A History of the Peoples of the British Isles

From 1870 to the Present

Thomas Heyck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781134415137
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Volume III deals with the 'long twentieth century'. Its main themes are: * the contraction of British industrial power and the shift to a service-based economy * the decline of Victorianism and the rise of Modernism * the climax of class society between the wars and the blurring of class lines after the 1960s * the impact of two world wars * the decline of British power and the empire * the partition of Ireland * the devolution of power to Wales and Scotland.

Part I
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The Decline of Victorian Britain




1870–1914

Topography of the British Isles

Chapter 1
Troubles in Economy and Society, 1870–1914

The “long century” from about 1870 to the present forms a unified chapter in the history of the peoples of the British Isles. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain had become the first industrial nation and the strongest power on earth. British industry, based on a technology of steam power and iron machines, dominated global trade even as it helped generate the world’s first class-based society—the three-level pyramid of the landed class, middle class, and working class. The British state, centered on England itself, encompassed all of the British Isles. In the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, a remarkable culture known as Victorianism had been built on the foundations of prosperity and progress; it symbolized the expansive achievement of the British peoples between 1688 and 1870. During the course of the next century and a quarter, all of the prominent features of this society and culture were subjected to change, sometimes because of forces imposed on Britain from the outside but sometimes because of the dynamics generated from within.

In the years between 1870 and 1914, the foundations of Victorian culture were seriously eroded, so that the whole structure was toppled by the First World War. Some historians make a sharp distinction between the “late-Victorian” period (1870–1901), which ended with the death of Queen Victoria, and the “Edwardian” period (1901–1914), which took its name from Victoria’s eldest son and successor, Edward Vll. Indeed, there were certain differences of mood and fashion—late-Victorian angst (anxiety) and Edwardian gaiety—but these were less important than the long-run trends that tied the whole together. These were the years when Britain’s economy began to descend from the heights of world preeminence; when social change again intensified class antagonism; when Victorian confidence turned to uncertainty and anxiety; and when intellectual rebellion began to create modernism from the scattered pieces of the Victorian mind. One well-informed journalist observed in 1913:

We have a society in which political power rests with the mass of its poorer members; in which education, carried up to a certain level, is general; in which an unprecedented mental restlessness has been stimulated by the diffusion of reading matter, and the facilities of rapid communication; in which class barriers are still rigid, though the physical, temperamental, and personal differences, which formerly divided classes from one another, have been attenuated; in which moral sanctions and conventions, handed down by tradition, and based ultimately on Christian theology have lost much of their force….*

All of these observations were true, and they marked dramatic changes from the mid-Victorian decades. No one factor caused the changes in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain; indeed, the fascination of the period arises from the interplay of political, economic, social, and cultural themes. But just as industrial and agricultural change altered the face of Britain in the years from 1780 to 1840, so economic and social difficulties in the period from 1870 to 1914 provided a framework in which the other factors operated.

Between 1870 and 1914, British economic growth began to falter, and foreign rivals started to catch up. The mood of expansive confidence characteristic of the upper classes in the mid-Victorian period slowly evaporated and was replaced by one of anxiety and concern. The relative social peace of that seemingly golden age of the 1850s and 1860s consequently degenerated into class conflict. To be sure, there was no outright collapse of trade and industry, and Britain remained a great economic power in 1914. Many a British businessman could sit down every morning to his breakfast and newspaper with pride in his company’s profits and his country’s successes. Many another, however, could hardly bring himself to read the morning’s paper, for fear of finding news of declining profits, or of yet another demonstration by militant feminists, or of a strike in a vital industry, or of a heated political stalemate, or worse yet of another trade in which Germany had pulled ahead.

THE LATE-VICTORIAN ECONOMY, 1870–1900

The economy of late-Victorian Britain had a very mixed record. Many businessmen thought that the economy had taken a radical turn for the worse, and their concern inspired the government to appoint a Royal Commission on “The Great Depression in Trade and Industry,” which reported in 1886. There was, in fact, no depression of the sort that was to come in 1929: no reversal of growth, no mass unemployment, no collapse of the industrial sector. The British economy continued to grow throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it continued to produce significant advances in the material standard of living. Yet there were serious economic difficulties, especially compared to the mid-Victorian years: the economy as a whole grew more slowly, the agricultural sector was badly shaken, and newly industrializing nations began to overtake the British headstart. Two simple facts are very revealing: first, overall economic growth from 1870 to 1900 averaged about 2 percent a year, as opposed to almost 3 percent a year for the first three quarters of the century; second, in 1900, both the United States and Germany produced more iron and steel than Britain did.

Throughout the period, certain parts of the economy performed very well, whereas others lagged behind. To take agriculture first: there was a sharp decline of cereal (mainly wheat) farming in the Midlands and South of England—long the grain belt of the nation and the seat of the landed elite’s political and social prestige. The causes of this decline were (1) a series of exceptionally cold and wet winters in the latter 1870s and (2) the collapse of grain prices in Britain. The former cause was short term and its impact eventually disappeared, but the price collapse had effects that lasted through the 1930s.

What happened was that cheap foreign wheat flooded the British market from the 1870s on. Imports of wheat doubled between 1870 and 1890, and the prices that British cereal farmers earned for their crops fell drastically. The farmers had no control over this calamity. Vast plains were brought under the plow in the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia after the 1860s. Railways and steamships made exportation of wheat from these newly productive areas very cheap. By the 1880s, in economic terms Chicago was as close to London as a Midlands estate. Since the Com Laws had been repealed in 1846, there was nothing to discourage the importation of wheat. By 1900, the price of wheat in Britain had fallen 50 percent. Livestock farmers fared better, but from the 1880s, refrigerated ships made it possible to export to Britain beef from Argentina and lamb from New Zealand. By 1900, more than one-third of the meat consumed in Britain came from abroad.

One result of the collapse of wheat prices was the restructuring of English farming. Because cattle grazers (at first) and dairy and vegetable farmers did better than grain growers, there was a shift away from cereal to mixed farming. Acreage devoted to fruit and market gardening increased. The most dramatic shift was from wheat cultivation to pasturage. Acreage in wheat was halved between 1871 and 1900, whereas land devoted to pasturage increased by 4 million acres. These tendencies continued in the early twentieth century. By 1913, more than three times as much land in England was in pasturage as in grains of all kinds.

As prices for cereals fell, the traditional landowners and tenant farmers of the Midlands and southern counties were hard pressed. Some farmers diversified, others scrimped on maintenance of fields and farm buildings, and some received rent abatements from their landlords. Many tenants, however, could not survive the crisis. By 1900, many tenancies stood vacant. Moreover, 340,000 agricultural laborers left rural life for urban occupations or overseas.

The landlords themselves, who had been under pressure from middle-class rivalry for most of the century, now found it hard to sustain their luxurious style of life. Many discovered that their incomes were cut in half as rent-rolls declined but that their cost of living remained high. Late-Victorian landlords typically sought outside income by investing in business and industry; by 1890 any self-respecting bank or railway could boast of several titled nobles on its board of directors. At the same time, many landlords retrenched by cutting back on household staff, by closing a house in town or in the country, or by entertaining less lavishly. In 1870, for example, the earl of Verulam’s family drank 590 bottles of sherry and 250 of brandy, but in 1880, they consumed a mere 298 of sherry and 75 of brandy!

The industrial sector continued to grow as a portion of the British economy, but here too there were signs of trouble. Industrial output continued to expand, and by 1900 trade and industry accounted for 64 percent of the total national income and agriculture only 6 percent. British exports (almost all of which were manufactured goods) went up by 50 percent between 1870 and 1900. The two key problems were (1) that industrial production grew less rapidly than before—from over 3 percent per year before 1870 to 2 percent between 1870 and 1914 and (2) that British industrial production now grew more slowly than that of two giant foreign rivals—Germany and the United States. Thus Britain’s share of world manufacturing output gradually shrank:

Table 1.1: Relative Shares of World Manufacturing Output

	1860	1880	1900
Britain	19.9	22.9	18.5
Germany	4.9	8.5	13.2
United States	7.2	14.7	23.6

Source: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 149

For the first time since industrialization began, Britain now had economic rivals. All around the world, British businessmen met competition in the sale of manufactured goods. They did not find it pleasant or think it fair. Both Germany and the United States protected their industries by tariffs, but British industry labored under free trade. By the 1880s, some British businessmen had come to think that Britain ought to adopt protective tariffs in order to create conditions of “fair trade,” but the mystique of free trade remained influential, and most commercial men realized that Britain needed free trade in order to have the widest markets possible. In any case, resentment toward Germany grew. In 1896, for instance, E. E. Williams published a book entitled Made in Germany in which he claimed that competition from the Germans in Britain and abroad had become “a deliberate and deadly rivalry.”

In addition, many British manufacturers found the prices of their products falling and their profit margins squeezed. Prices for manufactured goods fell by about 25 percent in the late-Victorian years, which was a great boon for consumers but a source of concern for industrialists. Profits are very difficult to measure, but all contemporary observers testified that profits were depressed. The lower level of profits denied British industry part of its traditional source of investments—plowed back from the industry itself.

The industries that had the most serious difficulties in the late-Victorian period were the old staples of the Industrial Revolution—cotton textiles, iron, and, to a lesser extent, coal. The problems in all three areas resulted from competition from newly industrializing countries, all of which adopted the most up-to-date technologies, while the British lagged behind in technical innovation. The British were slow to adopt the faster ring-spinning and automatic looms in the cotton textile industry; they were slow to shift from Bessemer converters to the more efficient Siemens-Martin furnaces in making steel and slow to adopt the Gilchrist-Thomas process for making iron and steel from low-grade ore; and they did not adopt mechanical coal cutting in the coal industry, even though the increasing depth and expense of mining required it. Of the older industries, only in shipbuilding did the British increase their lead.

At the same time, the British failed to keep pace in several new heavy industries based on advanced technologies. Of these, the electrical and chemical were the most important. The industrial use of steam and gas was deeply entrenched in Britain; thus the new electric power industries that grew rapidly in Germany and the United States met strong resistance in Britain. In industrial chemicals as in electricity, British scientists made many of the fundamental discoveries, while industrialists of other nations made the practical applications. German industry, for instance, made great advances in the production of aniline dyestuffs, which were first discovered in Britain. In the production of alkali, British manufacturers stuck to the old Leblanc process, while the Germans and Americans adopted the newer and cheaper Solway process.

Where the British excelled in the late-Victorian years was in light industries and domestic retailing. New light industries such as sewing machines, armaments, and above all, bicycles were founded on the solid base of mechanical craft skills of the Midlands. The bicycle industry of Coventry was, moreover, the first British industry to adopt American mass production methods. In retail sales, new entrepreneurs brought about major changes by establishing retail chains that sold standardized items in the high streets of every village and town: Boots the Chemists (drug stores), Sainsbury (groceries), and Thomas Lipton (groceries). W. H. Smith established book stalls in every railway station, selling cheap reading matter to travelers and commuters, and commercially oriented publishers established mass circulation newspapers in the cities.

How can the relatively poor performance of British industry in the late nineteenth century be explained? The big issue to be understood is how the most prosperous and industrially advanced economy began to falter and fall behind. Part of the explanation must simply be that as other nations began to industrialize, they would by definition break Britain’s monopoly in industrial production and inevitably take some share of the world’s markets. Furthermore, other nations could (and did) industrialize with the latest technology and business methods and thus to an extent were able to leap frog over the British, who had a huge investment in somewhat older plants and technology. To a degree, inertia was bound to be a bigger problem in Britain than in countries with new industries.

Comparison of the British performance after 1870 with those of Germany and the United States thus suggests that British industry was handicapped by its great headstart. To be sure, British industry by the 1870s and 1880s produced huge income for the nation as a whole, and this could have been transformed into capital investment that would have kept British industry ahead. But as the economy matured, British society unconsciously opted more for consumer pleasures than for capital investment—as seems the fate of most industrial societies—and the British also habitually invested huge sums of money abroad. The British exported capital throughout the nineteenth century and at a greater rate after 1870 than before: British assets abroad exceeded £1 billion in 1875 and £2 billion in 1900. They did so because the rate of return on foreign investments—mainly railways in the United States and elsewhere—was higher than at home. The maturing domestic economy, with its relatively older technology and expanding service sector, did not produce returns on investment to match those in newly industrializing areas. Given the British commitment to laissez-faire policies, the government would not consider policies that might have kept that capital at home.

The British headstart in industrialization also created psychological and structural disadvantages. While foreign entrepreneurs aggressively pursued innovations in order to catch up, British industrialists found it hard to break with old habits in management, sales, and industrial relations. They tended to look to the past as the model for success. Similarly, British capitalists were reluctant to discard the factories and mach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Part I The Decline of Victorian Britain 1870–1914
• Part II An Age of Total War 1914–1945
• Part III Britain in the Postwar World 1945–2000
• Appendixes
• Index
• Credits