Britain Since 1707

Hamish Fraser, Callum G. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317867494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Britain since 1707 is the first single-volume book to cover the complex and multi-layered history of Great Britain from its inception until 2007.

Bringing together political, economic, social and cultural history, the book offers a reliable and balanced account of the nation over a 300 year period. It looks at major developments – such as the Enlightenment, the growth of democracy and gender change – while also tracing the distinctive experience of different, the book's additional features include: social and ethnic groups through the decades. Fully integrating Scotland, Wales and the Irish experience, the book's comprehensive sweep includes coverage of the industrial revolution, the British Empire, the two world wars and today's multicultural society.

Ideally structured to support courses and classes on British history

· 'Focus On' sections with original documents and sources

· Timelines and tables to aid understanding

· Historical sources and further reading suggestions at the end of each chapter

· Illuminating contemporary illustrations

From Queen Anne to Gordon Brown, this wide-ranging and accessible book provides a complete and up-to-date history of Britain. Offering a coherent account of the evolution of the nation and its people, it will be essential reading for all students of British history.

Part 1
Introduction

1
Approaches to Britain’s history

Images of Britain

Historians do not work in a vacuum. Our knowledge of the past is influenced by the world in which we live and the way the past intrudes on us on a day-to-day basis. We see images of the past all around us – in paintings and, from the 1840s, in photographs and, more recently, through moving images on film and television. But the past is also interpreted for us in writing, whether in the fictional works of Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens or Graham Greene, or the overtly non-fictional, though often self-justifying, accounts left by participants. All of these shape how we see the country. But so too does the language we use to talk about the past.

The rural landscape contains much about our past. In itself the countryside was in 1707 central to the economy, people’s living and everyday existence. The very nature of country landscape tends to recall the past to us – a slower pace of life, fewer services, poorer houses and lower standards of education and culture. In the eighteenth century, the bulk of people lived in small labourers’ cottages, most of which have long since been knocked down. However, the aristocracy and gentry moved out of the fortified structures or modest farmhouses of previous centuries and erected palatial and elegant country houses amid parkland and gardens which today (through visits to National Trust properties) dominate our appreciation of rural landscape and leisure.

The kinds of change that have taken place in the built environment reflect the changes in social structures, in politics and in economics that have taken place in Britain over the last 300 years. In almost all cities, there is an historic social division between east end and west end – one strongly middle-class and one working-class in composition. In all cities, suburbs grew in the nineteenth century based on social distinctions, with the better-off generally moving ever westwards to escape the smoke, the smells, the crowds, the dangers of the centre, while the less well-off moved eastwards. Within predominantly working-class areas, streets of the skilled and the clerical were separated from those of the ‘rough’, whilst middle-class homes became larger to accommodate servants. Although social divisions grew in British cities between 1707 and 1950, the geographies have been changing since then, with ‘gentrification’ of city centres and of some working-class suburbs, making our landscape history more complex.

A look at any townscape tells us other things about the past. The numbers of spires and church towers – many now put to secular uses – reveal a highly religious society in the last three centuries. A visit to any of the country’s great cathedrals dramatically brings out the links between church and state – the battle standards of British Army regiments are still housed in the great Christian churches, alongside the memorials commemorating wars against French, Russians, Afghans, Zulus, Boers and Germans. Statues to heroes and (more rarely) heroines of the past still dot cityscapes. Military ones proliferate, with long-forgotten generals present in abundance; few now recall the importance of General Henry Havelock (statue in Trafalgar Square), General Colin Campbell (in Glasgow’s George Square), or the relatively unsuccessful General Redvers Buller (in Exeter). Politicians and great aristocrats proliferate. Everywhere in statues and street names there are Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, although few other monarchs are so commemorated outside London. Most cities also have their splendid town halls. These are often extraordinary statements about local pride, wealth and power: Leeds town hall built in 1858 on woollen industry wealth, Manchester’s of 1888 on ‘king cotton’, and Glasgow’s, also of 1888, on shipbuilding and engineering.

The history of our islands also come to us through art. John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain (1821), with its thatched cottages with flowers growing up the wall; Sir Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen (1851), with hills and heather behind the mighty stag, and the darker social commentary of Hogarth’s London scenes or Joseph Wright of Derby’s paintings of industry and science in the eighteenth century provide the visual grammar by which we understand Britain’s past. Artists, like historians, have had a tendency to idealise the British countryside for its rustic values, and to regard the cities that sprang up in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as dark and forbidding places to be condemned for their poor environment and health conditions. The idealisation continued with eighteenth-century paintings of individuals and families (by artists like Allan Ramsay, Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough) that revealed a wealthy, peaceful elite, often with their country house in the background and evidence of their culture by their side. By the early nineteenth century, a wealthy middle class was also getting itself painted. However, it was photography that, from the 1840s, changed images of Britain – bringing not just the successful to our view but also the exotic (with scenes from the British Empire of native peoples and places), and the working classes and the poor at home. Photographs give us a strong sense of our family history – perhaps the most personal and universal way in which we each have an investment in the past. Moving images also bring us fictionalised versions of the past which have been extremely influential – especially of Britons at war in William Wyler’s Mrs Miniver (1942), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), Lewis Gilbert’s Reach for the Sky (1956) and David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The idea of Britain still depends to a great degree on the notion of unity and heroism brought by the Second World War, lingering in television series as well as films.

Language of the past

Particular images of the past also come from phrases in regular use – ‘a thousand years of British history’, ‘the mother of Parliaments’, ‘our island history’, and ‘democratic traditions and values’. The 1980s saw a lively debate on Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s invocation of ‘Victorian values’, echoed in John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in the 1990s and Gordon Brown’s promotion of ‘Britishness’ in the 2000s. Nostalgia for an undated ‘lost age’ of order, of politeness, of neighbourliness, of respectability, of deference and patriotism has been a major factor in creating what, if polls are to believed, is sometimes a discontented and unhappy society. The evidence on most of these is that such a lost age never did exist, but the narrative to the contrary remains the powerful one.

Of course, a great deal of the past that has been shown in paintings and films is pure invention. History is often ‘false history’ in the sense that it has been used to push a cause or strengthen an institution, or merely to make money from a people keen to celebrate its own virtues. This tendency to manufacture a past is particularly powerful when a national history is involved. Historians and others have argued long and hard over what a ‘nation’ is, and how the sense of national identity is fostered and developed. In a well-known study, the American Benedict Anderson argued that nations do not exist other than in the imagination, in what he terms ‘imagined communities’, invented and fabricated for political reasons – not least to keep us in order. In this argument, no one is born instinctively feeling English, Welsh or Scottish. It has to be instilled. The historian Linda Colley has shown the efforts that politicians and others went to in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to generate a sense of Britishness, using anthems, flags, jubilees and parades. And this campaign to create a sense of Britishness worked by making England and Britain largely synonymous, with Welshness largely disappearing from the public view and the Scots rushing to identify themselves as North Britons. However, this imagining of Britishness has been faltering. In the 1920s, Ireland was partitioned between a ‘British’ north and an Irish republic in the south. In the 1950s and 1960s, the British Empire ended, leading to Britain becoming home to increasing numbers of black and Asian peoples, as well as, more recently, to East European migrants. And since the 1970s, there has been rising pressure for home rule and independence in Wales and Scotland, as the distinct identities of those countries emerge. In all sorts of ways, then, the unity of Britain and Britishness established in the first two centuries covered by this book has in the last century become vulnerable.

This means that the language of the past and present is not stable. ‘Britishness’ has changed meaning and resonance. It is a term which, by 2000, was being displaced by competing multicultural identities – of black, Asian, Scottish, Irish and Welsh, and also the re-mergence of English identity. Yet, the British state still perpetuates Britishness in parades, military regiments, national war memorials and pageants of royalty and celebrity. Though monarchy was, by 2000, much less influential than it had been even a hundred years before, it remains a symbol of political unity. As nationalism rises in Scotland and Wales, and devolved government returns in the 2000s to Northern Ireland, Queen Elizabeth remains a vital source of identity for most Britons, and confounds many predictions of the end of monarchy. More than any other single institution, the Royal Family is the nation’s central vehicle for expressing its history. But, like monarchy itself, the nation’s past is not a single, agreed understanding. History is like politics – it is open to debate.

The disputed British past

History is dominated by debate, and historians of Britain are just as likely as any others to disagree over interpreting the nation’s past. Sometimes, the debate is over what happened. New knowledge, new information about events, based on documents or other sources that have come to light, can change the basic knowledge of an episode or process in the past. Most of the time, however, historians are not disputing facts but debating the significance of events and processes, and how to interpret them. It is analysis and interpretation that drives forward new publications in books and history journals. Looking at history writing (‘historiography’, as it is called) is thus to consider different interpretations and approaches to the past.

Historians will argue from evidence as to what is the best way to explain episodes from the past. At the same time, though, there are different approaches. For example, there are political historians, economic historians, social and cultural historians, intellectual historians, historians of religion, historians of the labour movement, historians of science and of philosophy. With the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the history of women become a major part of the writing of history. More recently, there has been a tremendous growth in environmental history, resulting from new knowledge about climate change and the impact that humankind has had upon the planet. On the other hand, with the decline of religion in Britain in the later twentieth century, the emphasis on religious history has waned (though not disappeared). These instances demonstrate that the way history is written tends to be strongly influenced by the concerns of the present time. With each decade, the past is re-examined to bring out modern agendas and understanding, contemporary concerns and perspectives.

Economic historians, rather more than other historians, are given to constructing their research around large questions that form the centres of debate. There are several examples of these. Was the Industrial Revolution really industrial or a revolution? Did the British working classes benefit from industrialisation between 1760 and 1830? Did the late Victorian economy fail? Was the British economy regenerated in the 1930s? Was the British economy in decline from the 1960s? This book in part reflects this tendency, with a greater than usual focus on disputed interpretations in the chapters on economic matters. This reflects the way in which there is less emphasis on an agreed narrative of British economic history than on exposing the lines of debate. In other areas, historians are more prone to seek to produce consensus in their narratives, and to seek to influence the way in which this narrative is produced by introducing new areas of research and new angles on existing ones. Thus, topics like social and cultural history, gender history, and the history of immigration and race appear as part of the increasing diversity of the narrative of British history, rather than as subjects based around clearly defined disputes. Of course, there are disputes going on everywhere in the study of British history. But they are often complex and subtle, rather than structural to the study of each subject.

Political history: putting the Great in Britain

The earliest history of Britain, dating from the eighteenth century, was written mostly by men. As the Enlightenment evolved, the history they wrote moved further and further away from medieval conceptions of the role of religion. Rather than seeking religious lessons from the past, the Enlightenment prompted a rejection of the power of religion in interpretation while sustaining a place for religion as a stabilising social force. The Enlightenment encouraged a search for ‘truth’ and objectivity, and stressed the primacy of ‘facts’ and the creation of policy from facts as both possible and superior to any other method. Studying the past could teach lessons and release modern knowledge from the unwelcome power of religious fanaticism and superstition.

Nevertheless, behind the search for truth there lingered a strong romance about the developing ‘greatness’ of Britain. One consequence was a tendency to marry history with philosophy, as in David Hume’s History of England of the 1750s. Britain was a nation envisaged as the culmination of intellectual and cultural progress, though in Hume’s Tory/Jacobite view it lost merit because of the Hanoverian succession. Moreover, the way in which historians such as Hume and Edward Gibbon wrote placed emphasis on the creative imagination of events rather on documentary evidence and scrupulous attention to detail. A sceptic of historical writing, Samuel Johnson, wrote in 1775: ‘We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.’¹

The romantic view of British greatness continued in nineteenth-century writing, but in the work of one of the great exponents, T.B. Macaulay, the Tory view was replaced by a Whig outlook of upward progress in a grand idealistic narrative. Here the romance of British greatness focused considerably on Britain’s constitutional monarchy from 1688, which seemed to have modernised its outlook and legitimacy whilst, in the anciens régimes of European nations, there seemed to be a rigidity that had led to revolution, the breakdown of social harmony and an end to progress itself. The British system was seen as far superior to anything elsewhere in the world. There was an assumption of the nationalistic uniqueness of the English and Scots as superior and well-adjusted peoples who had systems of law, education and rational religion that allowed for the dutiful acknowledgement of both the world of God and the world of man. The history of Britain was written as the story of the gradual extension of constitutional government since 1688 and resistance to any attempts to increase royal power. English historians had particular faith in a trait of English character that seemed to desire liberty, a desire they traced back to Anglo-Saxon times and which could never be totally suppressed.

Historians writing at the peak of British imperial progress in the nineteenth century found it difficult to avoid speaking in praise of the nation – its progress, its leadership and dominance, its superiority in religion, law, education and industry. This tendency is one that underscores much of the writing of British political history until the mid-twentieth century. Praise came for the absence of revolution and civil war on mainland Britain after the 1740s, often attributed to the unwritten constitution and the facility it allowed for change, together with the absorption of new elites into the hierarchies of power. Social mobility was seen as a benefit to civil progress. The emphasis was on the peculiar stability of Britain and its steady progress.

This gave rise to what is referred to as the Whig interpretation of British history, which sought to trace a centuries-long progress of constitutional change, leading to the present. The emphasis was on English exceptionalness because of the avoidance of revolution (other than what was regarded as an exceptional – and therefore Glorious – English Revolution in 1688) and the formation of an apparently free society. The focus was very much on political history, and such an approach came under attack from the 1930s, with demands for other areas of history to be studied. Even so, it was still very easy for historians to slip back into Whig interpretations that take the present as the starting point and look at how things arrived there, and for these interpretations to be embedded in other parts of the history discipline in ideas such as ‘the rise of the welfare state’ and ‘the long march of labour’.

One of the strongest challenges to the Whig interpretation was in Sir Lewis Namier’s study of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), which presented a picture of politics not shaped by ideas but by the narrow self-interest of individuals. Constitutional reform came about as a result of manoeuvres among the political elite, not as a result of pressures from outside. It encouraged the study of the minutiae of a period or of individual lives, rather than trying to devise some gran...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Focus on
• List of timelines
• List of tables
• List of maps
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 An uncertain stability 1707-79
• Part 3 The industrialising nation 1780-1829
• Part 4 The dominant nation 1830-79
• Part 5 The imperial heyday 1880-1918
• Part 6 War and the end of empire 1919-63
• Part 7 The reshaping of Britain 1964-2007
• Index