BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
Britain über alles
The 19th-century belonged to us, according to David Cannadine’s
ambitious new history. Jane Ridley is mesmerised by itVictorious Century: The United
Kingdom 1800–1906
by David Cannadine
Allen Lane, £30, pp. 555
David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s
Birmingham, which was still recognisable
as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had
known. In the 1960s the town planners
demolished much of Victorian Birming-
ham. The bulldozing of 19th-century cit-
ies coincided with — and helped to cause
— a boom in Victorian history, led by
Asa Briggs. As a postgraduate student at
Cambridge, Cannadine wrote a thesis on
Birmingham’s 19th-century aristocratic
landowners. Since then, there has been a
torrent of academic research on 19th-cen-
tury history, and this has had a ‘deadening
and dampening effect’. The Victorians have
gone out of fashion. Historians have migrat-
ed to the rich pastures of the 18th century
or the newly available archives of the 20th.
So much has been written about 19th-
century Britain that a new interpretation
seems almost impossible. But in this magnif-
icent Penguin history, Cannadine pulls it off.
At first sight the book seems conventional
enough. This is a narrative history. It is also
a political history. As Cannadine explains,
the vital feature of 19th-century Britain
was the extraordinary importance of Par-
liament. Other countries had parliaments,
but none were as enduring or as prestigious
as Westminster.
Most histories of 19th-century Britain
begin in 1815 and end in 1914. Cannadine’s
account, by contrast, starts in 1800 with
the Act of Union with Ireland, which cre-
ated the United Kingdom, and ends with
the Liberal landslide election of 1906; both
dates are landmarks in Britain’s parliamen-
tary history. But this is not a clichéd text-
book story of the triumph of democracy and
reform. Nor is it an insular, inward-look-
ing narrative of Westminster high politics.
There is something else going on here. Can-
nadine begins his history in the middle of
the Napoleonic Wars with France. Through-
out the book the story of Britain’s relations
with Europe and with its expanding empire
is integrated into the narrative of domestic
politics. This is a global history, a spellbind-
ing account of Britain’s rise and fall as a
great power.
Starting the story in 1800 shifts the con-
ventional perspective. The Act of Union
with Ireland, as Cannadine points out, was
an expedient forced upon Prime Minister
Pitt by the war with France. It seemed the
only way to prevent a rebellion in Ireland
or a French invasion. It pleased none of the
Irish. Nor was the Younger Pitt’s strategy
of fighting the French by defeating them
at sea, and financing coalitions of the con-
tinental powers on land, a success. The co-alitions always broke apart and Napoleon’s
domination of the land seemed compre-
hensive. Not until Pitt had fallen did Britain
begin to win.
The Napoleonic War of 1803–14 was the
only major conflict in recent history where
Britain had no strong political leader; mere-
ly a succession of mediocre prime ministers.
These included Spencer Percival, the only
British PM to be assassinated, and the sec-
ond-rate Addington (‘Pitt is to Addington/
As London is to Paddington’) — though
Cannadine reckons that the latter has been
much underestimated. The war was a tri-
umph for Britain’s military-fiscal state. It
was financed by massive borrowing, made
possible by a buoyant wartime economy
and a sophisticated banking system. Mili-
tary success was enabled by the efficiency of
the Whitehall bureaucrats, overseeing ships,
weapons and supplies. For France, by con-
trast, the war was an economic disaster. The
result was that Britain, whose future had
seemed in the balance in 1800, emerged in
1815 as the strongest and richest power in
the world.
The 1830s was the hinge decade. As
every schoolboy used to know (but doesn’tany more), the Whig government under
Lord Grey bowed to the people and pushed
through the Great Reform Bill. This was the
prelude to a decade of reform, of sustained
legislative engagement with contemporary
issues, which was something entirely new.
It marked the end of the old military-fiscal
state and the beginning of the so-called age
of improvement. Overseas, this was a piv-
otal decade too. European peace coupled
with the opening of new markets in China
and Latin America offered unprecedented
opportunities for trade and investment. The
UK was more engaged with the world than
ever before.
In 1848 the historian Macaulay declared
that the history of England was ‘essentially
the history of physical, of moral and of intel-
lectual improvement’. The Great Exhibition
of 1851 was a defining moment, celebrating
Britain’s material progress. But, as Canna-
dine shows — and this is a major theme —
for every Macaulayan self-congratulatory
optimist, there was a doom-laden Matthew
Arnold, wracked with doubt and wringing
his hands. The backwardness of Britain’s
education by comparison with its Europe-
an neighbours was much bemoaned (as it is
today), and so was the rise of overseas com-
petitors.
The most extraordinary part of the story
was not visible to contemporaries. Indus-
trial supremacy gave the United Kingdom
a global hegemony, which was at its zenith
in the 1850s and 1860s, but Britain’s wealth
didn’t translate into military might. At
home, governments came under constant
pressure to reduce defence spending, and
the British army was by far the smallest of
all the European great powers. The price of
parliamentary government was an empire
on a shoestring. It’s a miracle that the Vic-
torians managed to hold on to their empire.
So how did they do it? One way was by
devolving power to white settlement col-
onies, many of which were granted self-
government in the 1850s. The 1857 Indian
Mutiny or Great Rebellion was the most
significant crisis of the 19th-century Brit-
ish empire: the stakes ‘were at least as highAs every schoolboy used to know (but
now doesn’t), Lord Grey bowed to the
people with the Great Reform Bill