as they had been at the Battle of Waterloo’,
says Cannadine, and it too was a close-run
thing. Afterwards, the Brits economised by
ruling India in collaboration with the tradi-
tional elites.
The Second Reform Act of 1867 cre-
ated an electoral system where ‘the Liber-
als would need the votes on the margins to
enable them to dominate England, where-
as the Conservatives would use their pow-
erbase in England to try to dominate the
UK’. This, as Cannadine observes, explains
Gladstone’s preoccupation with Ireland,
which was an attempt to buy Irish votes
and undercut the nationalists by offering
reforms. Gladstone’s attempts to conciliate
Ireland, culminating in his conversion to
Home Rule, failed. Also unsuccessful were
his attempts to repair the weaknesses of
the mid-Victorian state with education bills
and civil-service and military reform. Can-
nadine has little time for Disraeli, though
he gives his government credit for what in
the long run was a truly significant piece
of legislation, though few thought much of
it at the time: the 1867 Canadian Confed-
eration Act, which welded Canada into a
vast, land-based nation bordering America,
effecting a major geopolitical reorientation.
By the 1880s the signs of decline were
clear. Britain still accounted for 23 per cent
of world manufacturing output. But in Ire-
land (and to a lesser extent Scotland and
Wales), nationalists were fighting a land
war and the Union was under strain, while
Germany and the US were powering ahead
of the British economy. During the second
government of the anti-imperial Gladstone,
Britain occupied Egypt, and gained further
African territory at the Congress of Berlin,
but this expansion was defensive and pessi-
mistic. It was soon to lead to imperial over-
stretch, when the British found themselves
in possession of an empire which, even on
shoestring economics, they couldn’t afford.
Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, written at the
time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
in 1897, articulated the mood. ‘Even thoughthe foundations had been in some ways
fragile and fortuitous,’ writes Cannadine,
‘the nineteenth century had “belonged”
to the United Kingdom more than to any
other power, and as it ended there was seri-
ous concern, which turned out to be well-
founded, that the twentieth century would
“belong” elsewhere.’ Britain’s humiliating
performance in the Boer War, when 450,000
imperial troops took three years to subju-
gate 60,000 Boer soldiers, rubbed home its
failings. There followed an episode of self-
doubt and the abandonment of Britain’s
policy of splendid isolation.
This is a thumping great book, and it is
probably destined to become a classic. Can-
nadine writes long sentences and his para-
graphs go on for a page or more, but there is
something hypnotic and compelling about
his majestic delivery. Extraordinarily for a
history book there are no footnotes. Only a
historian at the very top of his game can do
that and get away with it, and Cannadine
succeeds triumphantly.Bristol ablaze: anger at the Lords’ rejection of the Second Reform Bill sparked riots in Queen’s Square, Bristol, October 1831
(William James Muller)BRIDGEMAN IMAGES