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The Liberal Age (reforms, Parties and Political life).
In 1851, the first World Fair, known as the Great Exhibition of 1851, was held. Organised by Prince Albert, the exhibition was officially opened by the Queen on 1 May 1851. Despite the fears of many, it proved an incredible success, with its profits being used to endow the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum). The Great Exhibition reflected Britain’s commitment to economic progress and enjoyed over 6 mln visitors. This date serves, probably for nostalgic reasons, as a milestone for the period that the British call Liberal Age and which lasted till 1914. Why is it called Liberal?
Between 1847 and 1868 the Tories lost 6 general elections running; Liberals, upon winning, brought about long-expected reforms. They abolished religious tests for entry into Oxford and Cambridge (on the whole, Britain was gradually becoming a secular country; in London only 19% population went regularly to church by the turn of the century).. They put an end to ‘Taxes of Knowledge’ – the stamp duties on newspapers, customs and excise on paper. As a result by 1863 there were over 100 newspapers in Britain. One more important innovation was the Penny Black, the first postage stamp, which standardised postage to a flat price regardless of distance sent.
They dealt away with a shameful practice of purchasing commissions in the army – comissions were to be granted for merit from that time on. They made capitalism relatively safe for the investor by introducing limited liability. They advocated free trade, and that coincided with economic boom. (Politically the British scene was dominated by two great PMs: Disraeli and Palmerston. Queen Victoria was fond of the former and detested the latter, but had to put up with the will of the Parliament and even strove to bring Wigs and Tories closer to each other.)
To return to liberal reforms: the Victorians were impressed by science and progress, and felt that they could improve society in the same way as they were improving technology. The model town of Saltaire was founded, along with others, as a planned environment with good sanitation and many civic, educational and recreational facilities, although it lacked a pub, which was regarded as a focus of dissent. Similar sanitation reforms, prompted by the Public Health Acts 1848 and 1869, were made in the crowded, dirty streets of the existing cities, and soap was the main product shown in the relatively new phenomenon of advertising. Victorians also strove to improve society through many charities and relief organisations such as the Salvation Army, the RSPCA and the NSPCC, and at the same time there were many people such as Florence Nightingale trying to reform areas of public life. Another new institution was Robert Peel's "peelers", one of the earliest formal police forces.
Queen Victoria was possibly one of the most powerful women in Britain since Queen Elizabeth, but her status did not dramatically improve the position of women within society. There were many movements to obtain greater rights for women, but voting rights did not come until the next century. Women played an important role in charities, church and arts; they were allowed to attend lectures in Universities and take exams, but not degrees; professions remained barred. The Married Women's Property Act 1882 meant that women did not lose their right to their own property when they got married and could divorce without fear of poverty, although divorce was frowned upon and very rare during the 19th century. Some women gained the vote for the local elections and could stand up as candidates for lical councils, school boards and the Poor Law Board.
The Victorians are often credited with having ‘invented’ childhood. Despite the image of large Victorian families, the trend was towards smaller families, probably because of lower infant mortality rates and longer life spans. Legislation reduced the working hours of children while raising the minimum working age, and the passing of the Education Act 1870 set the basis for universal primary education. Education in general worked:
There appeared first indications of the welfare system: free shool meals, old age pensions (1908), W.Churchill’s labour exchanges (1909) and Lloyd George’s National Insurance Bill (1911) – compulsory insurance to certain workers for benefits in times of sickness and unemployment, paid for by the state, the employer and the employee.
This period is marked by pronounced political leaning to the left. The term ‘left’ appeared in 1880 together with Independent Labour Patry (ILP), which considered itself socialist; Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation with its quasi-Marxist ideology. Trade unions were growing fast and later joined ILP to form a Labour Representation Committee. The Labour Party appeared in 1906. Leanings to socialism were supplemented by Labour-based Fabian Society (George Bernard Shaw and H.G.Wells were among the members), that preached a centrally planned economy and a labour market. Unionists (coalition of Tories and Liberal Unionists ) preached protection economy in new industrial spheres (chemicals, electicals, automobiles) and Imperial Customs Union – to integrate the empire’s economy, tariffs, including duties on food – as the only alternative to direct taxation. The basic question of social organization the left and the right dissented on: where would the extra tax burden fall – on the rich through the supertax or on the poor through food taxes?
If we compare this outline to continental countries, it would be a pretty picture of sweetness and prosperity; that’s one reason why ‘Liberal Age’ might be a preferred term. It doesn’t reflect the whole picture, that’s why there are a lot of other terms involved, e.g. Great Exodus or urbanisation.
Britain was rapidly becoming an urban nation, which had no precedent; that’s why perhaps the British clung so tenatiously to rural images and tradition – only 1/5 population was rural; by 1901 there were 74 towns with over 50.000 inhabitants. There was a Great Exodus to towns, even more marked than the one during the First Industrial Revolution; since women were less easily employable in towns, this also lead to a marked imbalance of sexes in the countryside. London metropolis grew from 2.3 mln in 1851 to 4.5 in 1911 – or 7.3 if we include the surburbs.Cities with their sattellite areas were merging to form a single non-rural unit – ‘conurbation’. By 1911 there were 7 such areas:
Most conurbations contained a significant Irish community; London and Leeds also absorbed large Jewish communities.
Ubarnisation also triggered high farming – which meant drainage, fertilizers and farm machinery. In 1868 80 % of food consumed in UK was home produced. This was however soon to change: in 1870s a series of bad harvests and the opening of North American praries led to ‘great agricultural depression – the price of grain fell dramatically; as a result, in 1901 only 6.4% of national income was accounted for by the agriculture; the majority of food was imported – which is a strategic factor.
For Ireland ‘Great Exodus’ acquired more tragic overtones: the territory was grossly undercapitalized; the economy could not sustain the population; hence mass emigrations ‘overseas’: ¾ mln emigrated to USA, more than 370.000 to Australia.
The same period is referred to as Victorian, which is not exact (Victoria’s reign started earler and ended in 1901) or the age of Victorian values (or emerging Victorian society). This is more or less justified, as society underwent considerable shifts and transformations. Paradoxically, what changed society dramatically was railways. Another important development during the Victorian era was the improvement of communication links. Trains promoted not only business, but also leisure. Many people used the train services to visit the seaside, helped by the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 which created a number of fixed holidays which all sectors of society could enjoy. Large numbers travelling to quiet fishing villages such as Worthing, Brighton, Morecambe and Scarborough began turning them into major tourist centres, and people like Thomas Cook saw tourism and even overseas travel as viable businesses. The trains became another important factor in regulating and ordering society, with "railway time" being the standard by which clocks were set throughout Britain. Steam ships such as the SS Great Britain and SS Great Western made international travel more common but also advanced trade, so that in Britain it was not just the luxury goods of earlier times that were imported into the country but essentials such as corn from the America and meat from Australia.
Indeed, the period in question was marked by the great fear of the propetied class that a revolutionary class would emerge. None however did. Why? Between 1860 and 1914 real wages doubled. Some money became available for more than essentials. This surplus coincided with a fall of birth-rate – the extra cash was not absorbed by extra children. Here is a brief classes overview.
Working classes ( a Victorian term ) fell into 6 main categories:
I suggest that you compare it with Russia at the turn of the century. There was a substantial deflation of prices. Male wage earners obtained shared leasure activities. Diets improved a little – milk, meat and vegetables to bread, potatoes and beer. Workers discovered books and photos. Housing was mostly leased or rented and housing conditions in conurbations remained ghastly.
Lower middle class: for them the decades after 1850 opened a golden age of expansion. Those were white collar workers managing and serving in the retailing, banking, accounting, advertising and trading. Surburbanisation was the characteristic innovation of the city life.
As to propertied class ‘land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position but prevents one from keeping it’(O.Wilde). An increasing amount of dignity turned mercantile. The habit of sending children away to boarding schools increased the national outlook of the class but discouraged succession in ‘business’.
If we sum up Victorian values, that would be individualism, self-respect and staunch belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority. In foreign policy, however, the period is characterized by rapid colonial expansion, or Colonial Imperialism (this would be the most acceptable term, but for the British not very palatable). Each of Britain's major elites also found some advantages in formal, overseas expansion: mammoth monopolies wanted imperial support to secure overseas investments against competition and domestic political tensions abroad; bureaucrats wanted more occupations, military officers desired promotion, and the traditional but waning landed gentry wanted formal titles. Observing the rise of trade unionism, socialism, and other protest movements during an era of mass society in both Europe and later North America, the elite in particular was able to utilize imperial "jingoism" to co-opt the support of the impoverished industrial working class. Riding the sentiments of the late nineteenth century Romantic Age, imperialism inculcated the masses with 'glorious' neo-aristocratic virtues and helped instill broad, nationalist sentiments.
It was the idea of broad ‘national interests’ that triggered the Crimean War with Russia in 1853-55; the root was Russian expansion against the sprawling and feeble Ottoman Empire. Britain felt threatened as to her Middle East acquisitions. It also brought about a new wave of colonial expansion.
Amalgamation of industrial cartels in the era of finance capitalism, in the forms of larger corporations and mergers and alliances of separate firms, and technological advancement during the Second Industrial Revolution, particularly the increased utilization of electric power and internal combustion engines fuelled by coal and petroleum, were mixed blessings for British business during the late Victorian era. The development of more intricate and efficient machines along with monopolistic mass-production greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. Among the new conditions, more markedly evident in Britain, the forerunner of Europe's industrial states, were the long-term effects of the severe 'Long Depression' of 1873-1896, which had followed fifteen years of great economic instability. Businesses in practically every industry suffered from lengthy periods of low and falling profit rates and price deflation after 1873.
This led Britain, and to a lesser extent other industrializing nations to be more receptive to the desires of prospective overseas investment. By the 1870s, London financial houses thus achieved an unprecedented control of industry, contributing to increasing concerns among elite policymakers regarding British 'protection' of overseas investments, particularly those in the securities of foreign governments and in foreign-government-backed development activities such as railroads. After the more 'gentlemanly' service sector of the economy (banking, insurance, shipping) became more prominent possibly at the expense of manufacturing the influence of London's financial interest began rising.
The 'cleaner' financial sector probably had an effect on the decisions taken by Britain's aristocratic bureaucrats and parliamentarians. Late-Victorian political leaders, most of whom were stockholders, "shared a common culture with the financial class." Foreign trade thus tripled in volume between 1870 and 1914, although (again) most of the activity occurred among the industrialized countries, or between them and their suppliers of primary goods or their new markets. In 1913, only 11 percent of the world's trade took place between primary producers themselves. Britain ranked as the world's largest trading nation in 1860, but by 1913 it had lost ground to both the United States and Germany: British and German exports in that year each totalled $2.3 billion, and those of the United States exceeded $2.4 billion. More significant was the emigration of their goods and capital.
With the expansion of the Industrial Revolution, Britain could no longer reap the benefits of being the sole modern, industrial nation. Britain by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War was no longer the 'workshop of the world', meaning that its finished goods were no longer produced so efficiently and cheaply that they could often undersell comparable, locally manufactured goods in almost any other market. Britain was even growing incapable of dominating the markets of India a crown colony by 1858 that Disraeli would later deem "the brightest jewel of the crown", Manchu China, the coasts of Africa, and Latin America. The German textiles and metal industries, for example, had by the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War surpassed those of Britain in organization and technical efficiency.
The new interest of the emergent industrial powers in colonial expansion brought them into direct competition with Britain. The expansion of the Second Industrial Revolution and the rise of similar economic practices (such as amalgamation of industry) in Germany and the United States intensified the competition for overseas markets and hence formal colonialism. The 'Scramble for Africa', rationalized by Rudyard Kipling-style racism and Social Darwinism in predominantly Protestant empires and the paternalistic French-style "mission of civilization", was attractive to many European statesmen and industrialists who wanted to accelerate the process of securing colonies upon anticipating the prospective need to do so. Their reasoning was that markets might soon become wanted, and that a nation's economic survival depend on its being able to offload its surplus products elsewhere.
In addition, such surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap labor, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement to imperialism, of course, arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially copper, cotton, rubber, tea, and tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and European industry had grown dependent.
This became especially pronounced following the 1869 completion of the near-by Suez Canal, prompting the official rationale behind Disraeli's purchase of the waterway. Rhodes and Milner also advocated the prospect of a "Cape to Cairo" empire, which would link by rail the extrinsically important canal to the intrinsically mineral and diamond rich South, from a strategic standpoint. Though hampered by German conquest of Tanganyika until the end of the Great War, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire.Formal colonies were often, in hindsight, strategic outposts to protect large zones of 'investment', such as India, Latin America, and China.
Following the First Opium War, British commerce, and later capital invested by other newly industrializing powers, was securable with a smaller degree of formal control than in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Pacific. Colonialism in India, however, should dissuade sweeping generalizations and over-simplifications regarding the roles of inter-capitalist competition and accumulated surplus in precipitating the era of New Imperialism. Formal empire in India, beginning with the Government of India Act of 1858, was a means of consolidation, reacting to the abortive Sepoy Rebellion, which was in itself a conservative reaction among Indian traditionalists to the era of liberalization and consolidation of the subcontinent.
Formal empire in Sub-Saharan Africa, the last vast region of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism" and "civilization", was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for other potential reasons. First, insofar as the "Dark Continent" was agricultural or extractive, and no longer "stagnant" since its integration with the world's interdependent capitalist economy, it required more capital for development that it could provide itself. Second, during a time when in nearly every year since the 1813 liberalization of trade onward Britain's balance of trade showed a deficit, and a time of shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets, Africa offered Britain an open market that would garner it a trade surplus a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall. Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavorable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments). As perhaps the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly more important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments to predominantly white 'settler colonies', the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. While settler economies developed the infrastructure to support balanced development, some tropical African territories found themselves developed only as raw-material suppliers. British policies based on comparative advantage left many developing economies dangerously reliant on a single cash crop, with others exported to Britain or to overseas British settlements. A reliance upon the manipulation of conflict between ethnic, religious and racial identities, in order to keep subject populations from uniting against the occupying power the classic "divide and rule" strategy left a legacy of partition and/or inter-communal difficulties in areas as diverse as Ireland, India, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Uganda.
Britain's 1882 military occupation of Egypt (itself triggered by concern over the Suez Canal) contributed to a preoccupation over securing control of the Nile valley, leading to the conquest of the neighbouring Sudan in 1896-98 and confrontation with a French military expedition at Fashoda (September 1898).In 1899 Britain completed her takeover of what is today South Africa. This had begun with the annexation of the Cape in 1795 and continued with the conquest of the Boer Republics in the late 19th century, following the Second Boer War.
Increasing exploitation of diamonds and discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 made Southern Africa a desirable asset and destabilized the rural economy of Boers. Cape Colony was attacked in 1899. This was dissimilar to other African ‘scrambles’, however: Boers had German guns, not spears and knew how to use them. The main cities were occupied in 1900, but Boers proceeded with querilla tactics. The British replied by burning Boer farms, clearing the veldt and systematically herding Boer families into ‘concentration camps’, where women and children died by thousands of epidemics and malnutrition. This British innovation was later developed by Germans (WWI, WWII). Another innovation – khaki uniforms – was adopted by all European countries. Before the Boer War Imperial troops wore reds ans blues, but Boers proved to be excellent marksmen... By and large, the Boer war was similar to the Russian/Japanese war in its social impact: the empire proved to be over-extended and poorly coordinated.
Cecil Rhodes was the pioneer of British expansion north into Africa with his privately owned British South Africa Company. Rhodes expanded into the land north of South Africa and established Rhodesia. Rhodes' dream of a railway connecting Cape Town to Alexandria passing through a British Africa covering the continent is what led to his company's pressure on the government for further expansion into Africa.
British gains in southern and East Africa prompted Rhodes and Alfred Milner, Britain's High Commissioner in South Africa, to urge a "Cape-to-Cairo" empire linking by rail the strategically important Canal to the mineral-rich South, though German occupation of Tanganyika prevented its realisation until the end of World War I. In 1903, the All Red Line telegraph system communicated with the major parts of the Empire.
Paradoxically Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to her long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting her advantageous position at its inception. Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under her control, compared to 15 % for France, 9 % for Germany, 7 % for Belgium and 1 % for Italy: Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire.
Britain's empire had already begun its transformation into the modern Commonwealth with the extension of Dominion status to the already self-governing colonies of Canada (1867), Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), Newfoundland (1907), and the newly-created Union of South Africa (1910). Leaders of the new states joined with British statesmen in periodic Colonial (from 1907, Imperial) Conferences, the first of which was held in London in 1887.
The foreign relations of the Dominions were still conducted through the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom: Canada created a Department of External Affairs in 1909, but diplomatic relations with other governments continued to be channelled through the Governors-General, Dominion High Commissioners in London (first appointed by Canada in 1880 and by Australia in 1910) and British legations abroad. Britain's declaration of war in World War I applied to all the Dominions.
But the Dominions did enjoy a substantial freedom in their adoption of foreign policy where this did not explicitly conflict with British interests: Canada's Liberal government negotiated a bilateral free-trade Reciprocity Agreement with the United States in 1911, but went down to defeat by the Conservative opposition.
In defence, the Dominions' original treatment as part of a single Empire military and naval structure proved unsustainable as Britain faced new commitments in Europe and the challenge of an emerging German High Seas Fleet after 1900. In 1909 it was decided that the Dominions should have their own navies, reversing an 1887 agreement that the then Australasian colonies should contribute to the Royal Navy in return for the permanent stationing of a squadron in the region.
To sum up, within the period GB grew in size but hardly in strength. It was remarkably unprepared psychologically and physically for a full-size continental land war. Militarizing society (Militia, Riflemen, Volunteers) had conspicuously failed. ‘To take the King’s shilling’ (to enlist) was an act of desperation in a personal catastrophy. Liberal capitalist democracy based upon free trade could be called an experiment brought to an abrupt end in 1914.
Liberal Age Britain feedback tasks. Note: the questions are meant to provide kind of a rough plan for your examination answer; you are welcome to rearrange them in a more suitable way.