Britain 20th Century

9 Key excerpts on "Britain 20th Century"

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  The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Twentieth Century

  • Mark Clapson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Centre for Contemporary British History, however, the years since 1945 define the contemporary period, and this appears to be the starting point that most historians are happy with—although some may begin with 1939, the start rather than the end of the Second World War. One thing is certain, however: contemporary history is equally as valid as the history of earlier times. And contemporary history is as ancient as history itself. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, for example, many scribes were recording and commenting upon very recent history. It may raise interesting methodological issues, but it is essential to any humane and informed understanding of the past as prologue.

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  1.3BRITAIN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A NARRATIVE OVERVIEW

  Notes

  • The most profound and dynamic developments and themes that shaped Britain are covered in this section, setting the scene for the remainder of the book. Its approach encourages you to make links between the social, cultural, economic and political history of twentieth-century Britain. Key terms in bold can be followed up elsewhere in the book.

  Britain, 1900–14

  Society and culture in Britain, 1900–14

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain was an urban nation: over four-fifths, or 80 per cent, of the population lived in a town or city. The population of the British Isles, including Ireland, numbered 38 million. Almost three-quarters of the British people were working class, engaged in industrial or manual labour. Britain was among the world’s most prosperous nations in 1900, but poverty and inequality blighted the lives of millions of people the length and breadth of the land. Social investigation had found that up to a third of the working-class population of Britain’s cities lived in poverty. Some poverty was extreme. Poor diet, pathetic clothing, dilapidated and overcrowded slum housing and many unpleasant illnesses blighted the lives of the worst-off families. In the heart of the world’s leading imperial nation, the question of national efficiency posed itself to many leading politicians and professional experts. Why was there so much poverty in the midst of plenty? What were the implications for British power and prestige when so many young British citizens were unfit and incapable of undertaking industrial labour or military service? These questions appeared more urgent in the intellectual atmosphere generated by social Darwinism

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  Sources and Debates in Modern British History

  1714 to the Present

  • Ellis Wasson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Part III The Twentieth Century Passage contains an image Chapter Seven State and Empire

  Two great wars shaped the course of twentieth-century British history. The loss of life was horrific, and the economic, political, social, and cultural dislocations caused by the conflicts were immense. It is not necessarily clear, however, whether one war or the other had a greater effect. The interwar years have been called “the Age of Anxiety.” Why? There were many good reasons not to confront Hitler and avoid World War II, but the towering figure of Winston Churchill emerged to challenge the British people to take the hard course. He also helped shape (not always intentionally) the postwar confrontation with communism and the unraveling of empire. Why did he gradually lose control of events? The postwar era produced the welfare state (see Chapter 8) and imperial retreat. Britons struggled with their diminished role in the world, and their special relationship with the United States that was both their salvation and a bond that was unequal and uneasy. At the end of the twentieth century Britain was still divided about what its role in Europe and the world should be and whether further “decline” had been staunched or was incipient.

  It is fascinating to trace the relationship between Britain and Iraq across the twentieth century. The territory was captured from the Ottomans during World War I, and acquired as a “mandate” from the League of Nations. The new technology of air power was used to suppress dissent there, but control slipped away in the 1950s. The British were no longer able to project power successfully in the Middle East. In 1990 and 2003, however, the British army returned, in alliance with the Americans, yet again invading Iraq. Is this story mere accident and happenstance or a model of British imperial history in the twentieth century?

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  A Brief History of English Literature

  • John Peck, Martin Coyle(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The economic changes within Britain as a result of these policies, accompanied by a sustained boom in the world econ-omy, meant that by the end of the twentieth century many people enjoyed a standard of living that they could never have envisaged fifty or even twenty-five years earlier. Yet, at the same time, a feeling persisted that there was something fundamentally wrong in Britain. It was clear that the health and edu-cation services were far from satisfactory. Despite the fact that the British people were working harder than ever before, poverty in some areas of the country was as bad, if not worse, than ever. And people were worried about levels of crime and social indiscipline. These are concerns that are felt in all countries, but in Britain there The Twentieth Century: To the End of the Millennium 265 was possibly the added feeling that the country had lost a sense of where it was heading; indeed, whether it was heading anywhere at all. It is, of course, hard to make sense of recent history. But there is one thing we can be sure of, which is that, in centuries to come, when his-torians look back at this period they will consider how events were reported in newspapers and on television, but they will also turn to novels, poems and plays to capture a sense of the mood of the nation. It is not that poets, playwrights and novelists are more astute social commentators than their journalistic contemporaries; indeed, more often than not they are probably unaware of the deeper resonances of their own works. But a literary text can often convey the deeper currents of change and concern within a society; even unknowingly, a literary text can touch on the issue behind the surface issue, the story behind the story. We can start to appreciate the truth of this proposition if, initially, we consider the literature of the Second World War and texts that look back to this war.

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  Britain and Ireland

  A Concise History

  • Jürgen Kramer(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 The twentieth centuryDevastation and decline, reconstruction and reorientation, 1914–1999

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003127512-8

  If the nineteenth century has often been dubbed ‘long’, the twentieth century has sometimes earned the epithet ‘short’. Historians have framed it by the cataclysmic events of the First World War (1914–18) and the Russian Revolution (1917), on the one hand, and the implosion of the Soviet Union and its allies 1989–91, graphically demonstrated by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, on the other. Alternatively, and from a distinctly European perspective, the century began and ended with bloody ethnic conflicts on Europe’s periphery: the Balkans. More generally and most crucially, however, the last century witnessed social, political and cultural changes that were without precedent in its scope and rapidity. A better understanding of what follows may benefit from an – obviously highly selective – bird’s-eye view of the period.

  While at the beginning of the twentieth century the world was dominated by the European nation states, many of which (such as Britain, France and Russia) directly controlled large areas as their colonial empires, by 2000 Europe no longer dominated the world, and its formal empires were reduced to a few negligible remnants. The first half of the century saw the apogee of nationalist ideology and politics and their catastrophes in two world wars, but the second half witnessed the growth and development of supranational as well as international ideas, institutions and forms of cooperation (as, for example, the United Nations and the European Union) which so far have tried to prevent further conflict. More often than not, however, their activities were not successful (the Balkans, Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan). Moreover, within pacified Europe many formerly unified nation states have ‘broken up’: regions such as Brittany in France, Catalonia in Spain, and Scotland, Wales (and, at times, Northern Ireland) in Britain have succeeded in reconstructing their distinct cultural and political identities and in achieving various forms of ‘home rule’ (devolution).

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  Aspects of British Political History 1914-1995

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  20 THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND COMMONWEALTH IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  The British Empire had developed as a result of very different cycles of growth. During the eighteenth century, the colonisation of India and North America had been based on commercial exploitation and military conquest, usually in wars against France. Then, for much of the nineteenth century there was a reluctance at Whitehall to increase the number of dependencies, largely on the grounds of expense. From about 1870 onwards, however, the Empire expanded rapidly in the hitherto largely untapped areas of Africa and the Pacific.

  By 1914 the Empire covered nearly one quarter of the earth's land surface, including self-governing Dominions such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; in Asia, the British Raj, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong; in the East Indies and Pacific, New Guinea, North Borneo, and Fiji; in central America, Guiana and Honduras and a series of West Indian islands including Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados; in Africa, Basutoland, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, Kenya, Uganda, the Sudan, Egypt, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia; and, in the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus. The twentieth century, however, saw the gradual reduction of this array of colonies until, by 1995, the only formal dependencies left were Hong Kong (due to revert to China in 1997), Gibraltar and a handful of remote island colonies, the largest of which were the Falklands.

  This chapter considers the two main stages in the process of the weakening of the Empire: between the two world wars and the period since 1945. There are really two sides to the same coin: the decline of formal imperial rule and the emergence of the British Commonwealth. As one faded and expired, the other grew and matured. The first cannot, in retrospect, be considered surprising. As J.R.Ferris argues

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  Cultural Continuity in Advanced Economies

  Britain and the U.S. Versus Continental Europe

  • Gustav Schachter(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5

  The Twentieth Century

  One could date the beginning of the twentieth century somewhat arbitrarily with 1900, or some similar date, or with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The dating employed here views the decade or so between 1900 and 1914 as a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the characteristics of Britain, the United States, and the Continental countries varied in degree during the last two centuries, the cultural core did not alter appreciably, irrespective of the changing economic and political circumstances.

  During the twentieth century, the dichotomy between the Anglo-American and the Continental approaches to the role of the State in the economy remained, by and large, stable even though cataclysms plagued the first half of the twentieth century. World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, wrought havoc. These events mandated short-run policy solutions for economic and often physical survival and forged today’s world. The century experienced two destructive global wars as well as the temporary collapse of the economies of the capitalist system during the great depression.1

  In defending a seemingly failed capitalist system, perhaps Fascism and Nazism constituted aberrations in the European Continent. Surely they gave a marked impetus to the State’s role in the economies of the Continental countries. During the 1920s, some French defenders of the democratic State were confused by the political success of Mussolini in Italy. For the doubter, there appeared to be a choice between freedom and property or perhaps both freedom and property.

  As the foremost capitalist countries, Britain, the U.S., and the Continentals were concerned with the apparent demise of capitalism and the spread of Communism. The capitalists lost faith in the capitalist ideology and believed that Marxist ideology was becoming all-powerful (wherein they were proven wrong). With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany, some thought or even hoped that a barrier had been erected against the Bolshevik threat. Unwittingly, in the vain hope of saving themselves, the capitalist countries practised benign neglect or appeasement for Nazi Germany that almost destroyed the entire capitalist system.2

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  British Foreign and Defence Policy Since 1945

  Challenges and Dilemmas in a Changing World

  • Robert Self(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 British Power and the Burden of History The rise of British imperial power The depressing central theme running through most studies of Britain’s post-war foreign and defence policy is one of remorseless and unremit-ting decline. As discussed in Chapter 1, this is a highly contested con-cept but concerns about ‘the decline of Britain’ did not begin in 1945 and nor did the problems that accompanied it. On the contrary, to understand the predicament confronting British foreign policymakers in the post-war era, it is necessary to return to the zenith of British power in the last quarter of the nineteenth century because it was ironically during this period that most of the difficulties and agonising dilemmas confronting British policy after the Second World War were already making themselves evident. Not least among these problems were those posed by what Basil Liddell Hart would later call ‘imperial overstretch’; a phenomenon characterised by the existence of a vast ‘resource gap’ between Britain’s massive imperial and overseas commitments and its ability to mobilise the diplomatic, financial and military resources needed to defend and extend those interests. None of these difficulties were foreseen in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, in the 60 years after the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, Britain rapidly emerged as the dominant world power in a qualitatively different class from all its competitors. As the first to benefit from mass industrialisation, Britain’s share of world manufacturing production increased from 1.9 per cent in 1750 to 9.5 per cent in 1830 before spiralling upwards to a peak of 22.9 per cent by 1880. With only 2 per cent of the world’s population (and 10 per cent of Europe’s population), Britain possessed between 40 per cent and 45 per cent of the world’s industrial potential (and 55–60 per cent of that of Europe).

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  British Culture of the Post-War

  An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945-1999

  • Alastair Davies, Alan Sinfield(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Conservatives returned to power in 1951. Their most dramatic attempt to slow down the pace of de-colonisation, however, had the effect of speeding it up. In 1956, the British, French and Israeli gov- ernments conspired to invade Egypt, in retaliation for its nationalisation of the strategic Suez Canal, the British empire’s direct link by sea with Arab oil and its colonies in South-East Asia. The action not only divided public opinion in Britain with an unprece- dented intensity, it was also condemned by the rest of the world, most significantly by the USA which threatened to speculate against the pound. British troops were withdrawn and the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Five years later in 1961, Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan made the first (unsuccessful) attempt to join the recently formed European Economic Community. The decision, like Suez, again divided public opinion, but for the political elite (on the left as on the right), the lesson of Suez was that Britain was no longer a world power. While its traditional ties with the empire and the Commonwealth and its close postwar alliance with the USA were important, its future lay in a still to be defined relationship with Europe. British politics have ever since been preoccupied with the attempt to define the exact nature of that relationship.

  Post-imperial melancholy

  ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role,’ one American politician famously remarked in 1962. Many of the leading British and American commentators on postwar British culture have echoed his sentiments. For them, the politics and culture of postwar Britain have been defined by evasive inwardness and nostalgia (Hewison 1977 , 1981, 1986), cultural retardation (Wiener 1981 ), middle-class conformism (Nehring 1993 ), anti-technological romanti- cism (Veldman 1994 ) and insularity (Piette 1995 ). The cultivation of empiricism in philosophy, of the figurative in painting, of realism in fiction, of the personal voice in poetry, and of the comic and the domestic in film and television has involved a very conscious refusal of the dominant forms of artistic modernity in postwar America and Europe (Appleyard 1989 ).

  Most strikingly, the postwar period reveals a loss of confidence and ambition amongst British writers (Kenner 1987 ). Critics of the postwar novel in Britain have suggested that the turn to fabulation, allegory and self-reflectiveness – from William Golding to John Le Carré, Iris Murdoch to J. G. Farrell, Elizabeth Bowen to Paul Scott – mirrors the end of imperialism’s confidence in historical narrative (Scanlan 1990 ; Connor 1996 ). Similarly, critics of postwar poetry and drama in Britain have found writers (John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Donald Davie) either expressing a profound resentment and anxiety at Britain’s loss of imperial status or (Trevor Griffiths, David Edgar, David Hare and Geoffrey Hill) analysing that resentment and anxiety (Morrison 1980 ; Sinfield 1983 ; Moore-Gilbert 1994

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  Britain 1740 – 1950

  An Historical Geography

  • Richard Lawton, Colin Pooley, Colin G. Pooley(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The period 1830 to 1890 was one of both great national stability and change. Queen Victoria's long reign (1837-1901) provided underlying continuity to profound economic and social change. The country had largely recovered from the effects of the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) and, with the exception of the Crimean War (1854-56) which claimed 25,000 British lives and cost the British Government approximately £70,000,000, Britain remained free from conflicts in Europe until the First World War (1914-18). Elsewhere, with the exception of some 'colonial' wars and the Boer War (1899-1902) Britain remained at peace. This almost unparalleled period of peace and Britain's dominance as a world power created stability which assisted economic growth and social change.

  This sixty-year period was one of almost continuous national economic growth. The 'main motif' of the years 1815 to 1914 was, according to Thomson (1950), the 'remarkable accumulation of material wealth and power which the English people achieved during the century'. The wealth however was unevenly distributed between regions and social groups, and by the last quarter of the nineteenth century Britain's economic and imperial power began to be called into question, though the widely held belief in economic growth and international power persuaded many in the better-off section of society that it could cope with the problems of urbanization, industrialization and economic growth. Carefully prepared political propaganda and improving standards of living for most people persuaded most social classes in Britain to share these beliefs and values. Belief in material progress and what it could achieve was epitomized by the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851:'...a sight the like of which has never happened before . . .' as The Times wrote. Great self-belief created the substantial internal stability of Victorian times.

  The materialism which underpinned mid-Victorian prosperity was tempered by a set of religious and moral values which both legitimated the accumulation of wealth and, in some at least, generated a moral consciousness which contributed towards nineteenth-century social reform. The extent to which religion was important for all social classes, and the degree to which moral consciousness rather than self-interest was a spur to social reform are open to debate. But shared values between the church, the state and the business world must have increased the self-confidence and stability of the leaders of society.

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