Great Britain.docx

Civilisation britannique La Grande-Bretagne de1534 à 1760 1534-1760 A GENERAL SURVEY More than a fully comprehensive survey, with no real visibility and guidelines, rather focus put on key moments, events and figures, from 1534 (Henry VIII’s Act of supremacy) to the 1760s (The Treaty of Paris, 1763). Religious and political issues clearly inter ingled. First two classes devoted to these topics. Then social, economic and cultural aspects will be presented. I) Political and religious 1) 1534, The Act of Supremacy and the following elizabethan settlement. 2) 1649 : Cromwell abolishes the monarchy. 3) The 1688 Glorious Revolution and the following settlements. 4) Hanoverian England. 5) 1763, The Treaty of Paris. 1) 1534, The Act of Supermacy. The English Reformation ?1509 Henry VIII’s accession to the throne. Good relationship with Roman catholic church, confirmed by several alliances with Rome (and Spain) against France. Also Henry VIII’s negative reaction to Luther’s protestant ideas in the 1520s made him receive the title of Defender of the Faith by the Pope (Leo X) ?Yet tensions emerged : - As early as the 1510s when a friar (Henry Standish) proposed that clergy should be ruled by common law. The King and Commons agreed, Cardinal Wolsey (who was The Royal Chaplain and Lord Chancellor, a key servant of the King) refused. In 1518 Wosley was made legate by the Pope, and therefore given full authority over the church of England. - Then in 1527 over the King’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon, whom he wanted to divorce, because she had not borne him a son… Potential threat to succession. Rome refused to release Henry, who dismissed Wosley in 1529, because the latter had failed in securing the annulment. - In 1531 Henry failed in having the assembly of the Church recognize him as sole protector of the Church and clergy. ?Henry VIII therefore had to find other ways to limit the power of the Church : - in 1532, he decided that the Church’s canon law (set of law regulating the government of the church) would be subordinated to the King, and that the King would de facto also have authority over the clergy. - in 1533 the Act in Restrain of Appeals stated that appeals in religious matters should no longer be referred to Rome, but to the Crown. This enabled the Archbishop of Canterbury to annul the King’s marriage and declare valid his secret union with Ann Boleyn, thus infringing on papal authority. - In 1534, the Act of Supremacy declared the King the supreme head of the Church. This was mostly a political gesture, rather than a theological dispute against Rome. It clearly extended the King’s political authority in the kingdom. It was also economically motivated, as confirmed by the 1536 Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries, which resulted in the seizure of 800 such institutions, whose property (roughly representing 20 to 25 % of the land) was taken away and redistributed. - - on the same year, 1536, the King dealt a final blow at the Pope’s authority with the Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Pope of Rome, the latter being fully denied any legitimacy in spiritual matters. - Henry VIII’s regal authority was also geographically extended to Wales by two acts in 1536 and 1543 and to Ireland in 1541. ?Henry VIII’s policy was partly confirmed by Elizabeth I (Henry VIII’s daughter by Ann Boleyn, who became Queen in 1558 (until 1603) [following Henry VIII’s death in 1547, Edward VI’s reign (1547-53) and that of Mary Tudor (1553-58), who began to organize a rapprochement with Rome]. This was the so-called Elizabethan Settlement, an apparently less radical move than Henry VIII’s, which extended from 1559 to 1563, but one which proved more stable and enduring. - In 1559, The Act of Supremacy made her supreme governor of the Church (and no longer “Head”, which insisted too much on the potential spiritual regal authority). This was also a way to view the Queen’s supremacy as no longer exclusively personal, but rather more parliamentarian in spirit. - To avoid further tension with catholics, (hence the term “settlement”), Elizabeth had a new Book of Common Prayer issued in 1559 under the Act of Uniformity (the 3rd of the name, after the early 1549 and 1552 version), which recognized the catholic doctrine of transubstantiation : thus confirming the belief in religious uniformity. - In both cases, refusal to obey these acts were sanctioned by law, as far as death for high treason. - Elizabeth’s religious and political settlement was given a final touch with the drafting of the Thirty Nine Articles in 1563, defining the full body of religious doctrine (and following Calvin’s belief in predestination). This document, once more, can be viewed as both political and religious, as it dealt with theology but also stated the position of the sovereign in relation to the Church. ?Elizabeth’s main “success” was eventually : - To legitimize the role of Parliament as the sole authority in charge of legalizing the English Reformation. - to recenter the religious debate inside the national scope, as shown by the internal tensions with the northern parts of the kingdom in 1569 (following a catholic rebellion) and the rise of Puritanism at home, pushing for more radical religious reforms. - To put an end, although momentarily, to religious quarrels and civil wars at home. 2) Charles I, Cromwell : The First English Revolution ? ?An interesting parallel can be already drawn between this episode, culminating in the abolition of monarchy and the beheading of King Charles I in 1649, and the “next” revolution, the 1688 Glorious Revolution, peaceful, “bloodless” and generally perceived as a success. ?The parallel is all the more legitimate since the Cromwellian republican episode also derives from a typically 17th-century mixture of religious and political stakes (as exemplified by the ongoing Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648). - In the early 1600s, king James VI of Scotland (Charles I’s father) inherited (in 1603) the English crown and (as James I of England) unsuccessfully tried to unite his two kingdoms, one Presbytarian and the other Anglican. - Another instance of the mixture of political/religious/economic interests can be found in Charles I’s (1625-49) attempt at levying funds to finance his wars by means of non-parliamentary taxation, thus heavily relying on customs (up to 50% of the crown’s annual revenue). This led to parliamentary opposition of the usual kind, such as the 1628 Petition of Right, denouncing unparliamentary taxes. But did not prevent Charles I from increasing his personal income in a spectacular way (almost doubling in less than 10 years in the 1730s) - By the mid-1730s, two decisions collided and escalated the tensions between the parliament and the king. Firstly, Charles extended a tax called Ship Money to the whole kingdom (securing in exchange the protection of the navy). Secondly, he tried to impose a new Book of Common Prayer to Scotland, in order to secure a political/religious union and uniformity between the two kingdoms. ?Scottish opposition openly manifested itself when the Presbytarian Scottish Church formed a National Covenant to defend the “true religion”, thus triggering two Bishops’ Wars in 1639 and 1640. To finance these wars, Charles was eventually forced to gather the Parliament in April and May 1640, but was dissolved because of its opposition to the Crown. The Scottish armies started occupying north-eastern England. ?When the Parliament gathered again in November 1640, it tried to curb the king’s authority in two ways : ??By impeaching one of the king’s main advisors, Strafford. ??By passing a bill prohibiting the dissolution of the Parliament without the latter’s consent. ?By November 1641, opposition to the King’s policy spread to Ireland and, on Novembre 18th, the Great Remonstrance was passed, demanding that the King hand out “the affairs of the kingdom” to members of the Parliament. In June (1st) 1742, the Nineteen Propositions were submitted, asking the king to abandon control of the army, sole control of religion and foreign policy, and his right to appoint judges and counselors. ?War with the Scots intensified, and the crown suffered several defeats in 1643 (against Oliver Cromwell’s cavalry regiment in the East), 1644 and 1645. In 1646, the king’s army was fully defeated and the King was handed over to the English Parliament. ?What followed for 3 years was an unprecedented form of political civil war, fought amongst different factions of the Parliament, whose division the King tried to use. But to no avail. In 1748, the Parliament was purged of its moderate members (Rump Parliament), and on January 4th, 1749, a parliamentary vote declared “that the people are, under God, the original of all power”. On January 6th, a Court of High Justice was set up, trying Charles Ist, who was then executed on January 30th. ?The new structure of power emerged : - The Council of State (40 members) was given executive authority and The House of Lords was abolished. - In May 1649, England was declared “a Commonwealth of Free-State”. The Commonwealth lasted until 1653. - In 1653, The Rump Parliament was dismissed, turning Cromwell into Lord Protector. (hence the Protectorate, 1653-1660) The Instrument of Government became the first constitution of the Protectorate (followed in 1658 by the Humble Petition and Advice). Yet Cromwell mostly relied on the New Model Army set up in 1645 to defend his position. Twice he dissolved Parliaments (in 1655 and 1658) which were openly challenging his authority. - Following Cromwell’s death, the Restoration brought monarchy and Charles II back on the throne, foreshadowing the future emergence of a parliamentary monarchy in the late 1680s. Any legislation passed without parliamentary consent was declared null and void. 3) The Glorious Revolution, James II and William III. ?Following the Restoration, the continuity of monarchy was demonstrated, yet the authority of a regularly-sitting Parliament was also put forward. Hence the ensuing tensions with kings (Charles II, James II) with Catholics “tendencies”… ?The authority of the Church of England was also reestablished, thanks to a series of codes and procedures excluding dissenters from public office, known as The Clarendon Code, in particular the 1661 Corporation Act (excluding all non-anglicans from municipal office) and the 1662 Act of Uniformity (imposing strict adherence to the articles of the Anglican faith). - Yet in 1672, Charles II tried to suspend the Clarendon Code by means of a Declaration of Indulgence. The Parliament reacted by passing the Test Act in 1673, which imposed a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and forced the king’s younger brother, James, Duke of York, to resign from his position in the army. ?The 1679-1681 Exclusion Crisis (leading to two Parliaments being dissolved by Charles II) was unsuccessful in preventing James from becoming the next king in 1685. ??In November 1685, James II tried to suspend the 1673 Test Act. Following the refusal of the Parliament, the King prorogued the Parliament. ??The Court granted James the right to ignore the Test Act, thus a sharp increase in Catholics in most domains of public life (in 1686, James dismissed most of his protestant advisors; a catholic was put at the head of Christ Church College, in Oxford, in 1687) ??Two Declarations of Indulgence (for the Liberty of Conscience) were issued in 1687 and 1688, abolishing laws against dissenters. These Declarations were rejected by 7 bishops and archbishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The latter were arrested, tried and eventually acquitted. ??In June 1688, the catholic son of James II and Mary of Modena was born (James Francis Edward Stuart). The prospect of a whole line of catholic monarchs in England became a real threat, and fears of a popular and bloody uprising (resulting again in some form of Republic) were renewed. By the end of June 7 whig statesmen sent a letter to the Stadholder of Holland, William of Orange (the husband of James II’s protestant daughter, Mary), inviting him to receive the English crown. ??James II backed down, declaring that catholics were unable to sit in Parliament, abolishing the Ecclesiastical Commission….) But by November 1688 William had landed on English soil, and accepted the crown. No battle occurred with the troops of James II, and the latter was captured on December 18th, and sailed to France, where he eventually died in exile in 1701. ??A Convention Parliament was assembled on January 1689, and resorted to the fiction of abdication to avoid the risks of claims of popular sovereignty. The Bill of Rights of Decembre 16th, 1689, put William and Mary on the throne as joint rulers and listed a number of limitations on the power of the crown and monarchs. ??The political and religious settlement thus achieved was completed by two military victories of William’s troop , one in Scotland, against the Jacobites at the battle of Killiecrankie in July 1689, and another in 1690, in Ireland, against James II himself, at the battle of Boyne. In both cases, treatises acknowledged the political submission of the two rebellious entities. ??In 1701, the Act of Settlement (“Act for the further limitation of the crown and the better securing of the rights of the subject”) secured the royal succession on the protestant house of Hanover. So, when William III died, the Stuart Queen Anne (Mary’s sister) succeeded (1702-1714), but she herself died with no heir. The possibility of a return of James II’s catholic son (The Young Pretender) was thus excluded and the closest Protestant relative from the Anglo-German branch was chosen as the next king, Georges Ist (1714-27). ?The Acts of Union 1707 were a pair of Parliamentary Acts passed during 1706 and 1707 by the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland. The Acts joined the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland into a single Kingdom of Great Britain. 4) Hanoverian Britain 1714-1820 The 18th century was marked by a considerable political stability, contrasting with the previous centuries. When George I died in 1727, his son George II became king (until 1760), himself followed by his son George III (until 1820). This stability probably rendered possible other deeper changes and evolutions, in particular as far as the actual role of the crown and the workings of the Parliament are concerned. 1) The Crown and ministers : ?The Bill of Rights' new framework : overall tendency was one of a new, fairer balance of power between the executive branch (King and ministers) and the legislative branch (The Parliament), although set against today's political standards, 18th-century British kings may appear as despots, and the term "democracy" should be used with extreme caution… ?The Bill of Rights chose the King's religion, it forbade him from raising an army or a tax, and from suspending a law -> the consent and vote of the Parliament became compulsory for all those matters. ?The king's power was also framed by the annual voting of the Civil List by the Parliament : setting the sovereign's personal expenses, and the remuneration of all civil servants. This Civil List, originally created in 1660 and funded by taxation, gradually replaced the kings' and queens' former hereditary revenue. It was fixed at £700,000 annually for George I (£800,000 for George III – today's Civil List, covering the state (not personal) expenses of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh is fixed at £7,900,000 annually). Civil expenses thus became more closely supervised by the elected representatives of the people. ?the sovereign's main responsibility was appointing (and dismissing) the ministers and as both George I and George II tended to withdraw from active political life, the ministers' influence became essential over the period. ?As the Civil List provided for the payment of civil servants, most of the latter "owed" something, directly or indirectly, to the Crown and the King -> hence the importance of patronage and rewards attached to some pensions and positions, granted by the King (at Court (the King appointed judges), in the army (he appointed army officers), in the Church (the King, as head of the Church of England, nominated bishops), at the Universities…) "Sinecures" and pensions such as Commissioner of the State Lottery, Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Loyalty was therefore very much a question of royal patronage, and this ensured a cohesion which became increasingly vital as the very size of governments, at large, grew over the century: by the year 1800, no less than 16,000 officials were employed by the state, which also became increasingly spendthrift – 1700 : £4.3 million in revenue -> 1800 : £31,6 million, thanks to a taxation per capita which doubled over the century. (Central gvt spending rose from 7% of GNP in 1715 to 27% in 1801! Hence the creation in 1780 of the Commission for Examining the Public Accounts) ?Ministers were appointed by the King himself -> they did not really form a true Cabinet, although this gradually emerged from the existing advisory body called the Privy Council, in particular because of George I and George II's relative withdrawal from politics (and George I's problematic understanding of English). Key ministers were the Chief Minister (later called Prime Minister), the Lord of the Treasury, the two Secretaries of State (diplomacy) and the Lord Chancellor. There was no real collective responsibility of the Government, instead there existed a rather personal tie linking ministers and the King. Fear of centralization and personalization of power : In 1741, it was declared in the Commons that "According to our Constitution we can have no sole and prime minister . . . every . . . officer has his own proper department; and no officer ought to meddle in the affairs belonging to the department of another." In the same year, the Lords agreed that "We are persuaded that a sole, or even a first minister, is an officer unknown to the law of Britain, inconsistent with the Constitution of the country and destructive of liberty in any Government whatsoever." ?Ministers were usually chosen from the party which had won the general elections and which therefore held the majority in the House of Commons. Under the first two Georges, the Whigs (standing for the interests of the rising business classes, the emerging middle classes, and pro-Anglican Church / unlike the Conservatives or Tories, explicitly standing for the interests of the Aristocracy, the landed elite, and (potentially) more lenient towards Catholicism) played a central part in British politics (1714-1760: the age of "whig supremacy", partly embodied by Chief Minister Horace Walpole (1721-1742)). This whig domination was put an end to by George III and his choice of Lord Bute as Chief Minister (1762-63). ?George III's reign was marked by more political unstability, demonstrated by the succession of both whig and tory Chief Ministers. This was because of George III's wish to restore some of the political prerogatives of the King, and the necessity to turn to whatever side might support his policy, in a rather agitated period of time (in particular the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1883). ?So an overall impression of reciprocal independence of the different levels of political decision-making, yet ministers needed the confidence of the King, and the support of the Parliament, in particular the House of Commons, who could withdraw its confidence from the Chief Minister, in case of unpopular decisions (hence Walpole's impressive career, as he was for example in favor of a very popular policy of low taxation). 2) The Parliament : the House of Lords, the House of Commons. The so-called "representatives" of the kingdom in fact represented only a fraction of the population. ?House of Lords : - Small chamber : 220 members, including 26 bishops (including 16 peers from Scotland) [today 731 members] – Lords Temporal (peers) and Lords Spiritual. Not an elected Chamber (this may change since in March 2007, the Commons voted in favour of the principle of an elected House of Lords). Small yet powerful : Highest court of appeal on judicial matters, could veto any bill after its passing by the Commons, and immense local power and influence, verging on local despotism, of the Lords/peers over their tenants. ?House of Commons : also called the lower house. - a larger chamber, comprising 485 elected members. - Basic role was debating and passing the bills and, gradually, to clearly support the government's policy, embodied by the Chief Minister (demonstrated by the first “motion of no confidence” in 1781, sanctioning Lord North's government failure to end the American Revolution.) - MPs not being paid, and elections being costly, only very wealthy individuals could afford to consider politics as a hobby… Despite disparities, common characteristics were the so-called open franchise (no secret ballot) and the overall level of corruption and bribery, from entertaining local communities to openly buying electors… - After 1716 and the passing of the Septennial Act (Commons elected for 7 years), majorities in the Commons became more stable, but the stakes of elections becoming more important, corruption also rose, as well as the very cost of such elections. - The elected members of the Commons, called MPs, belonged to two rather distinct categories : ??the borough MPs (405) : elected in constituencies of very different sizes and importance (Cornwall was divided into 21 boroughs, Lancashire only had 6…) Also no overall common system of franchise, huge local disparities in the very running of elections. So-called "pocket boroughs" (small boroughs literally owned by the local MP) and "rotten boroughs" (with electorate of only a few individuals) existed during the whole 18th century, despite some reform proposals made by the 1770s, and well into the 19th century (the 1832 Reform Act was a first attempt at eradicating such political abnormalities). Borough MPs generally stood for the interests of the emerging merchants, owners of corporations, the gentry…. ??The county MPs (80) stood more closely for the interests of the local gentry, and the aristocracy to some extent. Each county constituency returned 2 MPs. County MPs were often local landlords, interested in local affairs, and therefore often absent from London. - today's distinction between labour and tories had no real equivalent at the time. Whig and tory MPs did not follow any strict party discipline, and the struggles between a majority and the opposition did not really occur. Rather, MPs sided on this or that issue (taxation, religious dissenters…) according to their own opinions and loyalties. Yet, a division existed, between Court and Country, the former gathering MPs whose allegiance went towards the King, and the latter those MPs who did not believe in the legitimacy of central government and some of its policies, like high taxation… This defiant attitude towards can be accounted for for two reasons : firstly, the traditional British dislike of centralization, exemplified in their denounciation of the French highly centralized state ; secondly, the existence of a highly developed system of local government,which played a major part in the running of the kingdom. 3) Local government. ?Parishes were the smallest units in the kingdom. There were 9000 of them in England and Wales. Each parish was composed of only a few influential prosperous inhabitants, often headed by the parson [+/- curé], a body of people called the vestry. Local policies were usually the responsibility of the vestry, whose meetings could only be attended by the few local ratepayers (local squire, farmers, some tradespeople…). Road repairs, dealing with the poor were some of their roles and attributions. ?In counties, local administration was jointly run by : - the Lord Lieutenant : appointed by the King, he himself appointed the justices of the peace. He was often chosen because of his social rank, often a local magnate ; he commanded the local militia in time of trouble. - The sheriff no longer played a major role in the 18th century. He was a court officers empowered to enforce High Court writs – mostly a honorary function. - The Justices of the Peace: they held the true local administrative and judicial powers, usually superceding those of the parish. They represented the landed interests, since after 1732, they were required to own a landed estate worth at least £100 a year – yet were unpaid, and could therefore only come from the wealthy classes. These “local despots”, whose power was only framed by that of the law, enjoyed huge power, ranging from licensing trades, levying taxes for the parish, deciding on the upkeep of roads, bridges and canals, fixing the local poor rates… They met four times a year. ?boroughs were considered as autonomous municipalities (many of them were therefore centered on a town) which had been created having been granted a royal granted. A corporation ran each borough, including the mayor, the aldermen (municipal councellors) and the burgesses. Boroughs were considered as constituencies, returning MPs. They could set up their own civil court of law, trade and manufacture could be regulated by their own laws. Diversity prevailed, in size and prerogatives, implying huge disparities, and a blatant inequality between borough citizens in the kingdom. ?Nevertheless, the sense of political continuity, embodied by the smooth succession of three “Hanoverian” kings should not conceal the fact that, under the so-called “three Georges”, and particularly under George Iind and George IIIrd, Britain was repeatedly at war with many European countries. When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, putting an end to the Seven Years War (1756-63), Britain emerged victorious, and comforted its position at the head of a growing worldwide Empire. 4) The Treaty of Paris (1763) Between 1739 and 1763, Britain was twice at war, basically for the same reasons – curbing the economic and military and political power of France, maintaining a certain balance of power in Europe, and (above all ?) securing and expanding the British Empire. ?In the wake of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), putting an end to the Ward of Spanish Succession), the War of Austrian Succession (1739-48) and the Seven Years War were mostly political wars – with major economic consequences. ?The War of Austrian Succession (after the death of Emperor Charles VI) was : - Economically motivated, in order to break the Spanish domination over South American trade. - Politically too, the British siding with Austria, to secure what they saw as a necessary balance of power on the continent. - But basically, in political terms, the Treaty did not alter the previous balance. ?The gradual outcome of the Seven Years War was essentially different. The stakes was basically the same, ie the balance of power in Europe, this time Britain siding with Prussia (and against Austria!). ?While the French were busy fighting Prussia, some of their very far possessions fell in the British hands : Bengal in 1757 and Quebec in 1759. ?Basically, the basis of the Empire was laid out following the Treaty of Paris. Britain gained territories everywhere : Quebec and Cape Breton Island from France, Florida and Louisiana from Spain. Senegal in Africa, Minorca in the Mediterranean, and many islands in the Caribbean (Grenada, Dominica, Tobago, St Vincent). ?By the mid 18th century, therefore, military victories enabled Britain to expand economically and to become truly a world power. II) Social and economic 1) The Agricultural Revolution covered a period between the 16th century and the mid-19th century. ?It triggered a sharp increase in agricultural output, enabling an unprecedented growth of the population. It also caused the so-called "rural exodus" of a share of the rural workforce towards the cities, and thus led to the Industrial Revolution. Apart from isolated scientific and technical discoveries made by some individuals, deeper changes in agricultural practices took place, among which enclosures, mechanization, a new rotation of crops, and a more rational approach to breeding. These agricultural innovations were clearly supported by George III (1760-1820) – nicknamed "Farmer George" – who had a model farm build in Windsor, and under whose reign the Board of Agriculture was set up (in 1790), headed by Arthur Young, himself a supporter of enclosures (yet a critical one, when it came to their social consequences). ?Enclosures : - Before the 18th century, the traditional medieval pattern was that of the open field system, centered on the local village, relying on customary rights and enabling only subsistence farming. Farmers owned and cultivated scattered strips of land, delineated by drains or "furrows", with no edging or fencing. Large fields were also held and cultivated in common – "the commons" – and these were vital form most peasants. This system of community farming implied much waste (fallow) and prevented innovative methods from being implemented. - Enclosures were experimented as early as the 12th century, progressed during the 15th and 16 centuries (with the boom of the more profitable sheep farming) and were slightly checked during the 16th and 17th centuries, because of their obvious social consequences, as denounced by the Church. Yet the movement intensified during the 18th century, in particular due to the developments in agricultural mechanization which required larger, enclosed fields in order to be workable. - 18th-century enclosures affected several areas, and variably concerned privately owned open-field trips (which were fenced), village commons or sometimes waste and forests (which, being fenced, were thus entitled to a single private owner, and no longer belonged to the community). The specificities of 18th-century enclosures were both their scope and their methods. Private-agreement enclosures gradually gave way to parliamentary enclosures, achieved thanks to private Acts, especially during the second half of the century : 4,000 acts were passed between 1750 and 1800... So as to simplify the procedure and lower its cost, General Inclosure Acts were passed in 1801 and 1815. 18th-century enclosures were mostly situated in the Midland counties (corn) and then the South and the East of the country. - The parliamentary procedure, which replaced private agreements between members of the community, was complex: local landowners, representing at least 4/5th of the land to be enclosed, had to agree; a petition was then sent to Parliament, whose outcome greatly depended on support in the Commons. After the Bill was passed, commissioners settled the – often limited - amount of compensation to be granted to the small farmers who had lost their rights. Naturally, only wealthy landowners could afford to take the local initiative of enclosures, since costly surveying, the building of fences and the planting of hedges required capital. On the other hand, small farmers sometimes lost everything in the process, and had to find work in the new, larger, mechanized farms. Most were forced to move to the cities to try to find work in the emerging factories. ?Mechanization : - One should first note that improvements in machinery were limited, that wooden tools were kept well into the 19th century, and that the most widely source of energy remained the horse. A few inventions must nevertheless be noted : - Jethro Tull and his seed drill (1701), a mechanical seeder, which was widely adopted at the publication in 1731 of his Horse-Hoeing Husbandry. - Joseph Foljambe's iron plough (1730), combining a number of technological innovations, and lighter than traditional ploughs, remained in use in Britain until the development of the tractor. - Andrew Meikle's threshing machine of 1786 modernized reaping and mowing. ?Crop rotation: During the Middle Ages, the open field system had employed a four-year crop rotation, with a different crop in each of the three fields, and the third lying in fallow. The farmers in Flanders discovered a more effective four-field rotation system, with turnips and clover replacing the fallow year – thus improving grain production, and increasing livestock production. Charles Townshend introduced this new system of crop rotation to Great Britain in 1730, where it was soon experimented and applied by some rich landowners, whose large, more compact holdings had been enclosed. ?Selective breeding: This was introduced in England by Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke, and resulted in the production of bigger and more profitable livestock. This led to the change of the favorite type of meat to mutton, the first species to have benefited from these techniques. All of these changes constitute the so-called "agricultural revolution" – although the term itself has been deemed inappropriate, in particular because of the length of time over which they happened. Yet, enclosures, mechanization and new crop rotations certainly had far-reaching consequences on British society. All these changes caused a deep disruption of the traditional patterns of rural life, they broke apart many communities and drove many peasants away from their land, and on the verge of misery, while increasing the number of tenant farmers, and consequently reducing that of freeholders (or yeomen). The wages of laborers stayed low, and despite the rise of agricultural output, wheat prices also rose steadily over the century. Yet, enclosures in particular were a "necessary evil" for the agricultural output to increase in such a spectacular way, for they made innovative, big-scale – in fact capitalist - farming possible : corn production rose by 50% between 1760 and 1815, corn exports reached a maximum from the 1730s to the late 1760s, meat and dairy productions also rose, and deeply affected the daily diet of many citizens (as meat was no longer systematically salted, but increasingly consumed fresh) – with obvious consequences on public health and the average life expectancy (from 37 in 1700 to 41 in 1820). 2) Transports : ?Hand in hand with the agricultural revolution: the revolution in transports – roads, navigable rivers -, starting with the spectacular development of the road network in England. The road network had existed for quite a while, but communications were slow and unreliable. ?Roads: Until the early 18th century, most roads were made of earth and stones : although deficient, communications were vital for farmers (with pack-horses and sometimes farm-carts, although wheel traffic was limited, and many people simply walked to the nearest village, or market town), country gentlemen, postboys… - Roads were under the local responsibility of the parishes, and they sometimes represented a heavy burden because of heavy traffic, in particular when market towns existed. To cover the expenses for repair and betterment of the roads, parishes had to turn to the Parliament, which passed the first Turnpike Act in 1663, setting up the first turnpike (near London), where a local tax – a toll- was collected at given points (called gates) on all travellers and transported goods, and used to finance works. Turnpike acts were increasingly passed over the century : 109 between 1720 and 150, and 380 between 1751 and 1772. By the mid-18th century, the map of English turnpike roads was still patchy, but by 1750 all the major roads connecting London to Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, York and Dover were turnpiked. A century later, by the 1780s, turnpike roads existed in every region of England, and had been put under the responsibilty of highly profitable turnpike trusts, headed by men of property : 143 trust existed by 1750, and 500 of them by 1770. - The "positive" consequences were numerous : the time for journeys was reduced (1700 : 90 hours from London to Manchester -> 65hrs in 1750 and 33 in 1800) and "mental" distances were also reduced, putting various populations in mutual contact ; coach services developed (one stage coach a day between London and Birmingham in 1740, and as many as 30 by the 1760s) ; there was also a whole sub-economy of inns, horse-breeding, and a notable improvement of the mail service (mail carts replacing postboys by the 1770s, regular private coach services introduced in the 1780s); the safest and fastest transportation of goods, in particular fresh foodstuff, altered the average diet of the population and increased the share of fresh vegetables and meat. All in all, better transportation and fastest traffic acted as a socio-economic multiplier. - Yet problems also emerged, in particular because of local, sometimes violent, opposition to what was perceived as yet another tax : toll gates were attacked and opposition took the form of counter petitions sent to Parliament. Travelling by coach remained expensive and many travelers complained about the still poor quality of roads, at least until late in the century when engineers like Mac Adam conceived hard, flat surfaces which were water resistant. - One way of linking this with the next point (water ways and canals) is to state that, as far as goods were concerned, turnpike roads certainly did not affect greatly haulage – only with canals was the carrying of goods (in particular heavy ones, like wood, stones, coal, grain, bricks) significantly bettered… ?Waterways and canals : The modern canal system was conceived during the 18th century and the early 19th century, partly because of the Industrial Revolution and the new need for an economic and reliable way to transport goods and commodities in large quantities – hence the ensuing "canal mania". By the early 18th century, rather sophisticated canals were constructed, but most of them were "simply" canalized stretches of existing rivers. Yet this already affected the possibilities of communications as navigable rivers were extended from 960 miles in 1700 to about 1,160 in 1726. In the early 1760s, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, the owner of coal mines in northern England, wanted a fast and reliable way to transport his coal to the nearby, rapidly industrializing city of Manchester. He financed it totally on his own wealth, and this, the first "pure" canal, opened in 1761 – and proved an immediate, profitable success, making the profits of Bridgwater's mines shoot up from £406 in 1760 to £48,000 in 1803, partly because thanks to canals, the price of coal was simply reduced by two (canal freight was up to four times cheaper than road). Another famous example is to be found in Staffordshire, with potter Josiah Wedgwood who wanted to bring heavy loads of clay to his factory, and then to transport safely his fragile china goods to Manchester, Birmingham, and who had a private canal build for that purpose. In most cases, canals were built thanks to the collaboration of private individuals who wanted to improve communications and who obtained an Act of Parliament to authorize construction. These were the men at the head of canal trusts, and behind the 1770s - 1830s period often referred to as the "Golden Age" of British canals – or "canal mania", soon resulting in nearly 7000 kilometres of new canals – and a major channel of investments : by 1795, £8 million had been invested in canals (and £20 million by 1815) . Civilisation britannique/Commonwealth 2 La Grande-Bretagne de 1534 à 1834, deuxième partie : 1742-1834 General outline I Political institutions and evolutions 1 - Whigs and tories, a « whig aristocracy » 2 - The executive and the legislative 3 - Radicalism and religious dissent 4 - Conservatism and liberalism 5 - The 1832 Great Reform act II Social evolutions 1 - Demography and industrialization 2 - The landed elite 3 - The emerging middle class 4 - The poor. From the Old Poor Laws to the New Poor Laws 5 - The status of women 6 - Social evolutions : riots, social conflicts, workers’ associations III Nation and Empire 1 - “Forging the nation” 2 - Building the Empire 3 - Slave trade and slavery Historians still contend on the boundaries of the « eighteenth century ». Few argue in favour of 1700-1800. Indeed even if the notion of the « long eighteenth Century » is debatable, because it tends to underplay major social and political upheavals, we have to admit that on the one hand 1688, with the Glorious Revolution, and on the other hand 1832, with the Great Electoral Reform and 1834 with the New Poor Law and the Act abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire are major landmarks. Hence the dates chosen for this course. We shall now focus on the second part of the course, 1742-1834, quite a long time span, when major developments took place. 1742 corresponds to the fall of Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister in all but name, and 1834 to the two major acts quoted above. I Political institutions and evolutions 1-Whigs and tories. « A Whig aristocracy » The eighteenth century has often been called a “whig century” or the century of the “whig aristocracy”. This is due to the fact that the whigs became the dominant political force after the Glorious Revolution. During Queen Ann’s reign however the Tories maintained their influence, with major figures such as Bolingbroke. With the advent of the Hanover dynasty in 1714, the Whigs replaced the Tories in office, and Robert Walpole, who had been expelled from the Commons in 1712, resumed power, became the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acted as Prime Minister as early as 172. He officially became Prime Minister in 1730 and remained in power until he resigned in 1742, a victim of his pacifist policy when he tried to bring the war with Spain to an end and when he felt reluctant to launch his country into the war of the Austrian succession (which lasted until 1848). The 18th century was called “a whig century” because “tories” kept a low profile. This was due to the fact that they had not supported the Glorious revolution and were associated to the old doctrines of “passive obedience” and “non resistance” of the people whereas the 1689 Bill of Rights had promoted the notion of a parliamentary monarchy and put an end to the “divine right” monarchy. Moreover the Tories were associated to the Jacobite movements which tried to restore the Stuart monarchy and divine right, absolute monarchy: the two Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 failed but were considered as threats to the new parliamentary monarchy. The phrase “whig aristocracy” refers to the fact that throughout the 18th century the aristocracy ruled the country alone, as only members of the landed elite and of the Church of England were enfranchised. The two conditions to be enfranchised were: -1 to have property qualifications (to own land) -2 to be a member of the Church of England (this excluded religious dissenters, see below) Hence a very small proportion of the male population (about 10 % were enfranchised and this remained the case until the Great Reform Act of 1832) Political life in the 18th century was solely in the hands of the aristocrats, and this could be seen at all levels. Peers of the Realm, i.e. the heirs (the male heirs in the big aristocratic families and members of the House of Lords) were at the top of the ladder. 2 - The executive and the legislative a) The executive Until 1760 the Hanoverian monarchs had been content with detaining honorific positions and did not even speak English. George III’s advent however represented a turning point as he took his role very seriously and was determined to wield power. Although the King’s power had been limited by the Glorious Revolution, it remained very important. He could still declare war or make peace, call or dissolve Parliament, appoint anyone he liked as cabinet minister, nominate peers, bishops, judges and ambassadors… Besides, the king’s influence exerted itself through patronage: the King protected a certain number of aristocrats, by placing them in strategic positions, and making sure of their faithful political support. Those protégés were called placemen and could be found in the House of Lords (there were a few occasions when the Government was defeated because of the indirect influence of the King through his placemen) and in government offices or other positions of trust. In 1752, according to J. Cannon, out of 178 Peers of the Realm, 90 were holding such positions, i.e. were placemen. For instance male monarchs had Lords of the Bedchamber (12 in 1777) who attended on them every morning ; they were the selected few, members of the House of Lords and particularly open to persuasion, “watched as barometers of royal opinion”( J.CANNON, Aristocratic Century : the Peerage of 18th Century England, CUP, 1984) by their fellow peers. Some of them received very large pensions. Some aristocrats however resented the excessive prerogatives of the King and his grip on those selected few. Conservative as he was, Edmund Burke, who supported the Marquis of Rockingham, managed to introduce the Establishment Act in 1782, which was voted in Parliament, and which limited the King’s patronage by making Parliament approve of the King’s personal choice respecting placemen and pensions (allowance awarded to someone as a reward). Peers were very influencial in the Cabinet (the inner circle of important ministers, but not as important as today’s Cabinet). Between 1782 and 1800, out of 65 successive members of cabinet, 43 were peers and out of the remaining 22, 14 were sons of peers. The great Offices of State (Lord Chamberlain, Lord Chancellor) were almost always occupied by peers. b) The Legislative consisted of two Houses of Parliament. -The House of Lords : traditionally, the H of L or “Upper House” consisted of aristocrats only, big landowners, and was the more prestigious of the two Houses because it consisted of the Peers of the Realm. Although it lost some of its power under the Stuarts when it was deprived of the right to control taxation, it did not feel threatened by the House of Commons as the latter was controlled by a majority of landowners, often their younger brothers… -The House of Commons: indeed, because of the system of primogeniture (the eldest son inherited the entire estate and fortune, the younger ones received pensions and thus the big estates were never divided) many younger sons of the aristocracy embraced a political career and stood for election (which was easy enough as only propertied men were enfranchised and could be elected). At the turn of the century, William Cobbett made this amusing description of Parliament - “One House filled wholly with landowners, and the other four-fifths filled with their relatives”. In the 1830s, John Cartwright declared that there were “two hereditary Houses of Parliament instead of one”. The number of peers holding government office and sitting in one of the two Houses of Parliament gave the government an almost automatic majority. When Pitt had problems to fight radicalism at the end of the century (1780-1800) he created 100 peers in the House of Lords who immediately became staunch supporters of his government. As there were very few elections, there was little renewal of MPs. c) The grip of the aristocracy on the electoral system. There were very few elections: the Septennial Act (passed in 1717) allowed Parliament to sit for seven years before elections were organized. It was a far from democratic system: only about 10% of the adult males had the right to vote (were enfranchised) before the Great reform Act of 1832 as franchise depended on land property and allegiance to the Church of England (dissenters had no civil rights). -There was unfair representation as the 203 boroughs returned two MPs each, irrespective of their size and population. In 1831, new cities such as Manchester (182 000 inhabitants), Birmingham (144 000), Leeds (123 000), Sheffield (92 000) had no MP at all whereas Cornwall, with a total population of 192000 inhabitants had 44! -The rotten boroughs, representing sometimes a rich landowner and his ten farmers or so, but returning one MP each, were particularly iniquitous. -There was no secret ballot. Aristocratic patronage and corruption easily prevailed. Aristocratic patronage meant that an aristocrat could decide to give his protection to whomever he chose, in terms of positions, offices etc The electoral system really served one single interest, the landed interest, i.e the aristocracy, the gentry and the clergy. d) Legislation passed by the aristocracy for the aristocracy The landed elite passed legislation to reinforce its economic power throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th century. Because of the system of primogeniture the younger sons of the aristocracy were active in Parliament. As Thomas Paine and several radicals would say, this was really legislation passed by one class for its own benefit. Several instances of such legislation: Enclosures: Common land was divided up as private property and therefore separated by boundaries such as hedges and ditches. The purpose was to increase productivity, to make the wastes and rough grazing areas profitable. This caused much discontent as the common land was used by the poorer people. This could be done by private agreement (through commissioners and surveyors) or by Acts of Parliament (the most frequent case). Enclosure started in the 17th century but increased dramatically during the second half of the 18th century. Between 1750 and 1830 about 4000 Acts of Parliament were passed. By 1850 almost all the land had been enclosed. The process of enclosure increased the aristocrats’ wealth as it boosted productivity on their lands but was detrimental to small farmers who could not afford the cost and had to sell part of their property. It was a scourge to the poor who could no longer use the common land for their cattle and as hunting was totally banned on enclosed lands (hence poaching). The main beneficiaries were the big landowners and the Church of England. In Buckinghamshire almost 39% of the owners disappeared in parishes enclosed between 1780 and 1820 (Evans). The rectors and vicars who used to receive tithes from the small landowners were often granted land to compensate for the loss of those tithes when the latter were dispossessed of their own land. The Game Laws. Hunting and poaching. The Game laws were passed between 1671 and 1830 with the aim of allowing the killing of game (hares, pheasants partridges especially) to those with landed estate worth more than £100 a year. Those laws were widely resented as wild animals tended to be regarded as common property and therefore poaching developed although punished by fine or corporeal punishment. Deer steeling was punishable by death (because deer were bred by aristocrats in their parks) The game laws restricted the right to kill a large number of animals and birds, not out of environmentalist concern but to reserve hunting to leisured sportsmen, aristocrats and members of the gentry. EP Thompson, (Whigs and Hunters, The Black Act) has commented upon the 1723 Black Act, an act passed against poachers (a gang called “The Blacks” near Windsor Forest had poached but also destroyed property in retaliation against the game laws) : heavy fines, imprisonment and even transportation and capital punishment were prescribed for trivial offences against property. Turnpike acts (between 1663 and 1839): toll charges on country roads were also widely resented and caused several riots in Bristol (1727), Gloucester (1737). The peak period of turnpike enactment was in the 1760s (see Stevenson) The Corn Laws. Between 1791 and 1846, the landed aristocracy protected the corn market thanks to the Corn Laws: several acts, the 1791 Act and the 1815 Act reinforced the protective legislation to the effect that no foreign corn was allowed into the country at a lower price than the British corn. Between 1795 and 1800 there were some very severe harvest failures but the British landowners did not change their policy. On the contrary they took advantage of the policy to store grain in the granaries and to raise their prices. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, following a strong movement of protest led by the Anti Corn League. 3 - Radicalism and religious dissent Far from being a static century, the 18th century witnessed several evolutions. Although there were no parties as such, major oppositions appeared between the tories and whigs at the beginning of the century, then between the “old whigs” and the “new whigs” as Edmund Burke called them, those who defended the old institutions and the radicals, the conservatives and the liberals at the beginning of the XIXth century. The Test Acts, passed in the wake of the Glorious revolution, granted religious dissenters freedom of worship but deprived them of civil rights. They were not part of the landed elite, which in its vast majority subscribed to the tenets of the Church of England. A lot of them found professional outlets in commerce and industry. A significant proportion of dissenters brought their support to radical causes. The word “Radical” has very little to do with what we call “radical” today. In the 18th century it refers both to religious and political dissent, as the two forms of dissent were often closely linked, for the reason just mentioned. The first wave of reformers appeared in the 1760s, after the advent of George III, in the wake of the John Wilkes’ affair. MP John Wilkes attacked the King’s speech on peace (at the end of the Seven Year War) in 1763, in n°45 of the North Briton, a newspaper he had recently launched to criticize the Earl of Bute and governmental policy in general. He was immediately arrested thanks to a general warrant (a judiciary practice allowing the immediate arrest of anyone suspected of endangering the State). Wilkes was covered by parliamentary immunity and was acquitted by Judge Pratt. Yet, the same year, the House of Commons considered n°45 as a “seditious libel” and Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons. All in all he was elected three times in Parliament and his election was cancelled three times. Wilkes became a symbol for the fight in favour of the liberty of the press and also of individual liberty as he advocated the abolition of general warrants. Wilkite riots took place (generally food riots when people referred to the Wilkes affair), the Petitioning Movement and the Association were launched, in favour of parliamentary reform. American patriots supported Wilkes’cause. The second wave of reformers, called the British Jacobins because they supported the French Revolution , was active between 1789 and 1795. The two main issues were: -parliamentary reform: asking for more frequent elections (as the Septennial Act was still enforced, i.e. general elections took place every even years) and an extension of the franchise (vey few asked for universal suffrage, and of course nobody for women’s suffrage apart from Thomas Spence and to a certain extent Mary Wollstonecraft ). -the repeal of the Test and Corporation Act, so that dissenters could obtain civil rights. During the French revolution two mass organizations were launched, in order to support revolutionary ideas and fight for the two issues just mentioned: -the LCS, the London Corresponding Society -the SCI, the Society for Constitutional Information who printed and distributed revolutionary pamphlets as well as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1792) Both associations sent huge petitions to Parliament in favour of parliamentary reform. 4- Old whigs and new whigs. Conservatives and liberals a) Old whigs and new whigs: the phrase was coined by Edmund Burke and referred to the old whigs who supported Charles James Fox, who launched the Society of the Friends of the People, in 1792, to support reform and freedom of the press and who tried to prevent harsh repression of radicals, as opposed to the new whigs who supported William Pitt’s conservative policy. b) Conservatives and liberals : Adam Smith is considered as the father of liberalism. His work The Wealth of Nations, produced in 1776, the same year as the American declaration of Independence, was a major landmark. British liberalism in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries has very little to do with what we call liberalism today. Smith’s liberalism combined humanitarian values with economic ones. It pitted the interests of the emerging middle class and industrial bourgeoisie against those of the landed elite and the aristocracy while expressing concern for the poor. The opposition between liberals and conservatives had repercussions on approaches to the Empire (see below). It accounts both for the Great Reform Act, the New Poor Laws and the Abolition of Slavery (see below). 5- The 1832 Great Reform Act Let us simply discuss the 1832 Great Reform Act at this stage: it followed the 1828 emancipation of Dissenters and the 1829 Roman Catholic emancipation (the first one was much more significant as it concerned many more people). Dissenters, among whom there were a lot of manufacturers and tradesmen for the first time entered Parliament. a) -Why an electoral reform was needed: The growing influence of trade and industry as well as the development of towns enhanced the hiatus between economic prosperity and political representation. Whole towns such as Leeds and Birmingham were political ghosts as they returned no MP in Westminster. Prosperous manufacturers and merchants were totally ignored by the political elite of the country, as they were for the most part dissenters. The electoral representation was totally unfair as the 23 boroughs were returning 2 MPs each, irrespective of their size and population. The rotten boroughs, representing a rich landowner and his ten farmers or so, epitomized aristocratic patronage and corruption. b) The 1832 was a significant, but far from democratic, reform. To put it in a nutshell, the franchise was extended to the emerging “middle-class”. The property qualification remained but was much lowered, which meant that a greater number of freeholders were enfranchised. About one adult male in 5, as opposed to one in 10, was entitled to vote from 1832 onwards. The Scottish and Irish reform acts were also passed. In Scotland one adult male out of 8 was enfranchised although more rotten boroughs than in En gland were abolished. Yet there were many shortcomings: -the reform was still a long way from universal suffrage, let alone male universal suffrage. -there was still no secret ballot, -the Septennial Act prevailed until 1911 -the aristocracy still had the upper hand on both Houses of Parliament. -the poor, the agricultural labourers and emerging working class were still blind spots in Parliament. II Social evolutions 1- Demography and industrialization Two major changes should be taken into account to study social evolutions in the second half of the 18th century: demography and the gradual evolution towards an industrial society. Demography: between 1750 and 1851 the population more than doubled: England: 5,75 million to 16,7 million Scotland: 1,25 million to 2,9 million Wales: 0,5 million to 1, 2 million Right from the 18th century, long before the disastrous potato crop in the 1840s, there were tides of Irish immigration, to England and Wales, and London especially. Yet emigration far exceeded immigration. Emigration took place especially to the American colonies: between 3000 and 7000 in the second half of the century (between 0,5% and 1% of the population) The general increase in British population is not to be accounted for by immigration but by a lower death rate (although Scotland had higher mortality than England well into the 19th cent) and an increase in marriages and fertility (health and sanitation improved very gradually) Life expectancy was very different from what it is today: 1681: 28, 5 years 1716: 37, 1 years 1721-1726: 27, 9 years (the lowest rate in the century) because of epidemic disease. Between 1781 and 1821 life expectancy rose to 34, 39… Average of 40 at the turn of the century! During the last quarter of the 18th century Britain was the first nation to embark on a wide scale process of industrialization. The pace increased dramatically at the turn of the century. In the second half of the century numbers rose and became more concentrated, in the areas of expanding trade and industry, while rural areas remained densely populated until the 1850s. Indeed England remained essentially an agricultural country throughout the 18th century since from 1700 to 1780 industrial production represented only 2% per annum and only 3 to 4 % thereafter. Workshops and domestic manufactures prevailed, factories only appeared in textile production and in the last two decades (see Eric Evans). By the standards of the 18th century, Britain was a heavily urbanized country with about 15% of its population in towns in the 1750s (and 25% by 1800). London was a real colossus, with a population of about 675 000 in 1750, one ninth of the population, which reached one million in 1811 and 2 million in 1851. In Scotland only Edinburgh and Glasgow exceeded 80 000 inhabitants in 1801. 2- The landed elite a) Social structure In spite of the evolutions which took place in the second half of the century, the landed elite remained all powerful throughout the 18th century and in fact until 1846 (the Repeal of the Corn Laws) which meant the first but in no way the fatal blow to the aristocracy. What is meant by the landed elite? The term encompasses all those who partook of the “landed interest” as opposed to the “monied interest”, the traders, manufacturers, artisans (those who would emerge as the middle class but would not gain any political power until 1832). This includes first and foremost the aristocracy and the gentry (immediately below the nobility, “petite noblesse” being an approximate translation for this specifically British term). The sinews of power were manifold: economic, political, cultural and religious. The economic power of the landed elite was derived from its political power and conversely this political power was derived from the social status of the aristocracy. The peers were at the apex of the social pyramid. A peer is a member of one of the degrees of nobility ; peers of the realm (for short, peers) were the eldest sons of the aristocratic families who were automatically members of the House of Lords (until Blair!). The degrees of nobility are : -duke (next after prince)-duchess -marquis-marchioness -earl-countess -viscount-viscountess -baron-baroness The Dukes of Devonshire, Northumberland, Bedford were extremely wealthy. Comparing their annual revenue to what a labourer earned at that time is quite fascinating: in the second half of the century, while the Duke of Devonshire had an annual revenue of £181 000, a male labourer had an annual revenue of £6, 5 and a female labourer of £2,15 … Until the end of the century there was a limited number of peers (1003 during the whole of the 18th century). Not all the peers were as rich as the Duke of Devonshire or the Duke of Derby or the Duke of Bedford, some members of the gentry possessed more property than the “poor” peers but at the end of the century Pitt created new peers massively, which enhanced the power of the landed elite. Just below the peers, the gentry also derived their wealth from the land; they were more numerous than the peers. The gentry included the baronets, knights, squires/esquires and gentlemen (the gentlemen farmers…) and the yeomen (men holding a small landed estate, small landed proprietors, under the rank of gentlemen). The annual revenue of a member of the gentry varied from £1000 to £5000. Sir James Dashwood, Baronet, was wealthier than some of the peers. Last but not least, the richer clergy derived respectability and wealth from the land. There was a world of difference between the poor curate, at the bottom of the ecclesiastical ladder, and some very wealthy rectors. Rectors were in charge of parishes and received the tithes (tithe: tenth part of farm produce given by ancient custom for the support of the C of E parish priests i.e. rectors and vicars) While a curate earned less than £50 a year, Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, held several rectories and earned £12000 a year in 1829. b) The transmission of property The whole system of inheritance was cleverly designed to protect patrimony and large estates, to prevent the division of estate into small units, hence the system of primogeniture. This meant that the whole estate went to the eldest son at his father’s death. If the eldest son had died, it went to he next of kin (the next brother, then the next male cousin and only in the last resort to the daughters). The system of primogeniture was reinforced by the “strict settlement”: this tied the hands of the heir by preventing him from selling the family estate and by making him provide annuities or cash sums for the younger sons and daughters. The “strict settlement” bound the heir for three generations. Most aristocratic families chose that system. The system was based on male primacy. Besides, it meant that the younger sons were forced to find employment, of course not any employment but the most prestigious positions in the army, the Church, Law or Parliament, which reinforced the influence of the landed elite on British society. c) The monopoly of property. The landed elite was numerically extremely limited. The most striking feature of 18th century (and also 19th cent) society is that so much land was owned by so few. The new British elite (English+ Scottish +Welsh +Irish) came to terms with both the industrial and the agricultural revolutions. The value of land augmented tremendously from the 1780s to the 1820s and therefore the landowners’ income increased dramatically during that period. Far from losing ground, agriculture kept developing during the industrial revolution and even during the Napoleonic wars: taxation increased during the wars, yet this affected essentially the labourers and small farmers, not the big landowners. Besides, the prices of agricultural products rose because of the size of the military market (soldiers and prisoners needed to be fed!). In fact, huge profits were made during the French wars. Agricultural productivity almost doubled between 1650 and 1800. Although there was no widespread mechanization of agriculture before 1750, yet a lot of agricultural improvements were carried out. New crops were introduced. There was a better diffusion of agricultural knowledge, tanks to the Royal Agricultural Society and the landed aristocracy prompted those changes. The first Duke of Sutherland was a case in point : his income was derived from his vast estates in England and Scotland as well as the Bridgewater trustees (investments in the new canals). Charles Greville wrote about him in 1833 : “he was a Leviathan of wealth. I do believe he was the richest man who ever died!”. Most of the wealthiest land families in Victorian Britain started their fortune in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Hardly any taxation : Radicals such as Thomas Paine could quite rightly claim that landowners were not heavily taxed. An annual land tax existed until 1798 when as a “douceur” to the landed interest Pitt abolished it and replaced it with a permanent charge on each parish. As to income tax it was only levied during the war, between 1899 and 1816. The landed classes were very reluctant to pay direct taxation. The greater part of the revenue came from indirect taxation and therefore fell upon the mass of the people. Consequently, in spite of their debts, few British aristocrats went to the wall…The poor taxes were paid in the parishes where the poor lived and therefore this hardly concerned the aristocrats (see below). 3- The emerging middle class. The concept of “middle-class” is controversial among historians of the 18th century. Many refuse to acknowledge it, for different reasons. E. P. Thompson argued that throughout the 18th century, the “middle-class” remained invisible and he described 18th century society as a bipolar field of force, with a patrician, aristocratic elite on the one end and the plebs, or poor on the other. Yet he did not deny the existence of a gradual class awareness on the part of the emerging “middle class”. Dror Wahrman contends that what matters is the “political discourse”, the gradual introduction of the term “middle class” into political discourse (works, newspapers, pamphlets). “Revisionist” historians underplay the importance of the “industrial revolution” and therefore also of the emerging “middle-class” contending that the landed elite totally prevailed until at last 1832. They choose to speak of “the long 18th century” and deny the existence of significant social changes, also minimizing the importance of the Enlightenment. In the 18th century non class terminologies were used such as “middle ranks” or “middle station” or “middling orders” and the term “middle class” as such only appeared sporadically in the last decades of the 18th century and more frequently at the beginning of the 19th century. William Beckford spoke of the “middling people” (1761) by which he meant “the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman”. The term “middle class” only became effective after the French revolution. Even then “middle class” referred to a wide range of social groups, not very well defined. Yet it seems undeniable that industrialization –which took place gradually - prompted the emergence of a middle class in Britain and that for political and religious reasons, this emerging class largely consisted of dissenters who had been barred from civil life ever since the Test and Corporation Acts (1689) and were thus encouraged to make a living through industry and commerce. a) The different categories The farmers. Towards the end of the 18th century, most farmers rented their land: around three quarters of England’s farmland was rented by 1800. This meant that the farmers no longer belonged to the landed elite as they were not landowners. Yet those farmers were in charge of employment: they employed the daily labourers (also called journeymen as in those days labourers were not paid on a monthly but on a daily basis, and recruited day by day). They were responsible for the level of wages. They played an important role in the parish. Some of them collected the poor rate and the taxes; others were in charge of the parish roads. Later they became the administrators of the poor laws (see below). There were different ranks of farmers. While the wealthiest ones tried to imitate the gentry and even acquired country-houses (the arch symbol of social status in 18th and 19th century Britain), the lowest class of farmers dined with their servants. In the 1750s, the lowest category would have an annual income of £40 and the highest of £150. They were often scapegoats: in time of scarcity, the food rioters tended to turn against them instead of against the big landowners who remained aloof and remote. The professions : the public service, lawyers, doctors, teachers. The upper ranks of the professions (prestigious public offices or law) attracted the younger sons of the aristocracy who were not able to start a career in the Church or the Army, so the “middle” ranks will be considered here. The public service expanded in the 18th century: there were about 10 000 public employees in the State departments by the 1780s (i.e. the ancestors of today’s civil servants in Whitehall). Lawyers were men born from the lower gentry; only a few made their living from criminal law practice, most were involved in side activities, dealing with property and sometimes acting as money lenders. They were quite prosperous. The medical profession attracted the middle ranks. Country physicians came from “the middling people”. Before the 1800s doctors did not even need higher education. Until 1745 surgeons belonged to the same corporations as…barbers! After 1750 however they were trained in hospitals. Physicians were free to charge whatever fees they wanted. Obviously the poorer people could neither afford the doctor’s fee nor the medicine prescribed. Hogarth made fun of the profession in his famous engraving of quack doctors (doctors who had no qualification at all and were largely impostors…) Most health care took place at home, even for severe illnesses. Only the poor entered hospitals. Yet hospitals improved steadily during the 18th century. The influence of the French revolution dominated clinical developments and encouraged scientific research, influencing British medicine as well. The teachers. Very few teachers prospered in the 18th century. Of course there was no such thing as compulsory education. The only dynamic area was the private school, set up by an individual and attracting pupils who paid fees. Private schoolmasters could earn about £40 a year. The bulk of teachers was provided by clergymen eager to increase their income. Masters of the great public schools (attended by the sons of the landed elite) were doing quite well. Masters of the largest grammar schools were also quite well-off (about £80 a year) yet grammar schools tended to decline. Village schoolmasters fared quite poorly. £6 was considered as a good salary! In order to increase their income, many were parish clerks as well. Towards the end of the 18th century, private schools were set up for the education of girls. b) The commercial middle-class. “Monied interest”. Walpole was the first to encourage and value trade, as opposed to the traditional landed interest. This is the reason why so many aristocrats and members of the gentry despised him. Those who engaged in trade and industry were generally those who could not derive their income from land, because they did not come from aristocratic families, or / and those who were not members of the Church of England but came from dissenters’ families. Religious and political factors were closely intertwined. Franchise and civil rights depended on those two conditions : land property and allegiance to the Church of England. Hence the only outlets to gain a real social status for those deprived of land or those who did not subscribe to the tenets of the C of E were commerce and industry. The merchants (not to be confused with shopkeepers) were engaged in overseas trade. They were at the top of the commercial ladder and therefore generally esteemed. A rich merchant could earn as much as £1000 a year but incomes varied a lot, of course. The manufacturers did not belong to the social elite. Like the merchants, they were mostly to be found among Dissenters and therefore lacked a political status. A lot of them were “self-made men”. To give an example, out of the 209 Birmingham manufacturers in 1783 who had an income superior to £5000, 103 started from scratch (see RULE, John, Albion’s People, 1714-1815, London, Longman, 1992). Paradoxically, those people were the economic elite but not the social one since they very often lacked civil rights. c) Interaction between monied and landed interest? There was little interaction during the 18th century, apart from intermarriages, often ridiculed by contemporary novelist or artists as “marriages of convenience”. In Marriage à la Mode, Hogarth associated the union of a decadent impoverished heir to the daughter of a rich businessman with low morality. There was very little social mingling. Yet the British landed elite was often called an “open elite”: this is only true in the sense that the younger sons of the aristocrats joined the professions and that the lower gentry and rich merchants were encouraged to mimic the aristocracy and buy country-houses. Hardly any son of the landed elite went into business. There was no interaction between the land and business. However there was one between the land and the professions. The aristocracy did not take part in the industrial revolution but contributed to the agricultural one. Links were established between the landed elite and the Bank of England or East India Company in the 19th century. Economic factors undeniably prevailed over social prejudice. 4 - The poor. From the old poor laws to the new poor laws Who was considered as poor in the 18th century? - In fact almost all those who belonged neither to the landed elites not to the emerging middle-class. There has been a significant evolution in the definition of the word since the 18th century. What we call the poor today would have meant a small portion of the 18th century poor, i.e. “the paupers”. The paupers –in French “les indigents”- referred to people who were unable to work because they were ill, or insane, or just too old, or single mothers, beggars, lame people …etc The “poor”, or the “labouring poor” included people who worked, the day-labourers who were employed by farmers, or peasants who had been the victims of enclosures, all those who had a very low income (£6,5 was the average income for a male labourer, £2,15 for a female labourer). Assistance to the poor underwent a considerable change throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. There was an evolution from a paternalistic attitude towards a utilitarian one. The paternalistic attitude meant that benevolent aristocrats had the duty of being charitable to the poor, of giving alms to the needy ones. The utilitarian attitude, initiated by Jeremy Bentham, made a distinction between those who were able to work and those who were not, and recommended better administration, more centralization in the assistance provided. Yet this opposition needs qualifying as paternalistic attitudes survived even after the New Poor Law and the utilitarian views were interpreted by the authorities in a way which left Bentham and the Utilitarians unsatisfied. 1834 was a turning point in the treatment of poverty: new legislation was passed, which spurred fundamental changes in the handling of poverty. a) Poor relief before 1834. The Old poor Laws. The first poor laws date back to the Elizabethan era. Poor relief was completely decentralized. Each parish was in charge of its own poor. The poor rates were levied by the parish which redistributed them to the poor residing within its precincts. Poor people were eligible to relief from the parish providing they had resided within the said parish for at least 40 days. During the first 40 days the parish could refuse help to newcomers (Act of Settlement, 1662). Adam Smith, the father of British liberalism, criticized the Act of Settlement in The Wealth of Nations (1776): he thought the legislation was too harsh and discouraged work mobility, thus preventing the poor from finding work in other parishes. Yet, on the whole, the poor laws were considered as much better than the other European system of poor relief. Benjamin Franklin, among others, praised the English poor as they provided relief to almost everybody. Until 1834, poor relief essentially meant outdoor relief: the poor remained independent, i.e. lived at home and received financial help from the parish. Yet , indoor relief, although more marginal than outdoor relief, existed before 1834, especially for the paupers who would be sent to the first workhouses (a word impossible to translate into French as “asile des pauvres” is not totally adequate since it does not take into account the strong disciplinary component of the workhouse). Paupers were lodged and fed in the workhouses but submitted to a harsh discipline and made to do stupid chores such as oakum picking (Wilkepedia definition: “Oakum is a preparation of tarred fibre used in shipbuilding, for caulking or packing the joints of timbers in wooden vessels and the deck planking of iron and steel ships, as well as cast iron plumbing applications. Oakum was at one time made from old tarry ropes and cordage of vessels, and its picking and preparation has been a common penal occupation in prisons and workhouses »). Once they fell ill, the paupers would remain in the workhouse and receive a very rudimentary medical treatment. On the contrary, the poor who received outdoor relief would be sent to hospitals, which were a new phenomenon and reserved to the “labouring poor”, not the paupers. Hospitals would also be open to specific categories of people, such as repenting prostitutes, foundlings and orphans. The hospitals were entirely funded by private charity, philanthropists such as Thomas Coram, whose portrait was made by his friend Hogarth. Hogarth regularly made donations to his friend’s hospital thanks the profit he made on his art. Doctors also considered hospitals as training places where they could coach prospective doctors and acquire a reputation. b) The debate on the poor laws at the turn of the century. The old poor laws were criticized by some very conservative people such as Edmund Burke, economists and Utilitarians such as Malthus and Bentham, and on the other end of the spectrum, by radicals such as Thomas Paine. Poverty increased enormously in the last decades of the 18th century because of the Napoleonic wars, the bad harvests, and the corn laws which protected the big landowners. This meant that the poor rates increased. Yet, paradoxically, because poor relief was completely decentralized, the burden of the poor rates was essentially borne by the poorer districts: the poor did not live close to the aristocrats but rather near the “middle classes”, the poorest farmers, small shopkeepers. Hence Thomas Paine’s criticism: those who paid for the poor rates were not the richest people but those who lived near the poor and by were impoverished themselves in the process… Burke did not criticize the poor rates as such but strongly opposed any administrative measure taken to relieve poverty. He resented the Speenhamland System enforced in some counties which meant that a financial supplement was given to the poor labourers to make up for the increase of the price of bread after bad harvests. The Utilitarians were in favour of indoor relief, on the ground that it would be more rational, more centralized and better organized than outdoor relief and private charity. They made a distinction between the able-bodied poor and the paupers, advising a different treatment and recommending indoor relief. Yet they were shocked by the squalid workhouses which developed after 1834. Robert Malthus pinpointed the dangers of the population theories: poverty should be fought and therefore the number of poor children should be limited. The old poor laws, according to him, were too generous as they encouraged the poor to reproduce themselves… c)The New Poor Law. The Poor Law report of 1834 drew the conclusion that the old poor laws were the primary source of poverty! After paying the poor rates some farmers would turn poor themselves. The Poor Law Amendment Act, introduced by Chadwick, was passed in 1834 and became known as The New Poor Law: -relief to able-bodied people outside the workhouse (outdoor relief) became impossible. -a recommendation for building separate workhouses, for different categories of people, was passed. In practice, in many places, there was a single big workhouse but men, women and children lived separately. Application for relief had to be less attractive than it used to be for able-bodied people. The workhouse acted as a deterrent for most people. -Unions of parishes were in charge of poor relief. Each union of parishes elected its Poor Law Guardians. In practice those guardians were the old style Justices of the Peace. Workhouses were first built in the countryside, then in the urban areas (in the 1850s only). By 1870 4/5 of the 647 unions of parishes had built new workhouses. In spite of a growing population, the main objective was achieved, a reduction of the global expense on poor relief. The New poor law pleased essentially the middle class who thus spent less on poor relief than it used to at the end of the 18th century. The aristocrats had never been really affected by the poor rates anyway. Poverty became a national concern, regulated by the New Poor Law. Unions of parishes had clear regulations. The middle classes were no longer those who endorsed the cost of poor relief. Yet the new system meant the end of humanistic values and the development of squalid workhouses with harsh discipline (such as those described by Dickens in Oliver Twist and several of his novels). Aristocratic paternalism survived, marginally, but the landed elites did not pay for the poor any more than they used to. 5- Social evolutions: the status of women. Considering the gap which separated the landing elites from the “middling people” and the even wider gap which separated them from the poor, it is impossible to discuss the role of women as such in 18th century society. Gender and class are closely interwoven. A distinction must be made between the women who belonged to the landed elites, those who were involved in agricultural activities, the governesses, the domestic servants etc Mary Wollstonecraft encountered this difficulty when she wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the first significant work in the field of women’s studies. She meant to talk about womanhood, which she did very well, but, although she was a radical, she mainly discussed women who belonged to the middle and upper ranks of society. Any generalisation is therefore impossible. Only some aspects of women’s roles in the 18th and 19th centuries can be studied. Whatever the social class however, woman remained in a state of dependency throughout the century. Evolutions were quite slow, although significant, at least for some women who, although confined to the private sphere, little by little entered the public sphere. a) -Gender roles in 18th century society. Conduct books, sermons, magazine articles and even some novels briefed women on what was considered as proper behaviour. French women were considered as very bad examples, as they had intellectual pretensions, especially in the famous “salons”, thus entering the public sphere instead of remaining confined in the private one. Thomas Gisborne, in An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1796) wrote that such women seeking intellectual autonomy were “the least eligible of wives” and gave this recommendation to women: “Cherish your instinctive modesty; and look upon it as your highest commendation not to be the subject of public discourse” (Quoted and commented upon by L.Colley). Edmund Burke, in The Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) lamented the loss of chivalric values in France and described the French women who marched on Versailles to ask for bread in a time of famine as “the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest women”. When Queen Victoria came to power in 1837, legislation concerning women had not evolved much. To quote Trevor May, they were still subject to laws “which put them on a par with war criminals, lunatics and minors”. A wife who killed her husband was guilty of high treason, just as if she had killed the King, was sentenced to death and until 1790 would be burnt. Men killing their wives would generally be sentenced to death too (not automatically!) but would only be …hanged! b) Sex and gender. Courtship and marriage. All marriages in the 18th century depended on the economic circumstances of the couple concerned. For the upper classes, marriages were first and foremost financial transactions. Marriages of convenience were the common rule: “Don’t marry for money but marry where the money is” (Matthew Boulton, quoted by Bridget Hill). Concerning the lower classes, parishes would exert pressures upon the fathers of illegitimate children to make them marry the mother and thus remove the burden of mother and child from their poor rates. There seems to have been more courtship among the labouring population than among the rich: little wooing was needed upon the upper classes where marriages were arranged by parents and lawyers. For the upper and middle classes, the virginity of the bride was an essential part of the transaction. Where there was no question of inheritance and when little or no property was involved, pre-marital chastity was not perceived as essential. Attitudes changed when the Victorian ideas of respectability reached the bourgeoisie and even the poorer sections of society. Daughters were obviously more under the control of their parents than sons were. This was especially true of the richest people, as property was essential. Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) made it obligatory for all girls under the age of 21 to have parental consent to their marriage. This was essentially meant at preventing rich heiresses from being clandestinely married by ambitious young men. Church marriages did not represent the majority of marriages. Fleet Marriages (performed clandestinely in prison) were quite frequent. There was a great variety of informal ceremonies. Marriage was ill defined in the 18th century. Consequently, it was easy to get rid of a wife…As divorces were legal but quite expensive ‘Acts of Parliament’ were required) wives were frequently deserted and left unprovided for. Many marriages must have been bigamous, at least among the lower classes: wife-sale was a common practice until about 1800…although illegal. A husband would bring his wife to a sort of market and try to sell her at the best possible price like any head of cattle… c) Social status. Property. Women and work. Women totally surrendered their property rights when they got married. The personal property of the wife became the property of the husband who could dispose of it as he wished. In 1753, Sir William Blackstone, a famous jurist of the time, wrote: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” Any property acquired by the wife during her marriage would automatically become her husband’s. Yet the law distinguished between “real property” (i.e. freehold property, which the husband could not dispose of without his wife’s permission, although he could enjoy the income derived from it) and personal property, which became his absolute possession. A young lady, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, once had her purse stolen by a thief in London. When the thief was tried, he was charged with stealing the property of her husband, Mr Henry Fawcett, which made her remark that she felt she had been charged with the theft herself… Women had to wait till 1870 to be granted a degree of financial independence, with The Married Women Property Act, which actually protected their property and allowed them to keep control of their income. The wife possessed no legal power over her children but was only entitled to “reverence and respect”. Before 1839, the father had absolute rights over his children and the wife could not have access to them of the husband did not wish so. Even the Court of Chancery found it difficult to grant woman the custody of her children in case of conflict between husband and wife. Education. For the majority of women, education was marginal, and completely different form boys’ education, as Mary Wollstonecraft clearly showed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). A lot of women were educated at home, by their parents. There were private institutions, houses bearing the inscription “young ladies boarded and educated”, where needlework, and occasionally music and dancing, even French and Italian, were taught, yet they were marginal and girls were not taught the same subjects as boys at all. Poor women were totally deprived of education. Families from the aristocracy and the gentry were ready to accept the ideas advocated by Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which were not hostile to female education but recommended tutors at home. Sunday schools were launched in the last decades, by several religious denominations including the Church of England, for lower class children, to allow them to have some instruction without distracting them from their work in the factory… Sarah Trimmer, a writer and philanthropist, founded several at the end of the 18th century. Parliament decided to contribute to education in 1839 only: a Council committee was set up under the leadership of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. Yet public expenditure remained very limited and the Church of England was to control the schools with the Council Committee. Awareness of the necessity of educating girls however did not appear before the Schools Inquiry Commission of 1864 (due to the influence of Emily Davies)! It is therefore not exaggerate to speak of a complete lack of education for women in the 18th century and well into the 19th century. d)Work Women in pre-industrial society were quite flexible: as they generally lacked qualification they changed occupations quite often. Generally speaking they had home-based occupations, which does not mean that their work was purely domestic but that they were involved in what was called “family industry” (parents and also quite often children), either agricultural work on a farm, or textile work: women dominated the spinning of most kinds of textile until the end of the 18th century (cotton, linen, silk…) and helped with the harvest while the male members of the family were likely to be fully employed in agricultural occupations. Women were also active in upholstery and millinery or were seamstresses. They were also found in non textile sectors such as printing, bookbinding, retailing, laundries but they remained at the bottom of the ladder in those trades. When they worked for outside employers, their employment largely resembled domestic chores: a lot of them were servants. The highest paid female workers were those who worked away from home, in workshops in the hand weaving, pottery trades, in wool spinning etc Family production established a tradition of low wages for women, which accounts for the low wages they were to receive later when poor women entered the factory in droves. Women’s flexibility denied them access to the skilled, specialised and higher productivity work which was valued from the turn of the century onwards; With the exception of apprenticeship in the domestic service, few women were apprentices and received any specific training. After 1750 women monopolized the work in single-servant households. The growing practice of enclosure (see above) contributed to the unemployment of women in the traditional agricultural activities: as small farms disappeared, women were reduced to seasonal work and thus lost many job opportunities. According to Katrina Honeyman, 80% of those classed as poor in the 18th century were women. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, noted the poor remuneration of women. Therefore it is wrong to claim that the “family economy” was a golden age for women as opposed to the “wage economy” of the industrial era. Recent historians have uncovered the role of women during the Industrial Revolution, insisting not only on women’oppression (as was the case before) but also on “women’s agency”, active role. The Industrial revolution should not be limited to the introduction of machinery but also involved innovation in markets, distribution networks and the division of labour. Women were increasingly employed in manufactures, of course because their wages were lower, but also because of their technical dexterity and also their acceptance of discipline and their lack of ambition which meant they did not need any promotion. Women were flexible, as well as ready to perform dull and boring work for several hours whereas men tended to be more skilled. Prostitution (of course in squalid conditions) was quite widespread: in the 1780s, Sophie von la Roche, a visitor in London, estimated the number of London prostitutes was roughly 50 000. e) -Women and politics. In 1778, the House of Commons barred women from listening to its debates from the gallery, as some of them had tended to do since the beginning of the 18th century. The 1784 general election was a case in point because for the first time the position of women became an issue during the campaign. The PM, William Pitt had proposed to levy a tax on the employers of maid-servants. Women servants considered this was a threat on their jobs and the opposition candidate, Charles James Fox, canvassed against it. One woman came to the rescue, an aristocrat, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, called by conservative papers the “aristocratic supertramp”, the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, a Whig and supporter of Charles James Fox, said to be the confidante both of Fox and the Prince of Wales… Aristocratic women, had been known to canvass for their husbands in country elections, but this time Georgiana was taking sides in a very important election, as the Westminster MP to be elected was not any country MP but represented the largest borough in the Kingdom, the closest to central power and Georgiana was bringing her support to the major opposition leader of the time. She was thus stepping into the political arena, quitting the private sphere for the public one. Satirical and often obscene prints flourished: she was presented as Fox’s mistress, as the idea of the wife of a peer breaking class ranks to support voters who favoured reform was unacceptable. A print called Political Affection showed the duchess pressing a fox to her breasts while her hungry child was starving and crying for milk…Caricatures of Mary Wollstonecraft were also quite common in the press. Towards the end of the century there was a general tendency to confine women in the private sphere, for economic as well as for moral reasons. During the Napoleonic wars, it was felt that the British population should increase to produce more soldiers to serve as cannon fodder, therefore women should be as fertile as possible and content themselves with the domestic sphere. There was also a close connection between the urbanization of England and the growing apprehension concerning women’ s employment : if the number of domestic servants increased, middle class women would have more leisure than they used to have and thus might be contaminated by disreputable ideas, read novels, or worse write them (see Linda Colley’s chapter on “womanpower”). Everything was criticized, including the way women dressed: some women wore men’s riding coats and enjoyed horse riding and outdoor activities which had traditionally been male. The Great Reform Act of 1832 , while extending the franchise to the middle classes and dissenters specifically disenfranchised women, who had never voted anyway, but who would have to wait till… 1918 (women over 30) and 1928 (over 21, like men) to be enfranchised ( and British women were well ahead of French women who were only enfranchised in 1945). 6 - Social evolutions : riots, social conflicts, workers’ associations. a) Class evolutions. Can one describe 18th century society in terms of class/classes? It is usual to associate the word “class” to Marxist thought, i.e. to Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1847). Marx insisted on the notion of class struggle, between a ruling class and a subject class, the proletariat. Can one therefore speak of classes before industrialization and the emergence of a proletariat? E. P. Thompson tried to clarify the notion of class. For him class was not static but dynamic. According to him class was not a “category” but a “historical relationship”, or a “historical phenomenon”. He preferred to use the notion of “working class” rather than of ‘working classes” for that reason: “working classes” refers to an addition of individuals and not to a historical phenomenon. According to E. P. Thompson, we must study the process by which individuals adopted their social role, by which social organizations appeared: “if we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences”. If we understand the notion of class as dynamic, then we can account for the important social changes which took place in England in the last decades of the 18th century and in the first decades of the 19th century. The bad harvests and the Corn Laws account for increasing poverty at the end of the century. Industrialization affected the pattern of English society in many ways. The middle class developed, as more and more people were involved in workshops, manufactures, and later, factories. As more and more workers turned from rural to industrial activities, working conditions seemed to deteriorate. The way of life changed tremendously. Compared to the rural labourer of the 18th century the industrial worker of the 19th century had lost some independence. The traditional family pattern was being disrupted as men and women worked more and more separately and as children entered the labour market. During the Napoleonic wars, domestic troubles were limited. However, n the 1790s and after 1815, domestic unrest reached a peak. The landed elite was repeatedly challenged. b) - Social unrest in the 18th century. - Food riots. Most riots were food riots, due to a shortage of food or the sudden rise of the price of bread. According to Stevenson, two out of three riots were food riots between 1733 and 1800. Food riots only died out in the Victorian period, after the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). Bread was the staple food for the majority of the population. Few people produced grain for their own consumption, most depended on buying grain, or flour from dealers. The transition from home baking to the purchase of ready made bread took place in the 18th century. Because of the development of the communications network, many riots took place at ports, in market towns near the canals. Opposition to the digging of canals developed among the poor who resented seeing the local food being taken away from them and shipped to other towns. There were fewer riots in London than in the countryside or smaller towns because the London market was better supplied. Riots were very common in East Anglia, the Thames Valley, the Midlands, the North and South West. As they were the main purchasers of bread, women played a prominent part in the food riots. Rioters would assemble on the market place, or try to prevent the transport or storage of food. For instance, in 1751, the miners from the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire) stopped barges on the Wye which they believed were going to France (Stevenson, 127). The aristocrats were rarely attacked; the dealers, the middlemen, were easier targets. Yet the riots were never directed against the persons, always against their property. Between 1790 and 1810, according to Bohstead, 740 riots took place (Bohstead, quoted by John Stevenson, 1992): 40% of those were food riots, about 20% riots against the Press Gang (poor people were enrolled by force to join the army and serve as cannon fodder in wartime), about 10% were political riots. -Protest against the introduction of machinery. After1815 resistance to machinery became frequent but the first form of protest started as early as 1811-1812 with the Luddites. Letters and proclamations bearing the signature of “Ned Ludd” or “King Ludd” threatened to wreck the machinery and occasionally threatened the lives of the employers, magistrates or even the Prime Minister. Of course no life was lost. Yet machines were destroyed. Three main trades and three geographical areas were concerned: -framework knitting in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, -the woollen industry in Yorkshire, -the cotton industry in Lancashire and Cheshire. On April 11th, 1812, 50 croppers attacked the mill of William Cartwright (Yorkshire). Two of the attackers were shot dead. On April 18th, they tried to assassinate Cartwright. In 1812 an Act of Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence. In 1813, at the York Assises, 64 people were tried and 17 hanged. Some historians think that 1812 saw a revolutionary outbreak in England. Charlotte Brontë has staged the Luddites in one of her novels, Shirley (1849). The ruling classes did not really feel threatened however, as the manufacturers were the main targets. The tradition of King Ludd was revived in 1830-1832 in the myth of “Captain Swing”. The poor harvest of 1830 meant that more poverty was in store for the coming winter. Cheap Irish labour was resorted to at the same time as threshing machines were introduced in Kent: the local labourers felt really threatened. The first threshing machine was broken near Canterbury on the 28th August 1830 and within a few weeks over a hundred threshing machines were broken in the area. Machine breaking went along with arsons and a series of threatening letters all signed “Captain Swing”. Of course no such Captain existed, any more than King Ludd, but those mythical figures embodied popular discontent. Those people demanded higher wages, as well as a reduction of tithes. In some places, parsons were attacked. They also protested against the enclosures which were taking place in Oxfordshire, against the employment of cheap labour (mostly Irish) and against the building of workhouses. The movement spread very rapidly. The new Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, offered a reward of £500 for bringing rioters and incendiaries to justice. By December 1830, 1976 men and women were awaiting trial. Al in all 500 were transported and 600 were imprisoned while 19 were executed. The Captain Swing’s revolt was not a paupers’ revolt. Those who were tried were not the poorest elements of the population, most of them earned wages, but low wages. Their demands were entirely economic. They were asking for higher wages, a higher level of poor relief and they were resisting agricultural innovations because they feared for their jobs. Most of them were illiterate and far away from unionism. c) -Friendly societies, clubs and trade unions. In the 16th and 17th centuries, workers had joined guilds, which were supposed to protect the standards of the respective crafts. Small village clubs also existed and sometimes joined forces with the local friendly societies. Clubs had a similar function to friendly societies ; they helped a man find a job when he started travelling ,before the railways existed, on foot, “his kit packed on his back and walking stick in hand”, an artisan “on tramp” as he was called. Artisans “on tramp” would visit the local village club and often be accommodated for a few days. The guilds declined at the beginning of the 18th century and gave way to a new form of organization, the friendly societies. Those societies were the ancestors of our mutual societies: as no system of welfare existed, they provided workers with a little money in case of sickness, sudden dismissal and they helped theirs widows with funeral expense. Thanks to the friendly society, the worker would not be sent to the paupers’grave, a horrific prospect. In 1793, Parliament passed the Friendly Societies Act, which provided them with a legal status as well as with protection for their funds. Consequently, friendly societies developed with the benediction of the landed elite and to a certain extent the new middle class, as less would be spent on poor relief and as those associations were perceived as less dangerous than the budding trade unions. The friendly societies (with the Masonic lodges) were the only associations which were spared by the 1799 Unlawful Societies Act (one of the several Combination Acts passed at the time) which prohibited any meeting of people during the conservative backlash as the Government wanted to crash radical organizations and feared French contamination in the wake of the French revolution. The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824 only. According to E. P. Thompson (p.462) there were 648 000 members of friendly societies in 1793, 704 350 in 1801 and 925 429 in 1815. In 1850, there were 1,5 million members and in 1872, four millions (four times the membership of trade unions at that date). The Combination Acts tried to stifle the radical organizations which were influenced by the French Revolution (the LCS, London Corresponding Society) and the SCI (Society for Constitutional Information) which had gained massive support among the population, as well as the emerging trade unions. The latter were only small affairs at the time. Before the 1820s one essentially found organizations of single crafts, which had less than 500 members each. At the time members were not yet factory workers but skilled artisans eager to preserve their status and standard of living. They were literate, skilled and had enough money to afford a trade union subscription. Thus, in 1785, the London printers presented a memorial to their masters asking for a wage increase and the masters eventually agreed. The weavers of the woollen industry in Devon and Somerset had their own combinations as early as 1721. Trade unions only developed significantly after the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824. The first big union was the Grand General Union of All Operative Spinners in the UK, created in 1829 by the Manchester spinners. Attempts were made at creating general unions of all trades, but his was more difficult (1830: Doherty founded the NAPL, National Association for the Protection of Labour, which ceased to exist a year later). In 1831 the Operative Builders’Union was created, influenced by Robert Owen’s ideas of cooperation. In 1834 the GNCTU, Grand National Consolidated Trade Union was created. The origins of British trade unionism are really to be found in the early 19th century and the traditional organisation by trade still prevails today. III Nation and Empire 1- “Forging the nation”. This is the phrase used by Linda Colley (see bibliography). The “John Bull” myth prevailed throughout the 18th century: a jolly old fellow, fond of good cheer and beer, who liked his country much more than any other, who was proud of it and felt slightly superior to foreigners. Hogarth represented him in several engravings, from Beer Lane to The Gate of Calais. John Bull was English, there was little awareness of Scottish or Welsh nationalist feelings. Feeling part of the British nation involved rejecting foreign fashions. This could be seen in the preference for English opera over Italian opera at the beginning of the century (see John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), in the satire upon French fashion (see Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode), and in the claim for an “art for the nation”. An art for the nation, the Royal Academy In 1768 the Royal Academy was founded precisely to promote such an “art for the nation”. Joshua Reynolds was appointed the first chairman of the academy. In his Discourses he recommended “high art”, extolling the grandeur of the nation through the reference to neoclassicism and history paintings. Until then the world of “connoisseurs” had prevailed: aristocrats commissioned portraits and artists could only live through their patronage. The Royal Academy on the other hand encouraged artists who were ready to release history paintings (recent battles for instance) instead of painting portraits solely to ingratiate the aristocrats. This corresponded to the emergence of a new commercial class as well as to the building of the Empire. 2 - Building the Empire Scientific discovery and innovation, both characteristics of the European Enlightenment, combined with Britain’s increasing maritime power. Coastlines, wind patterns, animals and plants were being observed and mapping became more and more accurate. The first English colonies were the American colonies (1620: voyage of the Mayflower), followed closely by the Caribbean colonies (1627: Barbados ; 1655 : Jamaica taken over from Spain) and India (1600: English East India Company chartered ; 1630: grant of Madras to England ; 1661: England gains Bombay ; 1690 England founds trading post at Calcutta ; the Nawab of Bengal was defeated by the British in 1757). Thoughout the 18th century France and England were almost constantly at war. a) The Seven Year War and the American revolution From 1756 to 1763, the Seven Year War opposed them both on the continent and in the American colonies. Following the war, Britain tried to make the American settlers pay for the cost and imposed heavy taxes (The Stamp Act, 1765) which triggered the American revolution. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. b) India The British progressed in India. The British East India Company originally began as a joint-stock company of traders and investors based London, which was granted a Royal Charter in 1600. It obtained the monopoly on all trade with the East Indies. Spice, coffee, tea, and textile were imported from India. Besides, goods imported from the rest of Asia transited through the Indian trading posts. In practice, the British East India Company was responsible for the colonisation of India, which would become the British Empire's largest source of revenue. It created Britain's Asian empire, the most important component of the British Empire. So, the Company which had started as a commercial trading venture actually ruled India as it acquired governmental and military functions, along with a very large private army consisting of local Indian sepoys, i.e. Indian natives employed as soldiers in the British army. In 1761 they captured the French settlement at Pondicherry. In 1784 the India Act increased government control over India. Civilizing India. Britain prided itself on civilizing India. Indeed, schools respecting the local customs were founded: in 1781 the first Koran school was created in Madras, in 1792 Sanskrit was taught in Benares. In 1817 the School Book Society and Hindu college were founded in Calcutta, the teaching was in English. The first universities were founded in the 185Os in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. In 1910 there were about 20000 students, aiming to become civil servants for the most part. Bringing the Christian religion to India was considered as part of the civilizing process. In the 1840s missionaries began to exert their influence in India. The Church Missionary Society tried to convert Indian people and started denouncing local religious customs such as sati (forcing widows to die on the pyre with their husband) or sacrificing new born girls. Bibles were handed out to local people (. In 1813 the Charter Act recognized British moral responsibility and outlawed the traditional practices of sati or thagi (robbery coupled with ritual murder). Canals were dug to irrigate the country. Irrigation developed between 1820 and 1850. Railways were built. c) At the end of the 18th century, the British empire also extended to Australia, Canada and Africa: 1788 Establishment of penal colony of New South Wales, Australia 1791: Canada Act establishes colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. 1795 : British Occupation of Cape of Good Hope Conservatives and liberals debated over Empire: -the conservatives contended that colonization should be purely economic and military, that the local customs should be respected and that there should not be any cultural interference at all on the part of the colonizers. -the liberals on the other hand argued they had a duty to educate the colonized peoples and to make them benefit from European civilization, i.e., education, Christian values, but also medicine, transport etc 3 – The slave trade and slavery 1 The slave trade The Atlantic slave trade gained momentum in the 18th century. Slave trade had existed long before the notorious Atlantic slave trade, but the novelty was the scope of the trade. Never had any slave trade reached such a scale. From the XVIth to the XIXth centuries four Western countries controlled 90% of the Atlantic trade, i.e conveyed about 11 million slaves : Portugal, Britain , Spain and France : -Portugal : 4,65O million -Britain : 2,700 million -Spain : 1,600 million -France : 1,200 million The triangular trade was so named because it involved three continents, Europe, Africa, and America, three “commodities”, essentially sugar, rum and slaves and the route taken by the ships made a triangle on the map. Slave traders would leave Europe for Africa, barter rum and weapons as well as textile and manufactured goods for slaves, i.e. buy slaves from their African owners by giving them those commodities, bring the slaves to the Southern States of the United States, the West Indies and South America (-the middle passage- ) , which would provide them with agricultural products such as sugar, cocoa as well as rum in exchange, and then the ships would sail back to Europe. Again they would go back to Africa with the rum, weapons, and all sorts of trinkets, and so on and so forth. The cycle continued, profit was made. All in all, the British organized almost 10, 000 expeditions, precisely 9932, i.e. conveying about 2, 775 830 slaves between 1633 and 1811, against 3722 French expeditions i.e. 1, 178 173 slaves between 1670 and 1864. The British slave trade was abolished in 1807, due to several factors: -There was a growing awareness of the horror of the slave trade and the “middle passage” in particular, when slaves were transported like cattle. Abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce actively campaigned against the slave trade. -the loss of the American colonies deprived Britain of an important outlet for the production of sugar in the West Indies. There was not point in encouraging the planters in the colonies to have too many slaves and to increase their sugar production. -France was no longer a major rival in the production of sugar since it has lost its main sugar island, Saint Domingue, in 1802 following the revolution in Haiti. 2 Slave riots and abolitionism. When the slave trade was abolished, many people believed that slavery would disappear naturally as the planters would be more careful with their slaves and as they could no longer import any new slaves. Abolitionists soon realized that they were wrong: the slaves were as badly treated as before, the death rate was as high as ever and yet the sugar production seemed to be thriving: the only explanation was the illicit slave trade. Planters went on buying slaves, smuggling them from Africa although it was illicit. Therefore the abolitionists resumed their struggle and in 1823 launched the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Meanwhile major slave riots took place in the colonies: -in Demerara, British Guiana, in 1823 -in Jamaica, the Christmas Rebellion, in 1831 In both cases slaves had rebelled against the awful conditions (bad lodging, appalling food, bad treatment by the planters) and set fire to sugar cane plantations. There was a discrepancy between the damage actually caused by the slaves (very few casualties among the planters) and the harsh repression by the planters: over a hundred slaves were killed by the planters in Demerara and some 350 slaves were hanged in Jamaica. The religious factor is very important to understand the evolution of abolitionism. Originally only the Quakers condemned slavery. Towards the end of the 18th century the Evangelicals had a leading role in the abolitionist struggle because they believed in the necessity of saving souls and therefore emancipating the slaves. William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect were particularly active. The Church of England which had remained indifferent to the problem of slavery, was influenced by the Evangelicals and decided to send missionaries to the West Indies to convert the slaves from 1823 onwards: two Church of England bishoprics were created in Barbados and Jamaica. 2 The abolition of slavery : 1834 The abolitionists, men and women, organized the sugar boycott and sent massive petitions to Parliament to ask fro the gradual, and then immediate abolition of slavery. The liberals espoused the abolitionist cause for several reasons: - economic reasons : they were manufacturers or traders, supporting the new industrial bourgeoisie who needed hands, salaried workers. While they encouraged the poor to work in their factories, they condemned the notion of slavery. Slaves were considered as “chattel” (“biens meubles”)by the planters, aristocrats who had settled in the colonies and who wanted to maintain their commercial privileges, i.e., the mercantile system: the planters sold their sugar to Britain and Britain could only buy their sugar from the West Indian planters. The liberals on the other hand were encouraging free trade and wanted to put an end to the economic privileges of the aristocrats and planters. -humanitarian and religious reasons :they were very often dissenters or evangelists and were convinced that slaves were human beings who deserved to be “saved” i.e converted to Christian values and emancipated. Slavery was abolished throughout the Empire thanks to an Act of Parliament passed in 1833 and implemented in 1834: yet slaves had to remain with the same planters as “apprentices” buying off their liberty so to speak, for six years. As to the planters they received huge compensations for the loss of their “property”, i.e. the slaves, £ 20 million pounds to be shared among all the colonies. Apprenticeship was eventually abolished in 1837. Conclusion Although the landed elite retained its power throughout the 18th century, although the status of women remained much the same, major evolutions took place between 1760 and 1834, essentially due to the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie and of liberalism. As the power of the industrialists increased, liberalism gained momentum: this could be seen both in economic, religious and political terms. When the dissenters were emancipated in 1828 they entered Parliament and promoted new economic policies, especially free trade. While they opposed slavery and the mercantilist system of the planters, they also encouraged the emergence of a poor working class. Hands were needed in the factories and the poor were deterred from claiming poor relief and encouraged to work in factories, although the conditions were often squalid. The same MPS passed the New Poor Law and the Abolition of Slavery Act. Trade unions emerged very slowly, the factory acts would only be passed later in the XIXth century.