GREAT BRITAIN

The United Kingdom was formally created with the 1800 Act of Union, which merged the Irish Parliament (1690–1800) with the Parliament of Great Britain. The latter had already incorporated the Scottish Parliament with the 1707 Union (Wales had been under the English crown since 1536). In both cases the relevant legislation had to be approved by each of the two Parliaments, and, although there were well-supported claims that the Scottish Parliament in 1707 and its Irish counterpart in 1800 were bribed and coerced into accepting the union, there is also plenty of evidence that in each case there was genuine support for the move. By 1800 it was clear that the Scottish Union was a success, which had enhanced both stability in domestic affairs and security against foreign invasion. A further important result had been the creation of a "common market"—with the abolition of tariffs and trade barriers between England and Scotland—that provided the context for spectacular economic growth throughout the century. By the same token, the Scots were able to participate in the exploitation of the overseas empire that British colonists and trading companies were creating in America and India.

eighteenth century

In 1800 it was hoped that the Irish Act of Union would have similar beneficial results for both parties. In particular, the British, who had been fighting revolutionary France since 1793, were eager to consolidate their control over Ireland. The latter was then a populous and unstable country. With about eight million inhabitants, it accounted for nearly one third of the entire population of the British Isles—a much larger proportion than ever since. The country's instability was largely due to the economic and political crisis that accompanied the loss of the American colonies in the period from 1776 to 1789. While Irish trade was slow to recover from the shock, republican ideas spread among both the Protestant and the Catholic middle classes, especially in Belfast and Dublin. These ideas were sponsored by the Society of the United Irishmen and were given a sharper edge by the French Revolution. Once France started to invade the rest of Europe, the possibility that Ireland too could be "liberated" by sans-culottes armies electrified patriot opinion and encouraged revolutionary plots. However, many of the leaders of the United Irishmen were arrested before the rebellion started in May 1798. The main areas of revolutionary activity were the Presbyterian northeast, the counties around Dublin, and County Wexford in the southeast, where the rebellion acquired a violent sectarian dimension.

The rebellion has been celebrated by some historians as "the year of liberty" and was unquestionably widely supported by both Protestants and Catholics. It could have succeeded only with adequate and timely French help, which, however, failed to materialize. Had the rising succeeded, the course of Irish history would have been different, especially in view of the virulent anti-Christian agenda of the French government (which had fiercely persecuted the church in various parts of Europe and had imprisoned the pope himself). So here is a paradox: although the Catholic peasantry and some of the parish clergy supported the rebellion, the church hierarchy feared the prospect of a Jacobin republic in Dublin. Over the eighteenth century, despite the Penal Laws, the Catholic Church had quietly enjoyed effective toleration under the Hanoverian monarchy, whose government sponsored the establishment of the Maynooth seminary in 1795, after the Jacobin Revolution made it impossible for Irish priests to continue to be educated in France. In this context, many Catholics regarded the proposal of a Union as the lesser of two evils, especially if accompanied by full political rights ("emancipation").

Although nineteenth-century Irish nationalists celebrated the old Dublin Parliament as the last bulwark of Irish freedom, in the eighteenth century the perception had been different. For one thing, for most of the century this exclusively Protestant assembly had lacked power—its deliberations requiring London's sanctions to become effective. It was only in 1782 that the parliamentary leader Henry Grattan (1746–1820) secured a degree of independence under the British crown. "Grattan Parliament" became a milestone in Irish constitutional history, but did not solve Ireland's problems. It was only in 1793 that Catholics were granted the vote, but not the right to stand for Parliament. By then Britain and Ireland were already at war against revolutionary France, whose radical democracy and secularism added a further ideological edge to the conflict.

william pitt

In proposing a parliamentary union with Ireland, the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806) had hoped that the two countries could stand together against godless Jacobinism on a Christian liberal platform. Moreover, the union, he hoped, would help to modernize the Irish economy and at the same time resolve insular sectarian conflicts through Catholic emancipation. However, George III (r. 1760–1820) vetoed emancipation, believing that it would be inconsistent with his coronation oath to defend the confessional, Anglican constitution of the kingdom. The situation was very delicate: the king's mental health was unstable; the country faced Napoleonic France; but also, among the artisans and lower-middle classes in Britain, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791) had become a best-seller and had been followed by the publication of other important radical works, including Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Injustice (1793). Rather than face a constitutional conflict with the king, Pitt, who was also in poor

health, preferred to resign. A new and more docile prime minister implemented a union without Catholic emancipation. It was a fatal mistake that would have disastrous consequences for both countries.

Meanwhile the questions that inflamed both Europe and America—liberty, the rights of man, representative government and its relationship with the sovereign—had long been discussed also within the British Parliament. In the 1780s the American War of Independence and the stubborn behavior of the British government had generated a wide debate as to the extent to which the king's influence on the outcome of parliamentary elections was compatible with national interest. The advocates of constitutional reform found their most energetic spokesman in Charles James Fox (1749–1806), who demanded electoral reform and effective parliamentary control over the executive. The last twenty years of the century were dominated by Fox's relentless critique of both the king and of Pitt, his faithful servant. However, it must be remembered that Pitt too wanted moderate reform, but was determined to work with the king, rather than against him. With the king's help, he was able to check Fox's radical agenda from 1783. Although both Pitt and Fox belonged to the Whig tradition—which had triumphed in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 to 1690—the two men differed in temperament, outlook, and ultimate goals. In the nineteenth century the Conservative Party regarded Pitt as one of their founding fathers, while Fox became the great hero of the Liberals. However, the two eighteenth-century statesmen operated in a context within which "parties" were at best temporary alliances between gentlemen "sharing the same prejudice about the common good," to paraphrase the British political philosopher Edmund Burke's famous definition. At worst, they were rather corrupt networks of clients and friends hoping to benefit from government or private patronage and bidding for power in a context in which commercial growth and imperial expansion created enormous opportunities for enterprising individuals.

During his tenure as prime minister (1783–1801, 1804–1806), Pitt set new standards of ministerial professionalism. After the beginning of the French wars he displayed unparalleled energy in the pursuit of military victory. His greatest achievement was to consolidate the political and economic situation at home through a mixture of repression and reform. While civil liberties were drastically restricted from 1794, he mobilized the country's financial resources as no other minister had ever done before. The efficiency of the British "fiscal-military" state was perfected in 1799, when the newly introduced income tax increased the revenue to the extent that the previously spiraling national debt was brought under control. Simultaneously, because the fiscal burden was now more broadly spread across all social classes, the income tax helped to assuage popular discontent about taxation, and further strengthened national unity.

Military victory in a series of naval battles culminated with the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, when Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) destroyed the joint French-Spanish fleet together with Napoleon's dream of invading the United Kingdom. From then on, Britain was able to sustain a more aggressive strategy, particularly by sending an army to fight the French in the Iberian Peninsula under the command of Arthur Wellesley (later duke of Wellington, 1769–1852). However, it was only in June 1815 that Wellington was able to inflict the final blow on Napoleon and his army when he faced them on the Belgian battlefield of Waterloo.

1815–1851

Britain played a leading role in the postwar European settlement, defined by the Vienna Treaty in 1815. In central Europe, Russia, Austria, and Prussia became the pillars of the conservative Holy Alliance system, which aimed at preventing the repetition of the wars and related blood bath of the period from 1792 to 1815. In diplomatic terms, the system relied on the idea of the Concert of Europe, which depended on the plenipotentiaries of the Great Powers meeting at periodical congresses and conferences in order to debate and peacefully resolve their differences before the latter degenerated into open conflict. Britain supported the Concert, but remained skeptical about the Holy Alliance. Instead, London sponsored liberal nationalism whenever the latter was consistent with British interests: thus the rebellions of the Spanish colonies in Latin America, the Greek patriots struggling against the Ottoman Empire, and the Belgian insurgents in 1830 were all directly or indirectly supported by the British government.

Meanwhile the country began to recover from the Napoleonic wars under the skilled leadership of Lord Liverpool (Robert Banks; 1770–1828), who developed the Pittite tradition of government in a distinctly Tory direction. In the years 1812 to 1827 he became one of the longest-serving prime ministers in British history. His policy was to support economic growth through commercial liberalism and a stable currency based on gold, but to resist demands for constitutional change. The latter focused on two issues: Catholic emancipation and the extension of the parliamentary franchise. In Parliament, reform was advocated by Fox's disciples, led by the Earl Grey (Charles Grey; 1764–1845) and Lord John Russell (1792–1878), who belonged to two of the most illustrious Whig families. In the country, the alliance between the radical artisans and predominantly middle-class Nonconformists provided the cause of reform with an important constituency.

The Nonconformists, or Dissenters, comprised all the Protestant groups who had refused to accept the Act of Uniformity of 1862, which restored the Episcopalian nature of the Church of England. In the early nineteenth century they included Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, and Unitarians. The Presbyterians were regarded as Nonconformists in England, Wales, and Ireland, but were the established church in Scotland. Moreover, during the eighteenth century a new and important dissenting body had emerged from the revivalist preaching of John (1708–1791) and Charles (1707–1788) Wesley: the Methodists. Their work was increasingly effective among the working poor, especially in industrializing England and Wales. It was an age of general religious revival that transformed the spiritual landscape of the United Kingdom, with profound political implications on the country's traditional constitution.

The cause of Catholic emancipation was mainly an Irish cause and found a powerful champion in Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847). He was in many ways unusual: he had a native fluency in Gaelic, and yet he was steeped in the cosmopolitan, liberal culture of France. His aim was to stimulate a national (nonsectarian) revival, but he relied increasingly on the support of the Catholic Association and the parish priests. As a Catholic he was debarred from taking a seat in Parliament, but he could stand for election: he did so and won a seat in County Clare in 1828. By then Lord Liverpool had been replaced by the Duke of Wellington. Faced with the difficult choice between enforcing the law (at the cost of widespread unrest in Ireland) or changing it, Wellington opted for the latter option. After all, Pitt himself had damned religious disqualifications as early as 1800, and there was much to be said for incorporating the Catholics into the kingdom's constitutional framework. However, the government did not survive such a concession, which staunch Tory traditionalists regarded as anathema. At the election of 1830, occasioned by the death of the king George IV (r. 1820–1830), the Tories lost control of the House of Commons, and the new sovereign William IV (r. 1830–1837) called for the leader of the opposition, Earl Grey, to form a government. The new prime minister pressed for a full-scale reform bill. The "Great" Reform Bill was passed in 1832 and included new electoral franchises to empower the urban middle class and the better-off farmers, replacing ancient, capricious, and often corrupt hereditary franchises with a system consistently based on residence, property, and achievement of what contemporaries called "independence." Moreover, the Reform Act enacted a drastic redistribution of seats: many "rotten boroughs"—where, on the basis of medieval charters, few individuals enjoyed the privilege of the vote—were abolished. Seats were reallocated to both the counties and to the hitherto unrepresented industrial towns (including Manchester). Scotland and Wales, whose prereform electorates had been miniscule, were effectively enfranchised for the first time. Grateful, Scotland responded by electing a majority of Reform (later Liberal) members of Parliament (MPs).

The reform zeal of the new ministry was further displayed in a series of important measures over the next few years. In 1833 slavery was abolished in the British Empire (although the full implementation of the measure was effectively delayed until 1838): planters were paid a compensation and the slaves were gradually turned into tenant farmers. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act reformed the system of rate-supported poor relief and established local representative bodies to administer it. In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act created elective municipalities with wide-ranging powers. Meanwhile a good system of rate-supported primary schools was organized in Ireland. Finally, the government introduced more effective regulations of the conditions of work in the factories.

The latter was in partial response to the workers' agitation. This took two main forms. On the one hand, the new trade unions (legalized in 1824–1825) and radical groups demanded a shortening of working hours, the introduction of restrictions on child labor, and a more humane implementation of the notoriously punitive Poor Law. On the other, from 1839 a large number of artisan and working men and women joined a movement that proposed a comprehensive program of political democracy, summarized in the six points of their Charter: universal (male) suffrage, vote by secret ballot, payment of MPs, the abolition of property qualifications for parliamentary candidates, annual Parliaments, and equal electoral districts. At its peak Chartism involved millions of people under the leadership of fiery demagogues such as the barrister Feargus Edward O'Connor (c. 1796–1855). This was unprecedented for a democratic movement in Europe. On the other hand, support for Chartism was not exclusive of popular participation in the existing electoral process. Although the electorate was small and deference to one's "betters" was the rule, riots, bribery, and drunken celebrations were commonplace and involved both electors and nonelectors. Moreover, support for the Charter was not constant over the years 1839 to 1848: instead it followed the ups and downs of the economy to the extent that the movement was sometimes described as embodying "the politics of hunger."

There is no doubt that there was hunger. In Britain, trade fluctuations periodically resulted in phases of acute unemployment, which in turn affected local taxation (the Poor Law rates went up) and the government's central revenue (the income from duties on items of popular consumption

declined). This produced not only discontent, but also budget deficits, which the Whigs were unable to deal with. At the election of 1841 they were defeated by the reinvigorated Tories, or (as they now preferred to call themselves) Conservatives. Their new leader, Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), refined Liverpool's fiscal and financial policies and emulated Pitt when he decided to reintroduce the income tax in 1842. The income tax had previously been regarded as a "war tax." After Waterloo, Liverpool had wanted to keep it on to pay off the national debt, but Parliament had forced him to drop it. The resulting fiscal system was perceived as grossly inequitable, not only because it relied on highly regressive indirect taxes on popular consumption, but also because it preserved the Corn Laws, which protected British farming against international competition, and were supposed to keep the price of bread artificially high.

Thus Peel faced a difficult situation. Consistent with the Liverpool tradition, he tried to reform the economy without touching the constitution. Thus, while the Chartists were ruthlessly put down, new Mines and Factory Acts improved working conditions, conveying the impression that social amelioration would be possible without a democratic revolution. The additional revenue from the income tax helped to balance the budget. Moreover, it allowed Peel to relieve working-class consumers of some of the most bitterly resented taxes on the necessities of life.

Peel and his cabinet, including William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), had by now become converts to the idea that only complete free trade would relieve the British economy from its periodical crises. This involved repealing the Corn Laws, which the Conservative Party regarded as sacrosanct and indeed a part of the "constitution" that the Peel government had been elected to defend. The position of the government was not improved by the vigorous campaign of the Anti–Corn Law League. Under the leadership of the radical free trader Richard Cobden (1804–1865), the League argued that free trade would bring about global prosperity through interdependence between Britain's manufacturing economy and the economies of the other countries, which were eager to export raw materials in exchange for industrial products. By 1846 the League had won the economic argument. In an act of almost suicidal self-denial, Peel and his cabinet pushed the repeal of the Corn Laws through the Commons, where the measure was supported by the Whigs (now calling themselves Liberals) and opposed by the Conservatives. In the Lords the duke of Wellington loyally supported Peel, again with the help of the Liberal peers. The Conservative Party split with the protectionist majority, now led by Lord George Bentinck (1802–1848) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), rejecting Peel and his supporters, who formed a third party between the Tories and the Liberals.

In insisting on the immediate repeal of the Corn Laws, Peel had been motivated—among other things—by the impending collapse of the Irish economy. In the western counties, a large and growing population depended almost exclusively on potato crops for food. In 1845 an unprecedented combination of bad weather and a particularly devastating fungus destroyed the crops. This would have been enough to cause famine and emigration, but the recurrence of the potato blight in 1846 and 1848 brought about a demographic catastrophe. Although Ireland would not directly benefit from the repeal of the Corn Laws, Peel and his cabinet took the view that the famine was something like a warning from the Almighty that legislation should not interfere with the free circulation of food. However, they did not limit themselves to this negative and (as far as Ireland was concerned) symbolic measure. They staged a major relief operation, buying and importing Indian meal to feed the starving peasants in Ireland. Given the lack of railways and navigable rivers, it is questionable whether the limited amount of food that the government could actually distribute would have been adequate to avoid the catastrophe. However, for as long as Peel was prime minister the government was at least perceived to be doing something serious about the famine. When Peel was replaced by Lord John Russell in 1846, the partial (and short-lived) recovery of Irish farming in 1847, "donor fatigue," and dogmatic free-market advisers persuaded the Liberal government to discontinue the relief operation and rely instead on the Irish Poor Law. It was a disastrous decision. Irish landowners, already in debt, were unable to shoulder the additional fiscal burden of the greatly increased poor rates. Many went bankrupt. Worse, a million peasants died and another million emigrated, especially to the United States. By the same token, many, predominantly Catholic, farmers who managed to escape disaster actually profited from the tragedy when they were able to buy the lands that bankrupt Protestant landowners were forced to sell.

The potato blight also devastated other parts of northern Europe, including Finland and the Netherlands, and crop failures and bad harvests contributed to the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848. But in no other part of Europe was the famine as devastating as in Ireland, because nowhere else was there the same combination of a large population, a single-crop subsistence economy, and lack of alternative forms of employment. The Scottish Highlands are a good example of how the situation was dealt with elsewhere. In the first instance, Scottish overpopulation had already been partly reduced by means of the enclosures and related evictions, which forced a large number of crofters to emigrate. The industrial belt in central Scotland and in the Glasgow area attracted many of them, while others shipped across to Canada. By the time the potato blight struck, the population at risk was much smaller than in Ireland, and could be more easily relieved by private and public charity before donor fatigue and liberal economics set in. Moreover, the geography of the Highlands facilitated the relief operations: unlike Ireland, which forms a solid mass of land without navigable rivers, the tormented coastline of the Scottish Highlands, with its deep bays linked to long lochs, facilitated the distribution of relief by food ships. The different outcomes of the famine in Ireland and Scotland may perhaps be reflected in the fact that, while the large Irish American community in the United States has traditionally been pronationalist and deeply resentful of the British connection, the equally large Scottish community in Canada has always been strongly loyalist. Even in the twenty-first century, Canada is a monarchy, nominally under the British crown.

While the economy of the Highlands was devastated by the famine, the country's religious landscape was transformed by the so-called Great Disruption of the Church of Scotland (1843). The established Presbyterian Church enjoyed unparalleled influence and prestige in Scotland. Its General Assembly—consisting of ecclesiastical and lay representatives—operated as a sort of unofficial parliament for the country as a whole. The church managed the Scottish Poor Law system and the parish primary schools. Its theological seminaries were the four ancient universities (Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Aberdeen, and Glasgow). Under the 1707 Act of Union the church enjoyed greater autonomy than the Church of England, and the Evangelical Party within the Assembly was particularly jealous about preserving such autonomy. In particular, the Evangelicals, who by 1843 represented a majority of the delegates to the General Assembly, resented the practice of lay patronage in the appointment of parish ministers, according to which the local squire could impose his choice on the congregation, despite the fact that the latter had the right to elect its minister. The Evangelicals voted to discontinue the practice, but the decision of the Assembly needed the endorsement of the British government—who retained ultimate control on matters pertaining to the established churches. Peel, then the prime minister, refused to act not because of his views of the specific question under discussion, but because he was afraid of setting a precedent that the Tractarians in the Church of England could then appeal to in the attempt to "Romanize" Episcopalianism. Thus, ironically, the Evangelical Party in Scotland was snubbed because the government opposed the Anglo-Catholic Party in England. The Evangelicals did not like it: they claimed that the government had actually breached the Act of Union and—refusing to accept Peel's decision—moved out of the established church under the guidance of the leading theologian of the age, Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847). Nearly one half of the ministers and their congregations nationwide left the Auld Kirk to establish the Free Church of Scotland. The latter—which accounted for the overwhelming majority of the worshippers in the Highlands and the Isles—embodied Scottish opposition to Anglocentric parliamentary rule to such an extent that it became what historians have described as a form of "surrogate nationalism." In theological terms it was strictly Calvinistic. In political terms it was close to the Liberal Party, as the latter was generally sympathetic to the claims of religious freedom and even separation between state and church (a cause that was enthusiastically supported by radicals and Nonconformists in both England and Wales).

Not only was Evangelicalism strong in Scotland. It was also transforming the religious landscape of the rest of the British Isles. A series of revivals resulted in a dramatic increase of the total number of members of Nonconformist denominations in England and Wales: as early as 1851, census returns indicated that about 50 percent of churchgoers were Dissenters. The latter dominated religious life in Northern Ireland, the industrial North of England, the Midlands, and Wales, where a remarkable national awakening began around the politically powerful Welsh-speaking Dissenting chapels.

1851–1901

The first thirteen years of Queen Victoria's reign (r. 1837–1901) had thus been characterized by political unrest, social conflict, and economic tragedy. However, from 1851 the situation improved considerably. Indeed, the 1850s were a decade of great economic expansion—with Britain as "the workshop of the world"—and social consolidation. As Chartism petered out, friendly societies, cooperatives, and trade unions absorbed the energy and attention of a growing proportion of the working classes. Despite the prophecies of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), far from challenging capitalism, the working men and their associations were eager to adapt to market expectations. Their ideological inspiration came from Samuel Smiles's best-seller Self-Help (1859), which honored the genius and enterprise of the self-made man, and from the writings of liberal economists and political thinkers such as John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the author of the Principles of Political Economy (1848) and On Liberty (1859). The Crystal Palace international exhibition of 1851 was a celebration of British achievement in the fields of industrial production, manufacturing, and design. It set standards for the rest of the world—which was quick to catch up. In these boom years, even Ireland started to recover from the famine: as farmers were

eager to make the most of the new economic climate, nationalism faded into insignificance or American exile and the traditional two-party system appeared adequate to represent the wishes and the needs of the Irish electors.

In domestic politics the leading figures were the Liberals Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple; 1784–1865) and Lord John Russell and the Peelite Gladstone, who became chancellor of the exchequer in the 1853–1855 coalition government under the earl of Aberdeen (George Hamilton-Gordon; 1784–1860). As chancellor, Gladstone proceeded to implement free trade, reducing import duties and aiming at balancing direct and indirect taxation. His policies appealed to consumer pressure groups (such as the cooperatives) as well as to middle-class reformers and radicals, such as Cobden and the great Quaker leader John Bright (1811–1889). From then until 1929 free trade remained a sort of secular religion in popular politics, the creed on which the success of the Liberal Party was secured and retained.

The major challenges to mid-Victorian self-confidence came from abroad. In 1853 the country joined France in a war to prevent Russia from undermining the Ottoman Empire in eastern Europe. London was worried about Russian colonial expansion in central Asia and felt that the Ottoman Empire was the best barrier against such designs. The war (1853–1856) was fought in Crimea, on the Black Sea, where Sevastopol was the main naval base of the Russian fleet. Although Britain and France, and their junior ally the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia, managed to defeat the Russians, the war highlighted the inefficiency of the British army (especially the medical and supply services) and the civil service—both of which underwent substantial modernization over the next twenty years. In 1857 Britain faced a major rebellion in India, where the sepoys (Indian troops) of the East India Company massacred their officers and seized a number of cities. Britain's response was facilitated by the fact that the country had been sending troops to China, which Palmerston was successfully trying to force to accept Anglo-Indian imports (primarily opium, hence the name of the conflict). These troops were rapidly redeployed in India and managed to crush the numerically stronger insurgents. The Indian Mutiny prompted the Palmerston government to transfer the powers hitherto exercised by the East India Company to a secretary of state directly accountable to Parliament.

The Palmerston era came to an end only with the prime minister's death in 1865. His successors Lord John Russell (now elevated to the House of Lords as the earl Russell) and Gladstone were determined to satisfy the popular demand for franchise reform. They agreed with John Bright that the time had come when it was safer to enfranchise the working man than to keep him out of the constitution. Mill would have wanted to see the vote extended to women as well, and his campaign elicited substantial support in Parliament, but not enough to bring about the desired amendment to the Reform Bill. Later he further elaborated his case in The Subjection of Women (1869), which became immediately a classic of feminist thought. Even the vote for the working men was quite contentious and split the Liberals. Eventually Lord Derby (Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley; 1799–1869) and Disraeli persuaded a minority Conservative government to support an alternative Reform Bill, which—drastically amended by the pro-reform Liberals—was passed in 1867. This Second Reform Act conferred the vote on borough householders on a residential qualification, but did not extend the same provision to county constituencies or to Ireland, and avoided any drastic redistribution of seats. The result was, however, much more radical than Disraeli would have wanted. The working men were now a majority in many borough constituencies, and were rabidly Liberal in politics.

The first election under the reformed system resulted in a landslide Liberal victory. Gladstone, the new prime minister, had a precise reform agenda, which he immediately proceeded to implement. The disestablishment of the Protestant Church of Ireland created religious equality before the law between all denominations in Ireland. The 1870 Irish Land Act tried (unsuccessfully) to satisfy the tenant farmers' aspirations to stability of tenure. The 1870 Education Act created a system of rate-supported primary schools under elected school boards, inspired by the Massachusetts school system. For the first time women could both vote and stand for election for local authorities. The Married Women's Property Act (1870) was an important move toward equality in property rights (it was further strengthened by the second Gladstone government in 1882). In 1871 trade unions received full legal protection for their funds, and a separate law defined the conditions under which peaceful strikes could be conducted. Both laws had been prepared in consultation with the newly organized Trades Union Congress (TUC), which from 1868 met annually to define the labor movement's policy aims.

One guiding principle of Gladstonian liberalism was meritocracy, irrespective of differences of creed or social standing: thus the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge ceased to be the preserve of members of the Church of England, while the army was reformed and professionalized with the abolition of the system under which commissions could be purchased rather than earned through proven competence, merit, and military valor. In foreign affairs Gladstone pursued British aims through multilateral negotiations and the Concert of Europe, and advocated international arbitration wherever possible, as in the Anglo-American dispute over the losses inflicted on U.S. shipping by British-built confederate cruisers during the American civil war. This was the famous Alabama case, named after one of these privateering warships. Eventually a specially convened international court ruled that the British government owed reparations to Washington, and Gladstone promptly agreed to pay. The government ran out of steam in 1873, when a bill to reform Irish university education was rejected in the Commons, and in 1874 Gladstone lost the general election.

Disraeli was then able to form a Conservative government with a working majority—the first since 1846. Although his victory came as a surprise, he presided over a series of important reforms that rivaled Gladstone's achievements. Between 1875 and 1878 trade union laws were further reformed to the full satisfaction of the labor movement, city councils were empowered to clear slums, the school system was expanded, and factory legislation was consolidated. Important laws were passed to improve public health and reduce river pollution. Yet Disraeli, who became the earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, found foreign affairs much more interesting than domestic reform. His unilateralist approach to the eastern question (the Ottoman Empire and the Russians were again at war with one another, this time over Bulgaria) generated both support and opposition at home. Gladstone led a Liberal campaign over the Bulgarian Atrocities in 1876, after press revelations about the massacre of some twelve thousand Christian peasants by Ottoman troops. On the other hand, Tory nationalist fervor reached a peak in 1878, when Britain seemed ready to go to war on behalf of the Ottomans to stop the Russians. Eventually, Beaconsfield and his foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil; 1830–1903), managed to find a peaceful and satisfactory way out of the eastern crisis with the 1878 Berlin Congress. However, the Conservative eagerness to wave the flag resulted in two embarrassing colonial wars in Afghanistan and Zululand in 1879, in both of which the British were initially defeated.

In the election of 1880 Gladstone exploited popular disappointment about these defeats, as well as the general concern about trade depression and budget deficits. The outcome was another Liberal victory, which returned him to 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister. Despite his earlier criticism of Tory imperialism, the Liberal prime minister found himself pursuing similar policies, especially in Egypt. Britain decided to invade that country in 1882 in order to secure the control of the Suez Canal Zone when it was felt that a nationalist military government was threatening western interests.

Although Gladstone's second government has often been unfavorably compared with his first administration, its achievements were substantial: in particular, the system of parliamentary representation was drastically reformed. In 1883 a Corrupt Practices Act dealt effectively with the question of electoral expenses and corruption. In 1884 the Third Reform Act adopted a uniform residential household franchise for both counties and boroughs throughout the United Kingdom, including Ireland. As a result, a majority of the electorate (about 70 percent of the total) consisted of working men. Finally, in 1885 a radical redistribution of seats brought about the Chartist dream of "equal electoral districts." One of the first results of the act was the return of a larger number of working-class representatives to Parliament, where they sat as members of the Liberal Party (the so-called Lib-Labs).

The other major area of government reform was Ireland. From 1874 the decline in agricultural prices had severely affected the Irish farmers and landowners. Unable to pay the old rents, tenants were evicted. The problem became political when Michael Davitt (1846–1906) organized the farmers in the Irish Land League, with the aim to resist eviction and enforce lower rents. In Parliament the League was supported by Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), an Irish Protestant landowner who had adopted the cause of Irish nationalism and demanded Home Rule (Parliamentary self-government) for his country. Parnell's nationalist rhetoric was calculated to attract the support of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Fenians, a militant society particularly strong in the United States. The Fenians advocated violent insurrections and resorted to terrorism to achieve Irish independence. However, Parnell's actual program was neither republican nor independentist. Ireland had too much to gain from the British Empire—which was also an Irish empire, as scholarship at the turn of the twenty-first century has demonstrated—for Parnell to consider full separation. What he wanted was the restoration of something like the old "Grattan Parliament," which, he hoped, would enable the Irish to look after their own domestic affairs more effectively than they were able to do through Westminster. This program was supported by the Catholic hierarchy (who abhorred republicanism) and by many parish priests. Thus Parnell squared the circle of establishing a movement that was comprehensive of all shades of nationalism and truly popular, and yet conservative enough to obtain the blessings and support of the church and, potentially, even of the British government. Where he failed was in Ulster, whose Protestant

majority was appalled by the prospect of "Rome Rule" in a predominantly Catholic Ireland. At first, the British government's response was to try to make the Union work better for Ireland: the Second Land Act of 1881 granted the tenant farmers what they had been demanding for years—fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale ("the Three F's"). Under this law specially appointed land courts were empowered to set rents below the market rate, and the law protected tenants from eviction for as long as they paid the rent. However, as the worldwide crisis of agricultural prices worsened, within a few years even the judicially settled rents proved too high to be payable. The Irish responded by voting for Parnell, whose party secured most seats outside northeast Ulster in 1885. Gladstone interpreted the outcome of this election as a referendum for Home Rule, and decided to act accordingly.

He then proposed a bill granting Ireland a status similar to that of Canada. This came with a third land bill, which proposed to use treasury loans to enable Irish tenants to purchase their farms (the loans would then be repayable in terminable annuities through the Irish government). The two bills were very controversial and caused the Liberal Party to split between Unionists and Home Rulers. The Liberal Unionists were led by the Whig Lord Hartington (Spencer Compton; 1833–1908) and the radical Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914). At the ensuing election (June 1886) Gladstone and Parnell were defeated by the coalition between Liberal Unionists and Conservatives, who formed the next government under Lord Salisbury.

Salisbury's government (1886–1892) sought consolidation at home and abroad. The creation of county councils (1888) proved an important step in the reform of local government in Britain, and in 1891 primary education became free. In Ireland they introduced sweeping land acts—de facto moving toward Gladstone's idea of using treasury money for land purchase—and created a Congested Districts Board with wide-ranging powers and generous resources to develop the economy of the west of Ireland. Salisbury and his nephew Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930; Irish chief secretary, 1887–1891) hoped that these reforms would "kill Home Rule by kindness." However, as nationalism continued to inflame rural unrest, the government curtailed civil liberty through special police powers.

Meanwhile unemployment and recurrent trade crises generated social unrest in England as well. In 1887 the police clashed with a demonstration in London. In 1889–1891 a series of strikes mobilized previously unorganized sectors of the working classes, including the dockers, the matchmakers, and the gas workers. These strikes saw socialist agitators involved for the first time in the organization of the unskilled workers. Socialism had been surprisingly weak in British politics until then. The labor movement had been politically divided between Conservatives and Liberals, with a majority of the trade union members solidly aligned with Gladstone's party. The situation did not change at the end of the century, and the few socialist societies that had been established from 1882 remained small and marginal, despite the demonstrations and strikes in the years from 1887 to 1891. The principal of them were the Social Democratic Federation (Marxist), the Fabian Society (pursuing the socialist "permeation" of existing political parties), and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) founded in Bradford in 1893. Three ILP candidates were in Parliament until 1895, when they lost their seats in the general Conservative reaction.

The election of 1892 brought Gladstone back to power, but with a comparatively small majority that proved inadequate to the task of forcing Home Rule through the predominantly Unionist House of Lords. The Liberal–Irish Nationalist alliance had been weakened by the Parnell divorce scandal in 1890, and the resulting loss of credibility proved fatal to the Second Home Rule Bill (1893), after whose rejection Gladstone resigned and retired from Parliament. His ideas remained very influential in the party, which, however, was defeated at the election of 1895.

Salisbury was then back in government with Joseph Chamberlain as his colonial secretary. Despite the government's ambitious program of social reforms, an unwillingness to increase the income tax, and the increased demands of the military services prevented serious progress in the field of welfare legislation. In particular the Boer War (1899–1902) proved long and expensive. It resulted in the British annexation of the former Boer republics and the creation of modern South Africa, but the scandals associated with the importation of Chinese indentured laborers and the use of concentration camps for Boer civilians created considerable embarrassment for the government. In 1902 Salisbury was replaced by Balfour, whose government effectively solved the land problem in Ireland by completing the transfer of property from the old landowners to the farmers (1903 Wyndham Act). However, Balfour was unable to stop the disintegration of the coalition's electoral support, now threatened by Chamberlain's revived radicalism. Chamberlain proposed the adoption of import tariffs to sustain employment and pay for social reforms without increasing the income tax. While his proposal divided both Conservatives and Unionists, it gave new unity and enthusiasm to the Liberals, who fought a vigorous campaign to retain free trade, which was popularly regarded as the cause of "the big loaf " (i.e., cheap bread and foodstuff in general). This resulted in the Liberal electoral victory of 1906, when Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) formed a government. The new government was supported by the Labour Representation Committee (or LRC, which changed its name to Labour Party in 1906), and by the Irish Nationalist Party, which continued to demand Home Rule.

1901–1914

It was the beginning of a new era. The change had already been prepared by the passing of Queen Victoria, who had died in 1901. The new sovereign, Edward VII, reigned for only nine years, but, like his mother, he too defined an age, which was one of emancipation, liberalism, social and scientific innovation, and confidence in the future. He was succeeded in 1910 by his son George V (r. 1910–1936).

Social reform was sponsored both by Labour and, especially, by the radical "New Liberalism" that dominated post-1908 government policy. The Labour Party had been established as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in

1900. Originally it was created by the TUC in response to changes in trade union legislation that threatened the very right to strike in the years 1899 to 1902, when the Liberal opposition was weak and unable to help. Thus the LRC was set up primarily to advocate trade union interests. Although socialist societies were affiliated to it, neither the LRC nor the early Labour Party had a socialist program or ideology, and most of their members were essentially liberal in their ideological outlook. In 1903 the chairman of the LRC, James Ramsey MacDonald (1866–1937), struck a secret electoral pact with the Liberal Party in order to coordinate the strategies of the two anti-Conservative parties at the forthcoming election. Although the pact worked well, in terms of results the 1906 election was a resounding Liberal success, and, as the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) remarked at the time, Labour seemed little more than "a cork" floating on the Gladstonian tide.

In some respects, the governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905–1908) and Herbert Henry Asquith (1908–1916) were indeed "Gladstonian." In particular, their opposition to the women's suffrage campaign—opposition that was stiffened by their revulsion at the militant methods adopted by the suffragettes—was indeed consistent with Gladstone's old Liberalism. On the other hand, there was also a "New Liberalism" that went well beyond mere Gladstonianism. The Liberal politicians who came to the forefront of party politics from the 1890s argued that the state should accept responsibility for the creation of conditions under which citizens would enjoy a degree of liberty from the anxieties of old age, unemployment, and sickness. Pensions and national insurance would sustain domestic demand and indirectly stimulate economic growth and living standards. Radical economists such as John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940) insisted that the benefits of Gladstonian free trade should be shored up by decisive government action to secure "positive liberty." Ministers such as Asquith (1852–1928), David Lloyd George (1863–1945, prime minister 1916–1922), and Winston Churchill (1874–1965)—who had recently abandoned Conservatism for Liberalism over the issue of free trade—proceeded to legislate along these lines from 1908. By 1910 the new reforms required the government to increase taxation, which Lloyd George proposed to do by raising the income tax. Outraged at what they regarded as an attack on private property, the House of Lords broke constitutional convention by rejecting a money bill. In response, Asquith dissolved Parliament twice in 1910: the first election (in January) was about forcing the Lords to accept "the People's Budget"; the second election (December) was about reducing the power of the Lords. The Liberals won both elections, and in 1911 the Parliament Act reduced the Lords to the status of a revising chamber with suspensory veto of two years, after which a bill that they opposed would become law automatically. This paved the way for further reforms, including the disestablishment of the Episcopalian Church in Wales and the Irish Home Rule Act. Both were passed in 1912, both were suspended by the Lords for two years, and were due to be enacted in 1914. Then, however, the outbreak of World War I caused the government to suspend all controversial legislation (and both acts were very controversial) for the duration of the war, in order to maximize national unity.

The Asquith government's inability to avoid the war could be seen as its greatest failure. However, it is unlikely that the government could have done much to either prevent the war or avoid Britain's involvement in it. In the 1890s under Salisbury, Britain had cultivated Germany as a potential ally against France, whose colonial expansionism in Africa London regarded with alarm. Later, Germany's ambitious program of naval rearmament and her unpredictable kaiser brought about a complete change of mind in London. By 1904 France was Britain's informal ally. Moreover, Britain now regarded Russia—another old enemy—as a barrier against German expansionism. This Anglo-German rivalry was a disaster for both countries, but no amount of good will on either side was able to compensate for the combined effects of Germany's erratic foreign policy and the perverse operation of the system of countervailing alliances, which involved countries going to war on behalf of their friends irrespective of any threats to their own national interests. The year 1914 marked the end of an era not only for the United Kingdom, but also for the rest of Europe.

See alsoAlliance System; Boer War; Chartism; Concert of Europe; Conservatism; Corn Laws, Repeal of; Crimean War; Crystal Palace; East India Company; Emigration; French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars; Imperialism; India; Ireland; Labour Party; Scotland; Sepoy Mutiny; Tories; Waterloo; Whigs.

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Eugenio Biagini