1850-1875 Peak Victorian Britain

The period after 1850 is often regarded as a golden age in British history, when the country forged ahead at home and internationally. With the restrictive mercantilist policy abandoned, Britain’s industrial and commercial lead saw a thriving economy and booming global trade. In what historian Eric Hobsbawm called ‘The Age of Capital’ Britain dominated the international stage first with manufactured goods, and then through its control of international banking, insurance and shipping. It seemed nothing would interrupt this happy progress.

Great Exhibition, London 1851

Trade and capital

Indeed the 20 years from London’s Great Exhibition in 1851 to 1870, saw a strong economic performance. Apart from a sustained boom in agriculture, production of manufactured goods rose rapidly. In mid-century Britain’s industrial output counted for nearly half the world’s capacity. An astonishing figure, but it could not continue, even with Australia’s Victoria gold rush paying off Britain’s overseas debt.   

Australian gold diggings - Edwin Stocqueler 1855

The key statistic is share of world trade. In 1870 Britain’s slice of the global market was about 24%. From 1875 it started falling, though of course trade volumes continued to rise rapidly. In 1860 Britain ranked as easily the world’s largest trading nation. But from the 1870s it was losing its dominant position, mainly to Germany and the United States, countries industrialising quickly with new products and new efficient production techniques. Britain still outstripped both these nations in trade - and even more if trade-related services are included - but its relative position, if unnoticed at the time, had started an inexorable decline. By 1910 Britain’s share of world trade had fallen to 17%.

This coincided with the ‘Long Depression’ from 1873 to 1896 which followed the boom years. Falling profits and price deflation were accompanied by more control of industry by the banks. Competitors like the USA and newly united Germany applied tariffs while British trade was largely free of them. These and other countries were able to build their industries and export markets protected by tariff walls. The US population passed that of Britain and Ireland in the 1850s (at 27m), and its growth was little affected later by the huge number (600,000), of Civil War deaths.  

Overseas earnings

Britain countered the home depression through exports to the Empire, but also increasingly via income from overseas investments, plus insurance and commercial services. In 1880 more than 50% of world shipping was British owned. By 1875 an estimated 35% of global capital investment was being raised in London. In 1913 this had risen to 50%. And with domestic manufacturing from the 1870s onwards being increasingly less profitable, finance was directed overseas, not always to the Empire. Indeed, Latin America was a favourite location.

Despite the Long Depression, and from 1875 a declining share of world trade, average living standards generally rose in Britain. This was partly due to a sustained fall in prices as the economy benefited from a rising population - it was operating on a bigger scale and more efficiently. And also partly that while British overseas trade was running a deficit, the trade gap was bridged through invisible earnings and international investment income via interest and dividends.

The exports illusion

English merchant ship 'John Wood' approaching Bombay 1850

So the misperceptions? The image of Britain as the ‘workshop of the world’ lingered longer than the reality. From the late 19^th century other countries’ manufacturing industries, especially in the chemicals and electrical spheres, were catching up fast. Also the idea that Britain’s main market was the Empire, and especially India, needs correcting. By the 1880s only a third of British trade was conducted with the whole of the Empire. The country’s biggest market, then as now, was Europe.

The Suez Canal was built, by the French, in the 1860s. But Britain rather shortsightedly opposed it at first. Strangely, it was felt to be a threat to British global trade. Needess to say opinions soon changed as sailing times on the routes to India and the Far East were cut. Indeed in 1875 Disraeli's government bought Egypt's shares in the Canal, giving Britain much more economic and political leverage in that part of the world.

But belief in a self-confident spirit of buccaneering enterprise, capturing global markets with manufactured goods, was illusory. Education in Britain was still classics based, while competitor nations were concentrating more on science and technology. Chemistry, physics and engineering were subjects slow to be taken up by British universities. Graduates were not expected to pursue these disciplines, as they were destined to become administrators in the Empire. The spirit of the amateur was much admired. AP Thornton once described Kennedy's Latin Primer, a standard public school text for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as 'one of the winding sheets of empire'.

The country was increasingly relying on overseas investment income. And the rising commercial middle class often preferred to use the money they'd made to buy country estates and ape the nobility. It's a little appreciated fact that most of Britain’s hereditary titles date not from ages past, but from the third quarter of the 19^th century.

Political and social change

William Ewart Gladstone, 1861

In mid-century politics Tories became Conservatives and Whigs Liberals. 1850-1900 was shared in government equally between them. The Gladstone v Disraeli rivalry still holds the public imagination, though it was only a small piece of the political tapestry. Disraeli was prime minister twice, for under seven years in total, while Gladstone was prime minister four times, for over 12 years. By Gladstone’s last stint in 1892 Disraeli had been dead for 11 years. In terms of service, Lord Salisbury’s was the longest. His three terms totalled nearly 14 years, though he was ill for some of the last leg.

Disraeli 1852

Several social and cultural Victorian myths also need dispelling. Up to 90% of women worked outside the home in industrial, commercial, agricultural or service jobs. Yet the false idea of the stay at home wife has stuck. Only a few upper and upper middle class wives were in this category, another example of public perception framed by novelists, often with a mission. The same applies to living conditions. While they were often in many areas still very bad, steady improvements meant that 70% of people did not live in slums.    

Media distortions

Another impression still around today is that the Victorian age was riddled with crime. It was not. The rise of popular print media, especially the ‘penny dreadfuls’, meant a concentration on salacious and/or violent crimes to feed a growing public appetite. Accordingly the press continually distorted and exaggerated events to keep their readership happy. These contemporary sources are hardly balanced or fair minded. The crime rate actually fell over the period. But this is something from which today’s world, as we know, is still not immune.

'Penny dreadfuls' - illustration from Sweeney Todd

Civil marriage was re-introduced in 1836. Before then many people in Britain - perhaps a majority - had not bothered to register via a religious route. Besides, few had property and inheritance to worry about. Church attendance steadily fell, but with the rise in wealth and living standards, formally tying the knot became more popular. The ‘lie back and think of England’ quip actually belongs to the 20^th century. Britain was not full of opium dens (there were two). Matthew Sweet’s interesting work on Victorian myths is a prime source here. Finally didn’t Queen Victoria say after some colonial setback ‘We are not amused’? There is no evidence for this. It first appeared in 1919.

1840-50 The 'Hungry Forties'

This decade has gone down in history as a time of extreme poverty and deprivation, of widespread shortages and even, in some areas, of starvation. William Cobbett, grand old man of English radicalism, asked, “Why should those that raise the food be subject to begging for relief, emigration schemes, and gaols and transportation vessels for taking what they produce when no project is on foot…for transporting pensioners, parsons or dead weight people?”. The subject of endless coverage in literature, the period was clearly etched into the collective memory of earlier British generations. But is this memory reliable? 

Origin of 'hungry memories'

To start with, the term ‘Hungry Forties’ was not used by contemporaries, nor by anyone in the 19^th century. It was first coined in 1903, 60 years after the relevant decade. It served as propaganda in the renewed Edwardian political contest between free trade and tariff reform, Joseph Chamberlain’s plan to re-impose protective import duties. A key text, The Hungry Forties: Life under the Bread Tax: Descriptive Letters and Other Testimonies from Contemporary Witnesses, came out in 1904. Based on the memories of people who had lived through what they recalled as a time of poverty and starvation, the authors were Jane Cobden Unwin (daughter of Anti Corn Law hero Richard Cobden) and her husband, publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin.

Jane Cobden

With the electoral battle between Free Trade and Imperial Preference fought again before World War I, The Hungry Forties went through several editions. It was key to the radical Edwardian agenda (Jane herself was a suffragist) to avoid what were seen as the 1840s’ mistakes. So the book’s ideas became embedded in political and social memory, and even late into the 20^th century it was treated as if it were a contemporary source.

Inadequate reforms

In fact the 1840s saw a struggle between the ruling landed class and more liberal elements. The big disappointments of the 1832 Reform Act spawned two main groups. The Chartists wanted full male suffrage, secret ballots and annual parliaments. The single issue Anti Corn Law League wanted to lift tariff protection for British landowners/farmers to reduce food prices. In the short term the ACLL was the more effective.

Meeting of the Anti Corn Law League, Exeter Hall 1846

In 1843 protectionist spokesman Robert Marsham, Warden of Merton College Oxford made the flippant remark that if workers could not buy bread they at least ‘rejoiced in potatoes’. He predictably got some stick from the ACLL, for whom it was a propaganda boost, similar to Marie Antoinette's supposed 'qu'ils mangent de la brioche' line. Thomas Carlyle joined in to mock the phrase. With 7-8m people short of ‘wheaten bread’ the descent into potatoes was scorned. Note that it was less hunger and more a change of diet that outraged people.

The Irish position

But in Ireland it was the potato crop that was the problem. The blight in Europe from the autumn of 1845 hit Ireland particularly hard. Its population was far more dependent than England or other European countries on potatoes for its basic diet - a problem exacerbated when hunger struck both through the role of absentee landlords, and the lack of real city-based alternatives to rural work. Little in the way of grain, like wheat and oats, was grown for substitutes. The dreadful Irish catastrophe is not only very well known, but was a running sore in Anglo-Irish relations for ages. 1m people died from starvation or related conditions. Another 2m emigrated, mainly to England, Scotland, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Famine memorial, Dublin

It's easy to be misunderstood here, and there's certainly no wish to sound at all glib. No-one argues about the scale and consequences of the Irish potato famine. It was truly terrible. But was this a feature in the rest of Britain? When historian Chaloner analysed the period, he pointed out that hunger was much greater between 1837 and 1842 than during the economic recovery from 1843. Ireland hardly featured in the Unwin tract, nor in general debate on the ‘Hungry Forties’. And the Irish famine, or harvest crises in general, perhaps surprisingly, were barely mentioned by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, published in 1848.

Europe's revolutionary mood

A Europe-wide scarcity of grain was given as one reason for the 1848 Revolutions, but of course Britain avoided all this. Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws helped alleviate the 1846 food threat to the British Isles, a year when continental grain supplies took a huge hit with scarcity and resulting distress. Despite shortages in mainland Europe, and excess deaths, actual starvation was largely limited there. And Britain could import grain from the new American and Canadian prairie producers.

Poster for the Great Chartist Demonstration, 1848

Despite some attempt to link these events as part of a single whole, the strong evidence points to a set of regional factors at play. Scotland also suffered from the potato blight but was able to substitute this crop with oats and other grain. People affected often moved to the lowland cities where industrial growth offered employment. Large numbers of highlanders did in fact emigrate but this seems to have been mainly due to the Highland Clearances rather than purely hunger distress.

Britain's economic arithmetic 

The UK population grew consistently in the 1840s, reaching 27m by 1850. This figure includes Ireland, despite its obvious loss of so many people. The total was less than both France (36.3m) and Germany (33.7m), but GDP per capita was higher than in most of Europe except the Netherlands. Employment in agriculture at around 30%, was half the rate typical in continental Europe. 40% of the UK population lived in cities of more than 10,000. Only the Netherlands approached this level of density. It testified to rapid industrialisation and urbanisation.

Annual per capita GDP growth in Britain was an average 2.5-3.0% during the period according to Maddison. This, despite poor figures in the early years of the decade, and again in the British banking crisis of 1847 (dealt with by raising liquidity through suspending the 1844 Bank Charter Act). These figures were much higher than for mainland Europe. In fact, with some major construction projects, the frantic development of railways, and new communications like the telegraph, economic growth was turbocharged. Add rising industrial capacity to serve an expanding Empire, and these were boom times in Britain.

'Postmemory'

Clearly some people in some areas during this period struggled with extreme poverty and even starvation. But it wasn't a universal problem. Most historians to be fair, avoided the term ‘Hungry Forties’. John Clapham, first professor of economic history at Cambridge, said the 1840s ‘were no hungrier than the 1830s or 1850s’. TS Ashton repudiated the term as it ‘fastened on the decade that saw the railway boom and the repeal of the Corn Laws the stigma of the “hungry forties”’. 

Penny edition of 'The Hungry Forties'

But Eric Hobsbawm seemed convinced and used the term confidently. He had his blindspots though - for instance he found it hard to see why anyone should start and build a business other than for profit. Like many, he perhaps viewed hunger as a handy way of showing the scale of discontent and deprivation in 19^th century Britain. Well into the 1980s this propaganda term was still used as if it were contemporary. But, like many myths, it was ‘postmemory’, used by a later generation, though not by those who had lived it. As historian Anthony Howe pointedly writes, “A folk narrative was effectively relayed as a democratic history of the British people”.

The 1832 Reform Act

It’s sometimes claimed that the 1832 Reform Bill was a watershed in British democracy. It marked the country’s evolutionary transition from first, absolute monarchy, then through a period of oligarchy to a modern constitutional settlement. The bedrock of the democratic political system, it supposedly typified Britain’s incremental approach to peaceful political change and its transition to a modern state. This, at least, is what many learnt at school. But is it true? Did 1832’s political and constitutional change pave the way for democracy?

British politics before the Reform Bill

To start with it’s worth taking a look at the state of British politics 200 years ago, in the 1820s. There were two main parties - Whigs and Tories - representing different interests. These had existed since the 17^th century having taken shape through the Exclusion crisis of the 1680s. The parliamentary process functioned through two houses, the Commons and the Lords, under a constitutional monarchy. But voting in elections was hardly democratic. It had developed in a ‘catch as catch can’ process with seven different ways to qualify to vote. The key thing is that over 95% of adults did not qualify.

Canvassing for votes, William Hogarth

There were no votes for women, or for most people without property. Areas that had grown quickly in the industrial revolution had barely any Commons seats. Manchester, with just under 200,000 people had no seats, whereas Cornwall, with roughly the same population, had 42. Depopulated places like Old Sarum had seven voters but returned members. Dunwich did, too, though it had disappeared into the sea. In these ‘pocket boroughs’ one dominant employer or landowner might control the voting. Seats were bought and sold. Voters had to vote publicly, so might be shy in opposing a local magnate’s candidate.

“Before 1832, around a third of parliamentary constituencies were controlled in this way”, says historian Matt Cole. “Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that most constituencies - between 60 and 75 per cent - were not contested at all”. Some powerful local figures 'owned' several seats simultaneously. The Duke of Norfolk topped the charts here - he controlled 11. It was in pretty well every respect a corrupt system.

Demands for reform

In the 1820s calls for reform grew louder and were backed by the parliamentary Whig leaders. But what did they want and how did they plan to get it? On the face of it, supporters demanded fairer popular representation as industrial areas and interests hardly counted against an over-represented aristocratic ruling elite. Reformers wanted to correct the absurd and out of date distribution of parliamentary seats. And they also sought a better demographic balance. Despite 1832’s total electorate rising to 435,000, as a share of population it had fallen to only 3.2%. This was less than it had been in 1640.       

Duke of Wellington, John Jackson

An overwhelming case, then, but it took ages to convince Parliament. By 1830 the prime minister,Wellington, was the sole member of his Tory government refusing to accept the need for parliamentary reform. That year’s election returned the Whigs with a large majority under Lord Grey. But 15 months of detailed argument and delaying tactics were involved before the Bill passed through the Commons. The Lords was another problem. The King had to threaten to create enough peers to ensure its passage there. The Act eventually received royal assent on 7^th June 1832.

Effects of the 1832 Act

Those believing in the benefits of this measure have some awkward issues to confront. By removing non-resident voters, 30% of those boroughs that survived reform had fewer voters than before. And the Act did not abolish all pocket or proprietary boroughs in England and Wales, as at least 40 continued to exist, along with many attendant abuses. The ‘poor ratepayer’ franchise of 37 boroughs was abolished and an essentially democratic feature was replaced by a standard £10 pa property qualification. This disenfranchised numerous working class men, besides those rural tenants lacking security of tenure.     

Lord Grey, by Charles Hayter

So in practice the vote was taken from some groups, but extended to the commercial middle class and more prosperous rural householders. It excluded all males who fell short of the arbitrary £10 line. And all females were expressly banned from voting. While the arithmetic is hard without accurate registration figures, it seems as if the total electorate rose to 6%-7% of the population. Writes constitutional lawyer Jo Murkens, “The Reform Act thus created a division not between Whigs and Tories, but between economic (rural v industrial) interests, classes and also the sexes…The new constituents were either aristocratic or wealthy, and, of course, educated and male.”   

A democratic measure?

Democracy was never on the agenda. Commentators at the time, including the Bill’s main driver, Lord John Russell, downplayed the changes. A conservative, good housekeeping measure tidying up a few rotten boroughs and including some middle class voters. It was continuity, not real change, they reassured people. With the risk of unrepresented workers turning against parliament, the response was simple if cynical - to make aristocratic government acceptable by purging it of its most corrupt and expensive features. But the limitations were soon exposed as the Chartists organised a more radical movement to push the cause of the voteless working class.

Rotten borough cartoon

The 1832 Reform Act is often seen as a constitutional milestone. It was passed at perhaps the most dangerous moment in Britain’s political history, with the country teetering on the edge of revolution. The Act did little that it was later supposed to have done, and Britain waited almost 100 years for full adult suffrage. But it did solidify a principle - parliamentary representation should shadow population. It also shattered the Tory party. Two years later Tory leader Sir Robert Peel stated some new reform principles and renamed his party the Conservatives. Setting up clubs around Britain to fight elections, it was the dawn of modern political campaigning.

Robert Peel, by Pickersgill

Peel, according to historian Robert Saunders, was an interesting character. He exhibited several paradoxes in his various positions. He subscribed to the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland but supported Catholic emancipation in 1834. He backed agricultural protection for various reasons, but split his party when repealing the Corn Laws in 1846. There were numerous other examples. He had the priceless ability, and the intellectual honesty, to change his mind when the facts changed. He believed in a culture of atonement. His big fear was populism and where it would lead. Given today’s situation, this was to prove prescient.     

Parliamentary sovereignty?

Constitutional theorist AV Dicey saw an advance in 1832 - that people began to realise the constitution might be changed peacefully. But the men who passed the 1832 Act really had no interest in political democracy. They feared it would bring tyranny of the mob over the educated (and privileged) few, and a permanent majority over the interests of minorities. Political expedience forced them to concede the minimum to avoid possible riots or even revolution. This worked for a generation. And while a more democratic system was in retrospect perhaps inevitable, it was not the Reform Act, but changing political, economic and social factors which brought it about.

House of Commons, 1809 (destroyed by a fire in 1834)

Did the Act affirm the role of parliamentary politics? The sovereignty of parliament was originally propounded in the 1880s by Dicey. It was and still is accepted as the foundation of the British constitution. But these days government, with its patronage and media support, is very powerful. It can in practice often ignore or bypass the legislature. So is parliamentary sovereignty the basis of modern democracy? Or did it only truly apply in the context of a restricted 19^th century franchise? The question divides lawyers, historians and politicians. With an increasingly authoritarian executive, and in an age of referenda, social media and fake news, with weak ministerial and electoral regulation, recent events have clearly shown its fragility.

1815-1914 The British Imperial Century

Many in Britain still believe the country has been both a towering empire and a plucky underdog. But clearly both can’t simultaneously be true. To match a simplistic yearning for a glorious, maybe unjustly lost, past as a global superpower with the image of a lone, brave victim of superior forces is, to be polite, contradictory. It’s part of a collective memory where history has been mythologised into British exceptionalism. In policy terms this false perception, of two mutually exclusive portraits of the country’s place in the world, has been, and indeed continues to be, self-disabling.

Origins of the British Empire

Ireland aside, the British Empire began with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England between the late 16^th and early 18^th centuries. Envious of the great wealth Spain was generating from its empire, England, France and the Netherlands started colonies and trade networks of their own in America and Asia. Wars between European countries in the 17^th and 18^th centuries left England, or from 1707 Britain, as North America’s dominant colonial power. With the East India Company’s 1757 conquest of Bengal, Britain indirectly became the major colonial power in the Indian subcontinent, too.

By command of King and Parliament - East India Company arms

Losing the American colonies in 1783 may have seemed a blow. But Britain then turned to Asia, Africa and the Pacific. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 Britain emerged as the 19^th century’s leading imperial and naval power. With an unchallenged Royal Navy, it developed a dominant global trading role, later described as Pax Britannica, a period of relative global peace. The Empire grew to include most of India and much of Africa. Strength in related banking, insurance and shipping activities meant effective, if indirect, British commercial control of many regions, including Asia and Latin America, colonies or not.

Power and imperial contradictions 

This period, up to World War I was the zenith of the ‘Empire on which the sun never sets’. It included 412m people, 23% of the world’s population, and over a fifth of the earth’s land area. Raw materials and captive markets offered great wealth and power, but also brought hubris and the burying of some uncomfortable truths.

Was it right or even practicable to occupy so much territory and rule over so many people? The question was rarely asked. It never strayed from ‘whataboutery’ - if Portugal and Spain did it why not us? Britain hadn’t even the spurious justification of spreading Catholicism though the ‘civilising of savages’ line was used in a later rationalisation. Global competition for trade and commerce was the main driver. But Britain was often loath to bear the costs and responsibilities of occupation. And in the 18^th century slavery was sadly a huge part of the modus operandi.

French map - French, British and Russian empires 1840 

The East India Company drove British imperial growth in Asia, with Singapore (1819) and Burma (1826). The British Crown gradually assumed the administrative burden in these territories, claiming sovereignty over lands acquired. In the 1820s Britain took formal possession of the Cape Colony. This pushed many thousands of Afrikaners (Boers) north. Boer opposition to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire from 1834 was the catalyst for the Voortrekkers’ move to establish their own republics in the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The Sotho and Zulu nations in the Eastern Cape were also claimed by Britain. Many Victorian annexations (eg. Sind and Punjab) were made on the spot, without prior government approval.

Hone Heke and his wife, Hariata, signatories of the 1840 Waitangi Treaty

Meanwhile with the 1839 Durham report the ‘white colonies’ began their road to independence. Canada was soon formally created as an entity of several provinces with full self-government, though the Australian colonies were only later federated. New Zealand signed the Waitangi treaty with the Maoris in 1840 as the foundation document of the new nation. In fact these lands were in practice too far away to be governed day to day from Britain, though Dominion status was not officially granted until 1907.  

Britain and India

The 1857 Indian rebellion, called the ’Mutiny’ in Britain, involved Indian soldiers (sepoys), against the East India Company. It lasted six months, and was suppressed with savage brutality. The British government then assumed full control from the Company, establishing the British Raj with an appointed Viceroy, and a telegraph line to the Indian Office in London. Queen Victoria was made Empress of India, the supposed ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire - its most valuable asset. 

Rebels attack Lucknow's Redan battery, 1857

The story of Britain in India has many constructive aspects, establishing a national rule over numerous diverse cultures and languages - building railways, the telegraph and a proper legal system. That’s the positive view of people at the time, and in many cases since, about the British Raj. Yet the divide and rule pattern adopted by Britain caused a legacy of problems too numerous to list. Natural disasters also played a part. In the later 19^th century a series of crop failures hit India. It’s estimated that over 15m people died. The causes had long been ignored and while prevention measures had been planned and drawn up, they were not fully implemented until the 20^th century.

Durbar procession - Akhbar II 1806-1837, followed by the British resident 

It is sometimes forgotten that Britain ruled India, along with what are now Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka, with barely 300 civil servants sent out from London. There were always far more Britons engaged in trade there than in the Indian Army or Civil Service. Hundreds of millions of people were governed through local potentates acting with British advisers and thus effectively under licence from Britain. Civil servants were responsible for administering huge areas and vast populations. It would have been quite impossible without widespread local cooperation.   

Rebellion and the turning point

Apart from 1857’s violence in India there were serious Caribbean slave revolts, especially in Jamaica in 1867. The Empire saw popular rebellions on a local, if not a wider scale during the 19^th century. They ranged from China to South Africa, from the Caribbean to Kabul.

The 1899-1902 Boer War was maybe the Empire's key turning point. With gold discovered in the Transvaal in the 1890s, Britain’s attitude toward the separate Boer republics changed. When the siege of Mafeking was lifted early on, large jingoistic British crowds went wild. But it took virtually half the British army to beat a few thousand Afrikaner settler families. And Britain only secured victory through the use of concentration camps where maybe 100,000 women and children died. The Vereeniging Treaty ending hostilities suggested that if Britain had won the war it had lost the peace.

Boer women and children in a concentration camp, c1901

This conflict marked the end of unquestioning acceptance of the role and legitimacy of the British Empire. Many students from British ruled lands were coming to the ‘home country’ for education. More locals were trained to run things locally, too. The political mood in Britain changed with a Liberal government. People were increasingly asking if an imperial policy was right, or even affordable. With new global trade patterns (from 1875 Britain’s share of world trade started to fall, and 70% of British exports were to non-imperial markets), the raw material/captive market tradition was no longer tenable. Scarce profits meant it was actually costing Britain to maintain the Empire.

Imperial legacy

Huge migrations were involved in the story. Apart from the millions leaving Britain and Ireland to settle or serve overseas, many also left lands within the empire to settle in Britain or other territories - from India and Africa to the Caribbean, for instance. Large numbers of Indians moved to South Africa, Fiji or Malaya. The demographics and ethnic balance of Britain itself have also, of course, been changed.

Many in Britain learned of an imaginative, civilising imperial regime, bringing benefits to backward people. The traditional narrative has been that of subject peoples accepting benign British rule without violence. But this is just not true. There was resistance to occupation and conquest, often followed by revolt. If Britain was not wrenching land from local inhabitants and suppressing by force indigenous peoples, it was fighting competing colonial powers - the Netherlands or France. So Britain often became involved in a three sided contest, as in India, the Caribbean or South Africa.

In June 1897 Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, cheered by hundreds of thousands. It was the peak of the British Empire, a watershed. Kipling wrote the ‘White Man’s Burden’ for the occasion. It seemed synonymous with Anglo-Saxon imperial pretensions and racial superiority. So deciding not to use it, he wrote ‘Recessional’ instead, in the form of a prayer - Lest we forget! These lines would have profound echoes in British history, later used to commemorate those who died in the service of the British Empire in World War I.    

Territories which were at one time part of the British Empire

The descendants of the empire-builders and of their former subjects now share a home in Britain. Immigration from Commonwealth countries has meant re-appraising Britain’s history to take account of two imperial traditions - of the conquered as well as the conquerors. The first of these has been conspicuous by its absence. But the sort of sanctimonious incandescence now displayed on both sides - 'it was a great thing and you were lucky to have us'; or, 'you were inhuman exterminating exploiters' - loses the nuance of what really happened. Yes, Britain built railways and cities, but it was also at times a cruel occupier.

Says historian Alex von Tunzelmann pointedly, “To learn from mistakes you must confront them, and exceptionalism means you never do. Successes may be evidence of Britain’s greatness, but failures are inherently un-British…it may be tempting to imagine a golden age in which Britain was competent, reliable, stable and sensible. Looking at its history, though, if it turns out to be none of those things, we shouldn’t be surprised”.