent (to almost 5 million). Both death rates and birth rates declined somewhat, and a series of changes in the law made it possible for a minority of women to enter universities, vote in local elections, and keep control of their property while married.

The Late Victorian Empire

A relative lack of interest in empire during the mid-Victorian years gave way to increased concern during the 1880s and 1890s. The raising of tariff barriers by the United States, Germany, and France made colonies more valuable again, ushering in an era of rivalry with Russia in the Middle
East and along the Indian frontier and a “scramble for Africa” that involved the carving out of large claims by Britain, France, and Germany.
Hong Kong and Singapore served as centers of British trade and influence in
China and the South Pacific. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 led indirectly to a British protectorate over Egypt in 1882. Queen Victoria became empress of India in 1876, and both Victoria’s golden jubilee (1887) and her diamond jubilee (1897) celebrated imperial unity. The Conservative ministries of Lord Salisbury were preoccupied with imperial concerns as well. The policies of Salisbury’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, contributed to the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Britain suffered initial reverses in that war but then captured Johannesburg and Pretoria in
1900. Only after protracted guerrilla warfare, however, was the conflict brought to an end in 1902. By then Queen Victoria was dead.

The Edwardian Age (1901-1914)
In the aftermath of the Boer War, Britain signed a treaty of alliance with
Japan (1902) and ended several decades of overseas rivalry with France in the Entente Cordiale (1904). After Anglo-Russian disputes had also been settled, this link became the Triple Entente (1907), which faced the Triple
Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy. As the reign of King Edward VII began, however, most Britons were more concerned with domestic matters.
Arthur Balfour’s Education Act in 1902 helped meet the demand for national efficiency with the beginnings of a national system of secondary education, but the measure stirred old religious passions. In the course of Balfour’s ministry, the Conservative Party was divided between tariff reformers, who wanted to restore protective duties, and free traders. The general election of 1906 gave the Liberals an overwhelming majority. Union influence led to the appearance of a small separate Labour Party of 29 members as well. The
Liberal government, headed first by Henry Campbell-Bannerman and then by
Herbert Asquith, gave domestic self-government to the new Union of South
Africa and partial provincial self-government to British India in 1909 and
1910. Under the inspiration of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, it also laid the foundations of the welfare state. Its program, from 1908 to
1912, included old-age pensions, government employment offices, unemployment insurance, a contributory program of national medical insurance for most workers, and boards to fix minimum wages for miners and others. Lloyd George’s controversial “people’s budget,” designed to pay the costs of social welfare and naval rearmament, was blocked by the House of
Lords and led in due course to the Parliament Act of 1911, which left the
Lords with no more than a temporary veto. The Conservatives made a comeback, however, in the general elections of 1910, and the Liberals were thereafter dependent on the Irish Nationalists to stay in power. Although the economy seemed to be booming, wages scarcely kept up with rising prices, and the years 1911 to 1914 were marked by major and divisive strikes by miners, dock workers, and transport workers. Suffragists staged violent demonstrations in favor of the enfranchisement of women. When the
Liberal government sought to enact home rule for Ireland, non-Catholic
Irish from Ulster threatened force to prevent Britain from compelling them to become part of a semi-independent Ireland. In the midst of these domestic disputes, a crisis in the Balkans exploded into World War I.

The Era of World Wars

Although the competitive naval buildup of Britain and Germany is often cited as a cause of World War I, Anglo-German relations were actually cordial in early 1914, and Britain was Germany’s best customer. It was
Germany’s threat to France and its invasion of neutral Belgium that prompted Britain to declare war.

Britain in World War I
A British expeditionary force was immediately sent to France and helped stem the German advance at the Marne. Fighting on the Western Front soon became mired in a bloody stalemate amid muddy trenches, barbed wire, and machine-gun emplacements. Battles to push the Germans back failed repeatedly at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Efforts to outflank the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, and Turkey) in the Balkans, as at
Gallipoli (1915), failed also. At the Battle of Jutland (1916), the British prevented the German fleet from venturing into the North Sea and beyond, but German submarines threatened Britain with starvation early in 1917; merchant-ship convoys guarded by destroyers helped avert that danger.

In May 1915 Asquith’s Liberal ministry became a coalition of Liberals,
Conservatives, and a few Labourites. Lloyd George became minister of munitions. Continued frustration with the nation’s inability to win the war, however, led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George, heading a predominantly Conservative coalition, in December 1916. Problems in
Ireland, chiefly the 1916 Easter rebellion, resulted in several hundred dead. By 1918 the annual budget was 13 times that of 1913; tax rates had risen fivefold, and the total national debt, fourteenfold.

Although many Britons welcomed the end of czarist rule in Russia in 1917, they saw the Communist decision to make a separate peace with Germany as a sellout. Only the entry of the United States into the war made possible
General Douglas Haig’s successful tank offensive in the summer of 1918 and the German surrender in November. The election called immediately thereafter gave the Lloyd George coalition an overwhelming mandate. The
Labour Party, now formally pledged to socialism, became the largest opposition party, while the Asquith wing of a divided Liberal Party was almost wiped out. By then the Reform Act of 1918 had granted the vote to all men over the age of 21 and all women over 30.

Changes Wrought by the War
Lloyd George represented Britain as one of the Big Three (together with
France and the United States) at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The resulting treaties enlarged the British Empire as former German colonies in
Africa and Turkish holdings in the Middle East became British mandates. At the same time Britain’s self-governing dominions—Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and South Africa—became separate treaty signatories and separate members of the new League of Nations. An intermittent civil war in Ireland ended with a treaty negotiated by Lloyd George in 1921. Most of the island became the Irish Free State, independent of British rule in all but name.
The six counties of Northern Ireland continued to be represented in the
British Parliament, although they also gained their own provincial parliament. The immediate postwar years were marked by economic boom, rapid demobilization, and much labor strife. By 1922, however, the boom had petered out. That year a rebellion by a group of Conservative members of
Parliament ended the prime ministership of Lloyd George, and the wholly
Conservative ministry of Andrew Bonar Law represented a return to “normal times.”

The Interwar Era

During the early 1920s a major political shift took place in Britain. The general election of 1922 gave victory to the Conservatives, but another one, called a year later by Bonar Law’s successor, Stanley Baldwin, left no party with a clear majority. As a consequence, Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour
Party leader, became the first professed socialist to serve as prime minister of Great Britain. His first ministry in 1924, rested on Liberal acquiescence; it lasted less than a year, when yet another election brought back Baldwin’s Conservatives. Lloyd George’s and Asquith’s efforts at
Liberal reunion failed to restore the party’s fortunes, and it has remained a minor party in British politics. The Baldwin ministry restored the gold standard and enacted several social-reform measures, including the Widows’,
Orphans’, and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act, a national electric power network, and a reform of local government. In 1928 women were given voting rights that were equal to those of men.

Between 1929 and 1932 the international depression more than doubled an already high rate of unemployment. In the course of three years, both the levels of industrial activity and of prices dipped by a quarter, and industries such as shipbuilding collapsed almost entirely. MacDonald’s second Labour government found itself unable to cope with the depression, and in 1931 it gave way to a national government, headed first by MacDonald and then by Baldwin and made up mostly of Conservatives. The Labour Party denounced MacDonald as a traitor, but the national government won an overwhelming mandate in the general election of 1931. It took Britain off the gold standard, restored protective tariffs, and subsidized the building of houses. Between 1933 and 1937, the economy recovered steadily, with the automobile, construction, and electrical industries leading the way.
Unemployment remained high, however, especially in Wales, Scotland, and northern England. Interwar society was influenced by the radio (monopolized by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was begun in 1927) and the cinema, but British life was little affected by the continental ideologies of communism and fascism. The empire remained a fact, even though the
Statute of Westminster (1931) proclaimed the equality of Commonwealth nations such as Canada and Australia. Religious attendance declined, but
King George V maintained the prestige of the monarchy. When his son, Edward
VIII, insisted on marrying a twice-divorced American in 1936, abdication proved to be the only acceptable solution. Under Edward’s brother, George
VI, the monarchy again provided the model family of the land.

Britain and World War II
Memories of World War I left Britons with an overwhelming desire to avoid another war, and the country played a leading role in the League of Nations and at interwar disarmament conferences such as those in Washington, D.C. in 1921 and 1922 and London in 1930 that limited naval size. Conscious that
Germany might have been unfairly treated at the 1919 peace conference, the
British government followed a policy of appeasement in dealing with Adolf
Hitler’s Germany after 1933. Germany’s decisions between 1934 and 1936 to leave the League of Nations, rearm, and remilitarize the Rhineland in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles were accepted. So was the German annexation of Austria in 1938. In his efforts to keep the peace at all costs, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain also acquiesced to the Munich
Pact of 1938, which gave Germany the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia.
Only after the German annexation of Prague in March of 1939 did Britain make pledges to Poland and Romania.

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war, and World War II began. The defeat**********************************************************************
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**************************************************************at achieved by any other power. Although a German invasion plan was foiled by British air supremacy, large parts of London and other cities were destroyed and some 60,000 civilians were killed. Beginning early in 1941, the still- neutral United States granted lend-lease aid to Britain.

The nature of the war changed with the German invasion of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Churchill then forged the “Grand Alliance” with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt against Germany, Italy, and Japan. In the immediate aftermath of the
Japanese intervention, much of the British Empire in Southeast Asia was overrun, but late in 1942 the tide turned. The British contribution included the Battle of the North Atlantic against the German submarine menace and the campaign led by General Bernard Montgomery against the
German army in North Africa. Churchill corresponded continually and met often with Roosevelt, and British forces joined American in the 1943 invasion of Sicily and Italy, the invasion of France in 1944, and the ultimate defeat of the Axis powers in 1945.

The Winds of Change

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