Late Victorian Economic and Social Change
The same agricultural depression that led to unrest among Irish tenant
farmers in the second half of the 19th century also undermined British
agriculture and the prosperity of country squires. The mid-Victorian boom
gave way to an era of deflation, falling profit margins, and occasional
large-scale unemployment. Both the United States and Germany overtook
Britain in the production of steel and other manufactured goods. At the
same time, Britain remained the world’s prime shipbuilder, shipper, and
banker, and a majority of British workers gained in purchasing power. The
number of trade unionists grew, and significant attempts were made to
organize the semiskilled; the London Dock Strike of 1889 was the result of
one such effort. Social investigators and professed socialists discovered
large pockets of poverty in the slums of London and other cities, and the
national government as well as voluntary agencies were called on to remedy
social evils. Despite a high level of emigration to British colonies and
the United States—more than 200,000 per year during the 1880s—the
population of England and Wales doubled between 1851 and 1911 (to more than
36 million) and that of Scotland grew by more than 60 percent (to almost 5
million). Both death rates and birth rates declined somewhat, and a series
of changes in the law made it possible for a minority of women to enter
universities, vote in local elections, and keep control of their property
while married.
The Late Victorian Empire
A relative lack of interest in empire during the mid-Victorian years gave
way to increased concern during the 1880s and 1890s. The raising of tariff
barriers by the United States, Germany, and France made colonies more
valuable again, ushering in an era of rivalry with Russia in the Middle
East and along the Indian frontier and a “scramble for Africa” that
involved the carving out of large claims by Britain, France, and Germany.
Hong Kong and Singapore served as centers of British trade and influence in
China and the South Pacific. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 led
indirectly to a British protectorate over Egypt in 1882. Queen Victoria
became empress of India in 1876, and both Victoria’s golden jubilee (1887)
and her diamond jubilee (1897) celebrated imperial unity. The Conservative
ministries of Lord Salisbury were preoccupied with imperial concerns as
well. The policies of Salisbury’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain,
contributed to the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Britain suffered
initial reverses in that war but then captured Johannesburg and Pretoria in
1900. Only after protracted guerrilla warfare, however, was the conflict
brought to an end in 1902. By then Queen Victoria was dead.
The Edwardian Age (1901-1914)
In the aftermath of the Boer War, Britain signed a treaty of alliance with
Japan (1902) and ended several decades of overseas rivalry with France in
the Entente Cordiale (1904). After Anglo-Russian disputes had also been
settled, this link became the Triple Entente (1907), which faced the Triple
Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy. As the reign of King Edward VII
began, however, most Britons were more concerned with domestic matters.
Arthur Balfour’s Education Act in 1902 helped meet the demand for national
efficiency with the beginnings of a national system of secondary education,
but the measure stirred old religious passions. In the course of Balfour’s
ministry, the Conservative Party was divided between tariff reformers, who
wanted to restore protective duties, and free traders. The general election
of 1906 gave the Liberals an overwhelming majority. Union influence led to
the appearance of a small separate Labour Party of 29 members as well. The
Liberal government, headed first by Henry Campbell-Bannerman and then by
Herbert Asquith, gave domestic self-government to the new Union of South
Africa and partial provincial self-government to British India in 1909 and
1910. Under the inspiration of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, it
also laid the foundations of the welfare state. Its program, from 1908 to
1912, included old-age pensions, government employment offices,
unemployment insurance, a contributory program of national medical
insurance for most workers, and boards to fix minimum wages for miners and
others. Lloyd George’s controversial “people’s budget,” designed to pay the
costs of social welfare and naval rearmament, was blocked by the House of
Lords and led in due course to the Parliament Act of 1911, which left the
Lords with no more than a temporary veto. The Conservatives made a
comeback, however, in the general elections of 1910, and the Liberals were
thereafter dependent on the Irish Nationalists to stay in power. Although
the economy seemed to be booming, wages scarcely kept up with rising
prices, and the years 1911 to 1914 were marked by major and divisive
strikes by miners, dock workers, and transport workers. Suffragists staged
violent demonstrations in favor of the enfranchisement of women. When the
Liberal government sought to enact home rule for Ireland, non-Catholic
Irish from Ulster threatened force to prevent Britain from compelling them
to become part of a semi-independent Ireland. In the midst of these
domestic disputes, a crisis in the Balkans exploded into World War I.
The Era of World Wars
Although the competitive naval buildup of Britain and Germany is often
cited as a cause of World War I, Anglo-German relations were actually
cordial in early 1914, and Britain was Germany’s best customer. It was
Germany’s threat to France and its invasion of neutral Belgium that
prompted Britain to declare war.
Britain in World War I
A British expeditionary force was immediately sent to France and helped
stem the German advance at the Marne. Fighting on the Western Front soon
became mired in a bloody stalemate amid muddy trenches, barbed wire, and
machine-gun emplacements. Battles to push the Germans back failed
repeatedly at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Efforts to outflank
the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, and Turkey) in the Balkans, as at
Gallipoli (1915), failed also. At the Battle of Jutland (1916), the British
prevented the German fleet from venturing into the North Sea and beyond,
but German submarines threatened Britain with starvation early in 1917;
merchant-ship convoys guarded by destroyers helped avert that danger.
In May 1915 Asquith’s Liberal ministry became a coalition of Liberals,
Conservatives, and a few Labourites. Lloyd George became minister of
munitions. Continued frustration with the nation’s inability to win the
war, however, led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George, heading a
predominantly Conservative coalition, in December 1916. Problems in
Ireland, chiefly the 1916 Easter rebellion, resulted in several hundred
dead. By 1918 the annual budget was 13 times that of 1913; tax rates had
risen fivefold, and the total national debt, fourteenfold.
Although many Britons welcomed the end of czarist rule in Russia in 1917,
they saw the Communist decision to make a separate peace with Germany as a
sellout. Only the entry of the United States into the war made possible
General Douglas Haig’s successful tank offensive in the summer of 1918 and
the German surrender in November. The election called immediately
thereafter gave the Lloyd George coalition an overwhelming mandate. The
Labour Party, now formally pledged to socialism, became the largest
opposition party, while the Asquith wing of a divided Liberal Party was
almost wiped out. By then the Reform Act of 1918 had granted the vote to
all men over the age of 21 and all women over 30.
Changes Wrought by the War
Lloyd George represented Britain as one of the Big Three (together with
France and the United States) at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The
resulting treaties enlarged the British Empire as former German colonies in
Africa and Turkish holdings in the Middle East became British mandates. At
the same time Britain’s self-governing dominions—Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and South Africa—became separate treaty signatories and separate
members of the new League of Nations. An intermittent civil war in Ireland
ended with a treaty negotiated by Lloyd George in 1921. Most of the island
became the Irish Free State, independent of British rule in all but name.
The six counties of Northern Ireland continued to be represented in the
British Parliament, although they also gained their own provincial
parliament. The immediate postwar years were marked by economic boom, rapid
demobilization, and much labor strife. By 1922, however, the boom had
petered out. That year a rebellion by a group of Conservative members of
Parliament ended the prime ministership of Lloyd George, and the wholly
Conservative ministry of Andrew Bonar Law represented a return to “normal
times.”
The Interwar Era
During the early 1920s a major political shift took place in Britain. The
general election of 1922 gave victory to the Conservatives, but another
one, called a year later by Bonar Law’s successor, Stanley Baldwin, left no
party with a clear majority. As a consequence, Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour
Party leader, became the first professed socialist to serve as prime
minister of Great Britain. His first ministry in 1924, rested on Liberal
acquiescence; it lasted less than a year, when yet another election brought
back Baldwin’s Conservatives. Lloyd George’s and Asquith’s efforts at
Liberal reunion failed to restore the party’s fortunes, and it has remained
a minor party in British politics. The Baldwin ministry restored the gold
standard and enacted several social-reform measures, including the Widows’,
Orphans’, and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act, a national electric power
network, and a reform of local government. In 1928 women were given voting
