A Global Power

At the joint coronation of William III and Mary II in 1689, a document known as the Declaration of Rights was read aloud. Its effect was to confirm that, henceforth, the monarch would not be able to levy taxes or administer justice without the agreement of Parliament. The constitutional balance between monarch and Parliament had now been permanently reset in Parliament's favour. The same year, the Bill of Rights was passed — formally enshrining Parliament's powers and placing clear limits on the Crown. Parliament took direct control of the succession itself, declaring that the monarch must always be a Protestant. A new Parliament was required to be elected at least every three years (a period that was later extended to seven years and more recently fixed at five). Each year, the monarch had to come to Parliament and ask for renewed funding for the army and navy.

The practical consequence of the new settlement was that the Crown could no longer govern without the support of ministers who could reliably command a majority in both Houses of Parliament. Two rival parliamentary groupings took recognisable shape at this point — the Whigs and the Tories. (The modern Conservative Party continues to be referred to colloquially as the Tories.) British party politics begins here.

The same period saw the emergence of a free press — newspapers and other publications operating outside direct government control. From 1695, printed newspapers no longer required a government licence to operate, and the number and variety of papers published in the country grew rapidly thereafter.

The laws passed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution mark the beginning of what is generally called 'constitutional monarchy'. The monarch remained politically significant, but could no longer impose particular policies or actions on the country in the teeth of Parliament's disagreement. After William III, ministers became progressively more important than the monarch in day-to-day government. None of this, however, yet amounted to democracy in the modern sense. The body of men entitled to vote for members of Parliament remained small: only men who owned property above a certain monetary value had the franchise, and no women at all could vote. Some parliamentary constituencies were effectively controlled by a single wealthy family and were known as 'pocket boroughs'; others had almost no voters at all and were known as 'rotten boroughs'.

This period was characterised by substantial population movement in both directions. Many people left Britain and Ireland to settle in the new American colonies and other overseas territories, while others arrived to live in Britain. A Jewish community re-established itself in Britain in 1656 — the first formally recorded since the medieval expulsion — initially settling in London. Between 1680 and 1720, substantial numbers of Huguenot refugees arrived from France: French Protestants, they had been persecuted for their religion at home. Many of the Huguenots were educated and skilled, and worked in Britain as scientists, bankers, weavers and craftspeople of other kinds.

William and Mary's successor on the throne was Mary's sister Anne, who had no surviving children. Her childlessness raised serious constitutional uncertainty over the royal succession in England, Wales and Ireland — and equally in Scotland. In 1707, as a resolution, the Act of Union (known in Scotland as the Treaty of Union) was agreed between the two parliaments, creating the new Kingdom of Great Britain. Scotland ceased from that point to be an independent country, but the Union settlement preserved its own distinct legal system, its own education system, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland as its national Church.

Queen Anne died in 1714. Parliament chose her nearest Protestant relative, a German prince named George, as her successor — he took the throne as George I. An attempt by Scottish Jacobites to install James II's son on the throne in George's place was quickly defeated. George I did not speak very good English, which in practice meant he relied heavily on his ministers for the day-to-day business of government. Out of that practical reliance, the office of Prime Minister effectively emerged: the most important minister in Parliament became known as the Prime Minister. The first to be called by that title was Sir Robert Walpole, who held the post from 1721 to 1742.

In 1745 there was a further Jacobite attempt — a renewed effort to restore a Stuart king to the throne, this time in place of George II (who had succeeded his father George I). Charles Edward Stuart, popularly remembered as Bonnie Prince Charlie and a grandson of James II, landed in Scotland and raised an army drawn from the clansmen of the Scottish Highlands. Charles had some early successes, but in 1746 he was decisively defeated by George II's forces at the Battle of Culloden. Charles escaped back to Europe.

The long-term effect of Culloden on Highland society was dramatic. The clans lost a great deal of their old political power and influence. Chieftains who retained favour with the English crown were effectively converted into landlords, while the clansmen they had traditionally led were in turn turned into rent-paying tenants on the land they worked.

The transition eventually hardened into what became known as the 'Highland Clearances'. Many Scottish landlords dismantled individual small farms — crofts — on their estates to create space for large-scale sheep and cattle farming. Evictions became widespread in the early 19th century. Substantial numbers of displaced Scottish families emigrated to North America in this period.

Robert Burns (1759–96), known in Scotland as 'The Bard', was the country's defining poet of the age. Burns wrote in three registers — the Scots language, English with a sprinkling of Scottish words, and standard English — and he also extensively reworked traditional folk songs by altering or adding lyrics. His single most enduring piece is probably the song Auld Lang Syne, which is sung around the world (and particularly in the UK) at New Year — the Scottish celebration of Hogmanay.

The 18th century saw a rapid flowering of new ideas across politics, philosophy and science — the period commonly called 'the Enlightenment'. An unusually large share of the era's most important thinkers were Scottish. Adam Smith produced work on economics that remains influential today; David Hume's analyses of human nature are still argued about by philosophers; and scientific developments such as James Watt's advances in steam power directly fed into the Industrial Revolution that was beginning to reshape Britain. One of the most important of the Enlightenment's operating principles was that every individual should have the right to hold and to act on their own political and religious beliefs, and that the state should not seek to dictate those beliefs. This principle continues to underpin British public life today.

Ripening wheat, Moss, South Yorkshire · N Chadwick (Geograph Britain and Ireland), 2022. CC-BY-SA-2.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Prior to the 18th century, agriculture was overwhelmingly the largest single source of employment in Britain. Alongside farm work, much manufacturing took place in the form of 'cottage industries' — in which individuals and families worked from their own homes to produce goods such as cloth and lace for sale.

Coalbrookdale by Night (Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1801) · Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801, Science Museum London. Public domain (PDM 1.0). Wikimedia Commons.

The Industrial Revolution describes the rapid development of modern industry in Britain across the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain was the first country in the world to industrialise at national scale. The process was driven by two linked developments: the invention and refinement of power machinery, and the widespread adoption of steam power to drive it. Both agriculture and the manufacture of consumer goods were progressively mechanised, improving productivity and expanding output. The new factories required coal and other raw materials in large quantities to keep them running, and a very large rural population migrated to work in the new mining and manufacturing trades.

Alongside textiles and power machinery, the development of the Bessemer process for the mass production of steel enabled two further transformative industries — large-scale shipbuilding, and the railways. Across the decades of industrialisation, manufacturing overtook agriculture as the primary source of paid employment in Britain.

Richard Arkwright (1732–92) originally trained and worked as a barber, with a sideline in wig-making and hair dyeing. When wigs went out of fashion he redirected his energies to the textile trade. Arkwright improved the existing carding machine — carding being the preparatory process of combing raw fibres so they can be spun into yarn — and went on to develop horse-driven spinning mills organised around a single central machine. The combination sharply increased the efficiency of textile production. Later he adopted steam engines to power the same machinery. Arkwright is particularly remembered not so much for any one invention as for the efficient, profitable, and tightly-organised way in which he ran his integrated factory operations.

Industrialisation required better transport infrastructure to move raw materials into factories and finished goods out of them. A national network of canals was built during this period to link factories in the new industrial regions — particularly in the middle and north of England — to the towns, cities and ports.

Working conditions in the new factories were, by modern standards, very poor. There was little or no regulatory protection for employees; hours were long, and the work was often dangerous. Children also worked in factories, on much the same terms as adult workers — sometimes on worse ones.

Overseas, this was also a period of rapid colonial expansion. Captain James Cook charted the coast of Australia and a small number of British colonies were established there. Britain took control of Canada, and the East India Company — originally a trading operation — progressively took over direct control of much of the Indian subcontinent. Colonies were also established in southern Africa.

British trade now extended around the world, and imports rose sharply. Sugar and tobacco arrived in Britain from North America and the West Indies; textiles, tea and spices came in from India and from the region we now call Indonesia. Overseas trading and settlement also frequently brought Britain into direct conflict with France, which was expanding along broadly similar lines into many of the same parts of the world.

Sake Dean Mahomet (1759–1851) was born in the Bengal region of India and served in the Bengal army before coming to Britain in 1782. He subsequently moved to Ireland, where he eloped in 1786 with an Irish woman named Jane Daly, and returned to England around the turn of the century. In 1810 he opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in George Street, London — the first curry house in Britain. Mahomet and his wife also introduced the UK to 'shampooing' — the Indian practice of therapeutic head massage.

A significant part of Britain's commercial growth and accumulated prosperity in this period was built on the slave trade. Slavery itself was illegal within Britain, but by the 18th century it had become a fully developed overseas industry — one dominated jointly by Britain and the American colonies. Slaves were taken overwhelmingly from West Africa, shipped across the Atlantic in brutal conditions on British vessels, and forced to work on tobacco and sugar plantations in North America and the Caribbean. Conditions of both life and labour for enslaved people were extremely poor. Many tried to escape; others mounted direct revolts against their owners in protest.

A domestic British opposition to the slave trade gathered strength nonetheless. The first formal anti-slavery groups in Britain were organised by the Quakers in the late 1700s and submitted petitions to Parliament calling for the trade to be banned. William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian and a sitting MP, played a particularly prominent role in shifting both public opinion and the parliamentary arithmetic. In 1807, together with other abolitionists, he succeeded in getting Parliament to make it illegal to trade slaves on British ships or out of British ports. Full abolition across the whole of the British Empire followed in 1833 with the Emancipation Act. The Royal Navy subsequently intercepted slave ships of other nations, freed the slaves carried on them, and punished the slave traders. After 1833, roughly 2 million Indian and Chinese labourers were brought into colonial workforces across the Empire to replace the labour previously extracted from enslaved people — working on Caribbean sugar plantations, in South African mines, on East African railways, and in the army in Kenya.

By the 1760s Britain had established substantial colonial populations in North America. The colonies were wealthy and, by colonial standards, unusually self-governing in practice. Many of the original colonist families had gone to America in the 17th century explicitly in order to secure religious freedom, and the colonial population was on the whole well educated and increasingly attracted to ideas about political liberty. When the British government sought to increase the tax revenue it raised from the colonies, the colonists saw the move as an attack on their established freedoms and responded with the slogan 'no taxation without representation' in the British Parliament. Parliament made efforts to compromise by repealing some of the new taxes, but the relationship between Westminster and the colonies continued to deteriorate. Armed clashes between colonists and British soldiers followed. In 1776 thirteen of the American colonies formally declared their independence, asserting a right of the people to establish governments of their own choosing. The colonists ultimately defeated the British army, and Britain formally recognised American independence in 1783.

Through much of the 18th century, Britain fought a recurring series of wars against France. When in 1789 a revolution broke out in France, the new revolutionary French government quickly declared war on Britain. Napoleon, who rose to take the title of Emperor of France, prosecuted that war against Britain across the next two decades. Britain's navy engaged combined French and Spanish fleets at sea and famously defeated them at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The British fleet at Trafalgar was commanded by Admiral Nelson, who was himself killed in the battle. Nelson is commemorated in Trafalgar Square in London by Nelson's Column, and his flagship — HMS Victory — is preserved and can still be visited in Portsmouth. The British army was also engaged against France on land. The Napoleonic Wars came to an end in 1815 with the defeat of Napoleon by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. Wellington — nicknamed 'the Iron Duke' — subsequently entered politics and in time became Prime Minister.

Ireland had shared a monarch with England and Wales since the reign of Henry VIII, but it had remained constitutionally a separate kingdom. That arrangement ended with the Act of Union of 1800, which took effect in 1801 and formally united Ireland politically with England, Scotland and Wales. The new entity was named the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The symbolic expression of the union was a new official flag — the Union Flag, widely referred to as the Union Jack — which combined the crosses associated with the three individual nations of England, Scotland and Ireland. The flag is still in use today as the official flag of the UK.

The Union Flag is built up from three saints' crosses:

Wales has its own separate official flag featuring the Welsh dragon. The Welsh dragon is not included in the Union Flag because, at the time the first version of the Union Flag was drawn up in 1606 — combining the flags of Scotland and England — Wales was already constitutionally united with England and therefore had no separate standing to add.

Coronation portrait of Queen Victoria (George Hayter, 1838) · George Hayter (1792–1871), Coronation Portrait of Queen Victoria, 1838. Public domain (PD-Art). Wikimedia Commons.

Queen Victoria came to the throne of the UK in 1837 at the age of 18, and her reign continued until 1901 — a span of almost 64 years. At the time the present chapter's source material was compiled (2013), that was the longest reign of any British monarch (a record since surpassed by Queen Elizabeth II). The period as a whole is usually referred to as the Victorian Age. It was marked by a substantial increase in British power and influence abroad. At home, the middle classes grew steadily in economic and political weight, and a broad group of reformers worked to improve the living conditions of the poor.

The Victorian Age saw the British Empire expand to cover the whole of India, the whole of Australia, and large parts of Africa. At its peak it was the largest empire the world has ever seen, with an estimated population of over 400 million people under British rule.

The era was marked by substantial population movement in both directions. People were widely encouraged to leave the UK to settle in the colonies and dominions overseas: between 1853 and 1913 as many as 13 million British citizens left the country to build lives abroad. Migration into Britain continued in parallel. Between 1870 and 1914 roughly 120,000 Russian and Polish Jews came to Britain specifically to escape persecution at home; many settled in London's East End and in Manchester and Leeds. Substantial numbers of people from around the Empire — including from India and various parts of Africa — also came to Britain during this period to live, to work and to study.

Victorian Britain remained a major international trading nation. The government of the day moved steadily towards 'free trade', repealing a range of taxes that had previously applied to imported goods. A particularly high-profile example was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 — the laws had kept out cheap foreign grain, and the repeal opened up cheaper grain imports. These reforms supported British industry in general, because manufacturers could now source their raw materials more cheaply.

Working conditions in factories, although still bad by modern standards, also began gradually to improve. In 1847 Parliament introduced a statutory 10-hour cap on the daily working hours of women and children in factories. Better housing, too, began to be built specifically for working-class tenants.

Transport infrastructure improved in parallel, which in turn enabled faster and cheaper movement of goods and people across the country. Just before Queen Victoria came to the throne, the engineer George Stephenson and his son Robert had pioneered the steam railway engine; the Victorian decades saw a huge nationwide expansion of Britain's railway system. Railways were also extended throughout the Empire. Civil engineering more generally produced spectacular bridge and tunnel projects in this era, associated above all with the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59) was originally from Portsmouth, in the south of England. He worked as an engineer across a remarkable range of projects — tunnels, bridges, railway lines and ships. He was the driving engineering figure behind the construction of the Great Western Railway, the first major main-line railway in Britain, running from Paddington Station in London down through the south west of England, across to the West Midlands and on into Wales. A number of Brunel's bridges remain in active use today.

British industry led the world during the 19th century. Between them, the UK's factories and foundries produced more than half of the world's iron, more than half of its coal, and more than half of its cotton cloth. The UK also became a major centre for financial services, in particular insurance and banking. In 1851 the Great Exhibition was held in the specially constructed Crystal Palace in Hyde Park — a vast steel-and-glass pavilion. Exhibits ranged from enormous industrial machines to delicate handmade goods. Countries from all over the world displayed their wares, but the majority of the exhibits on display had been made in Britain.

Between 1853 and 1856 Britain fought, in alliance with Turkey and France, against Russia in what became known as the Crimean War. The conflict was the first war to be extensively reported in the media of the time — through war correspondence in newspapers and through early war photography. Conditions in the field were poor, and a striking proportion of British military deaths were caused by diseases contracted in field hospitals rather than by wounds taken in battle. It was during this war that Queen Victoria introduced the Victoria Cross, the UK's highest medal for acts of bravery by soldiers.

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) was born in Italy to English parents. At the age of 31 she trained as a nurse in Germany, and in 1854 she travelled to Turkey, where she worked in military hospitals with British soldiers wounded in the Crimean War. Nightingale and her team of nurses dramatically improved hospital sanitation and working conditions and drove down the mortality rate among their patients. In 1860 she founded the Nightingale Training School for Nurses at St Thomas' Hospital in London — the first formal nursing school of its kind in the world. The school exists to this day, and so do many of the clinical practices Nightingale instituted. She is widely regarded as the founder of modern nursing.

Conditions of life in 19th-century Ireland were, overall, markedly worse than in the rest of the UK. Two thirds of the Irish population still depended on farming for their livelihood, typically on extremely small holdings, and a very large share of the population relied on the potato as the staple of their daily diet. When the potato crop failed in the middle of the century, the consequence was a catastrophic famine. About one million people died of starvation or of associated disease, and a further million and a half emigrated from Ireland — some to the United States and others across the Irish Sea to England. By 1861, sizeable Irish communities had established themselves in Liverpool, London, Manchester and Glasgow.

The Irish Nationalist political movement grew steadily in strength through the 19th century. Within that movement there were two broad strands: some, such as the Fenians, advocated complete independence from Britain. Others, such as Charles Stuart Parnell, argued for 'Home Rule' — a settlement under which Ireland would remain within the United Kingdom but would gain its own separate parliament.

As the new middle classes grew in economic weight in Victorian industrial towns and cities, they began to press for a commensurate share of political power. The Reform Act of 1832 was the first major response: it significantly expanded the voting franchise, and at the same time abolished the old pocket and rotten boroughs, transferring parliamentary seats to the growing industrial towns and cities. The 1832 Act produced a permanent shift of political power away from the countryside and towards urban Britain, but voting rights continued to be tied to the ownership of property — which meant that the emerging industrial working class still had no vote.

Soon afterwards a further movement emerged, specifically demanding the vote for working-class men and for other people without property. These Chartist campaigners submitted mass petitions to Parliament. Their campaigns appeared at first to achieve little, but in 1867 Parliament passed a second Reform Act, which created many more urban seats and lowered the property qualification required to vote. The majority of men, however, still lacked the franchise, and no women could yet vote.

As the electorate expanded, politicians realised that they would now need to reach out to ordinary voters if they wanted to be sure of being elected. The political parties developed their own outreach organisations accordingly. Universal suffrage — the right of every adult, male or female, to vote — followed in the early decades of the 20th century.

British women in the 19th century had, in common with women across Europe, significantly fewer legal rights than men. Until 1870, a married woman's earnings, property and money all passed automatically into her husband's legal control. Acts of Parliament in 1870 and 1882 partially corrected this: married women were given the right to keep their own earnings and their own property. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an increasing number of British women organised and demonstrated for greater civil rights, and above all for the right to vote on the same terms as men. The organised women's suffrage movement took shape, and the most visible campaigners became known collectively as 'suffragettes'.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) was born in Manchester. In 1889 she founded the Women's Franchise League, which campaigned specifically to secure the vote in local elections for married women. In 1903 she was a co-founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) — the first organisation whose members were commonly called 'suffragettes'. The WSPU's campaigns increasingly incorporated civil disobedience: members chained themselves to railings, broke windows and set fires. Many suffragettes, Emmeline among them, went on hunger strike when imprisoned. In 1918 women over the age of 30 were at last granted voting rights and the right to stand as candidates for Parliament, partly in recognition of the substantial contribution women had made to the UK war effort during the First World War. Shortly before Emmeline Pankhurst's own death in 1928, women were finally given the right to vote at the age of 21 — the same voting age as men.

Although the British Empire continued to grow in extent until the 1920s, the late 19th century was also a period of increasingly open public debate about the Empire's long-term future. Supporters of continued expansion argued that the Empire brought the country clear benefits through increased trade and commerce. Critics took the opposite view: that the Empire had become over-stretched, and that recurring conflicts in parts of it — on the north-west frontier of India, or in southern Africa, for example — represented a steady drain on British resources. Notwithstanding those debates, most of the British public of the time continued to believe in the Empire as a force for good in the world.

The Boer War of 1899 to 1902 brought the arguments about the Empire's future to a sharper pitch. Britain went to war in South Africa against settlers of Dutch origin known as the Boers. The Boers fought very effectively, and the war ran on for over three years. Large numbers died in the fighting, and still larger numbers from disease. There was visible public sympathy for the Boer side within Britain, and people began openly to question whether the Empire could or should continue to expand. As the separate parts of the Empire developed politically, most of them progressively gained greater freedom and autonomy from Britain itself. By the second half of the 20th century the process had played out, for the most part in an orderly way: Empire gave way to Commonwealth, and individual member countries were granted their independence.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in India and over his lifetime lived in India, in the UK, and in the USA. He wrote books and poems set in both India and the UK. Much of his work reflected, and promoted, the view that the British Empire was a force for good. Kipling received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. His best-known books include the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book, both of which remain popular today, and his poem If has repeatedly been voted one of the UK's favourite poems. It begins:

'If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too; / If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, / Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, / Or being hated, don't give way to hating, / And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise' (If, Rudyard Kipling)

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