How did the rural economy change between 1780 and 1850?

Between 1780 and 1850, economic change had far-reaching effects on British society. From being an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural society, Britain was transformed into a manufacturing and urban society. This chapter examines how and why this process occurred, its effects on rural and urban society and the ways in which working people responded to these changes.

In what ways did farming change between 1780 and 1850 and why? How ‘revolutionary’ was this? Change in farming took place far more slowly than in the dynamic manufacturing industries. Output increased by less than fifty per cent between 1700 and 1800 compared to nearly two hundred per cent in industry and commerce. However, the most significant advance was not in yield per acre but the amount of land under cultivation by about half. Total corn output rose from 15 million quarters in 1750 to 19 million by 1800 and 25 million in 1820. By 1800, the number of sheep reached 26 million and cattle num­bers stood at 4 million. There were, however, imports of grain and cattle from Europe. The achievement appears even more moderate when it is remembered that the major part of the increase in grain output was the result of the expansion of cultivated.

 

Changes in farming techniques.

Increased productivity in farming was the result of a combination of improved techniques of farming (many of which predated 1780), mechanisation (though its impact can be overstated) and the enclosure of large areas of land.

New crops

The most important change in agriculture lay in improved techniques of farming: the introduction of new crops, greater attention to soil fertility, and improved livestock breeding. The impact of new fodder crops was widely felt.[1] They had been introduced from the Low Countries in the mid-seventeenth century and were widespread by the 1750s. Their impact was of major importance. They allowed large waste areas to be brought into cultivation.[2] These included extensive areas of light soil on scarp land England that had previously been used only as sheep runs but also the areas, which had previously been left fallow. New rotations were introduced and spread throughout the eighteenth century. The most famous was the four courses of wheat, turnips, barley and clover introduced in Norfolk in the late-seventeenth century. A second consequence of the new crops was that they underlay the increase in livestock production in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries by providing winter-feed.

Improving soil fertility

A variety of other methods was used to improve fertility. The supply of manure remained of critical importance in maintaining the fertility of the soil. Until 1850, the main source of manure was animal dung hence the importance of new root crops and legumes which made it possible to keep more animals. Dung was also brought in from outside and farmers within reach relied heavily on ‘town muck’.[3] They also made use of industrial waste materials--coal ashes, soot, waste bark from tanneries, bones, pulverised slag from ironworks, and marl and lime. Guano, the dried droppings of seabirds, began to be imported in 1835 but quantities remained small until the 1840s. ‘Artificial’ fertilizers were introduced on a commercial scale in the 1840s.

Drainage was not a new problem in 1780. Some surface drainage was achieved by the ridges and furrows created during ploughing. The importance of effective under-drainage was not recognised until the mid-eighteenth century. Joseph Elkington had proposed the making of borings to enable water to pass through the impervious stratum to a porous one in 1764 and James Smith used shallow drains in the 1820s. However, it was not until the appearance of a tile-making machine invented by Thomas Scraggs and mole or drainage ploughs in the 1840s that the clay lands were brought into more productive farming.[4]

Improved livestock breeding

Livestock breeding improved considerably during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Robert Bakewell emerged as Britain’s foremost livestock expert by the 1770s but he extended the work of earlier breeders. His work was built on by the Culleys, the Collings and Jonas Webb. Bakewell’s pre-eminence rested with his improved longhorn cattle and the ‘New Leicester’ sheep. Though both his sheep and cattle had defects--his longhorns were wanting in milk and fertility and his sheep fattened too quickly--he did succeed in producing animals ready speedily for the market.

Better machinery

Advances in stock, drainage, fertilizers and crops emphasised the need for improved farm tools and machinery. Before 1800, changes in implements, other than ploughs, proceeded slowly. Mass-produced tools originated in the 1780s and by the 1840s, Robert Ransome of Ipswich was producing as many as eighty-six different designs of ploughs to suit local needs. From 1786, Andrew Meikle’s threshing machine began to be adopted and horse-drawn reapers appeared in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Mechanisation in farming was primarily a mid-nineteenth-century devel­opment. The threshing machine was first adopted in Scotland and by 1815 was common both there and in northeast England. However, it was not general in the south or in Wales until after 1850. Seed-drills were increasingly advertised in newspaper after 1820. Reapers and mowing machines did not appear until the 1850s and only became common after 1870. In 1850, most of British corn was still cut and threshed by hand. The unreliability of the early machines partly accounted for this. Far more important was the cost of labour. In the north, where labour costs were higher because of competition from non-agricultural employment, the early adoption of powered threshing was economic. It was more sluggish in the south where cheap labour was plentiful.[5] Some farmers kept the old methods to provide a major source of winter employment in order to prevent throwing their regular men on to the parish.[6]

The spread of new farming techniques altered the pattern of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century agriculture. Until the 1820s, arable prosperity shifted away from the heavy clay vales to the lighter chalk land, soils. Many were close enough to London to profit from the overall rise in grain prices after 1780. Change occurred more quickly on the lighter soils, more slowly on the heavy clay soils which suffered from a shorter growing season and a higher risk of harvest failure. Impor­tant though these changes were their impact would have been lessened after 1780, without the changes in the organisation of farming.

 

Enclosure

Enclosure did more than any other development to alter the face of the countryside.[7] By 1780, large areas of Britain had already been enclosed or had never known open field cultivation. It was important in improving the efficiency and flexibility of the open fields and in bringing into fuller use wastelands, marshes, heaths and hill grazing. Enclosure led villages to improve their road system, dig drainage channels, rebuild farmhouses, barns and byres and plant new hedgerows to provide windbreaks and shelter for stock.

Enclosure between 1750 and 1850 was largely as the result of parliamen­tary acts and fell into two phases. Thirty-eight per cent of all acts were concentrated between 1750 and 1780, with 630 acts in the 1770s. The second phase of activity occurred between 1790 and the mid-1830s, though 43 per cent of all acts were passed during the French wars. The first phase was concentrated on the heavier-soiled counties of Midland clay belts, the lighter clays of much of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The second phase completed this process but included the lighter soils of East Anglia, Lincolnshire and the East Riding, marginal soils of the Pennine uplands and heaths of Surrey, Berkshire and Middlesex.

Many contemporaries were certain about increased productivity achieved in terms of both improved output and rent. Ten per cent increases in grain output occurred in Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire when enclosed fields were compared with open ones and improvements of 25 per cent may well have been possible. For the landlord enclosure was a good investment. Rents were increased by 15 and 20 per cent but this was both a cause and a consequence of enclosure. From the 1770s until the end of the French wars, prices rose. This too helped landowners, who often relied on fixed rents for income, to enclose and renegotiate leases with tenants who benefited from rising prices.

There was a significant rise in prices from the 1750s to the inflationary prices during the French wars. This coincided with the growth of parliamentary enclosure. Rising wheat prices are attractive in explaining who large areas of commons and waste were enclosed after 1793 even though much of this was poor in quality and capable of only low yields. Relatively stable interest rates in the 1760s and 1770s coincided with the growth of enclosure while the higher rates during the American war of the late 1770s and early 1780s saw a significant decline. During the French wars, high interest rates and large numbers of enclosures coexisted. However, the level of prices was higher than the interest rates and in real terms, money was ‘cheaper’. Farmers could borrow money to enclose their land knowing that high wheat prices would enable them to repay their loans and still make a good profit.

After 1780, population growth increased the demand for agricultural prod­ucts. Price levels moved ahead more rapidly than in industry. These encouraged farmers to invest in change. British farming was highly capitalised by 1800. High-intensity arable farming was situated near the main centres of population in the band from Lancashire to London. Lower levels of investment occurred on the upland fringes where stockbreeding dominated. Rising population increased the supply of labour. In 1801, 3.3 million people or 36 per cent of the population of England and Wales were involved in agriculture, forestry and fishing. This represented an increase of about eight per cent since 1750 compared to the seventy per cent increase in total population. Although there were only slightly more people working in farming they were feeding more people. One person in 1750 fed 1.7 persons; by 1800, it was 2.5 people. The percentage of the total population employed in farming fell relative to other industries after 1800, but people employed continued to rise until 1850. Farming remained a labour-intensive industry with no dramatic breakthrough in mechanis­ation.

A chronology of change

 

Between 1750 and 1790, there was a gradual but consistent increase in all food prices paralleled by gradual but accelerating enclosure. Wheat increasingly became the staple grain food--89 per cent of Londoners were on a wheat diet by 1764. Potatoes were increasing important helping to explain demographic growth in Ireland and parts of Scotland. Homegrown food supplies were sufficient until the 1770s but after that, substantial imports were necessary. Corn prices began to rise faster than other prices and faster than wages. This stimulated further agricultural change.

Years of shortage, amounting between 1795 and 1800, in 1808 and 1812 to ‘famine’, became more frequent. Local shortages and food riots were often caused by failure to distrib­ute supplies effectively. Increased demand was met largely by increased productivity. Grain output rose at the same rate as population: 14 per cent between 1793 and 1815. This was achieved by extending of the land under cultivation and the use of new crops and new breeds of livestock. The major problem facing farmers in this period was labour costs. The extent to which enclosure and new techniques required more labour is debatable but in some areas labour shortages pushed up costs further. Many farmers were forced to rely on casual workers. Yet, this did not lead to widespread mechanisation. Between 1790 and 1815, British agriculture increased its productivity by only 0.2 per cent per year. This compares adversely with the 0.3 per cent per year achieved between 1816 and 1846, a period regarded as one of ‘depression’.

Prices fell dramatically after 1814 and thousands were demobilised or released from war industries. The severity of distress was greatest on the clay land arable farms and least in dairy and stock-rearing districts or in areas like Kent where hops and fruit were important crops. Depression was closely linked to the flexibility of the land under cultivation. Farmers sought legislative support in the form of protection or reductions in taxes. The Corn Law of 1815 was the result. However, by the 1830s many farmers were adjusting their costs to lower prices or moving across to mixed farming. The social cost of ‘depression’ was most severe in areas with falling agricultural wages. Tariffs did little to protect arable farmers and provoked a violent reaction that the Anti-Corn Law League built on the 1830s and 1840s.

By the mid-1830s, British farming had got through its ‘depression’. The introduction of inexpensive drainage techniques liberated the clay lands from high production costs. Farming generally became more ‘scientific’, producing higher output at lower cost. From the mid-1840s until the 1870s, agricultural production rose at 0.5 per cent per year. There was a more intensive application of the techniques of mixed farming on the light soils of southern and eastern England and on the Lothian area of southeast Scotland. There was some shift on the clay soils, especially those in the north and west of England, to beef and dairy production. Railways reduced transport costs--cheap food had become both an economic and a political necessity. British farming was more productive in 1850 than it had been in 1780.[8]

The end of the French wars in 1815 saw up to a quarter of a million men demobilised. They had to be absorbed back into the labour force at a time when both farming and industry faced depression. This caused considerable distress in rural England where there was a surplus of workers. Farmers needed to reduce their costs (at a time of falling wheat prices) to repay loans they had taken out during the war when prices were higher. Rural wages fell.

Why were there so many problems in the countryside?

Agricultural labourers were rarely at the centre of protest in the eighteenth century but this situation changed after 1780. Why did this change occur and why were the protests of farm workers largely confined to southern and eastern England? The agricultural revolution, especially enclosure, upset traditional rural society. There was a decline in hiring farm servants and ‘living in’ disappeared. Labourers were paid by the day or week and were employed for short periods for harvesting, hedging, ditching and threshing.[9] There was little guarantee of work. The social and financial gulf between farmer and labourer widened.

There was growing rural poverty in southern England. In 1795, Berkshire magistrates introduced a system of relief to supplement the wages of labourers. Similar schemes were introduced across southern England. This was known as the ‘Speenhamland system’.[10] The name gave the schemes a sense of uniformity that in practice they did not possess. Its attempt to redress low wages became part of the framework of labourers’ lives instead of a safety net in hard times. The system encouraged low pay and did not fully make up the difference between high prices and low wages. Wartime farming transformed much of southern and east­ern England into a region dominated by wheat production. Boom con­ditions ended abruptly in 1815, grain prices slumped while rents, fixed during wartime inflation, did not. Farmers were faced with falling profits and sought to reduce costs by cutting wages, quite possible in a labour market saturated by the demobilisation of the armed forces, or by introducing economies that technological innovations like the threshing machine offered.

The 1816 riots

Industrial workers, townsmen, cottagers and agricultural labour­ers were linked together in 1816 in ways not repeated in 1822 or 1830. There were three main types of protest. There were incidents in some market towns, a continuation of the tradition of food riots and collective action by textile workers. Agricultural labourers took little part in these. On the loam and clay lands of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, there were protests over the use of the mole plough and threshing machines and demands for a subsistence wage. The third series of disturbances was in the Fens, centred on Littleport and Ely. The diversity of rioters--one in three arrested was not an agricultural labourer and one in seven had some land--reflected the impact of enclosure and drainage and the particular effect of depression. The authorities at local level had limited resources at their dis­posal to stop riots spreading and, especially in the Fens, there were too few gentry to act collectively. Magistrates made concessions to stop the protest but the dramatic breakdown of law and order could not be tolerated by central government. Sidmouth ordered the military to be sent to Norfolk and Suffolk, not just in the Fens. Magistrates who had made concessions were overruled and harsh sentences were passed. Five rioters were executed and this, as much as anything, ensured that rioting spread no further.

Disturbances in 1822

Protest occurred in three areas in Norfolk in late February and early March 1822. All three involved the destruction of threshing machines and in contrast to 1816, these attacks were not simply symbolic, drawing atten­tion to the plight of the labourer, but were a campaign to sweep the machines away. Local magistrates acted quickly to prevent widespread disturbances and the use of the military drove the rioters underground.

The Swing riots of 1830

The problem of pauperism was worst in south of a line from Norfolk to Gloucestershire. In these so-called ‘Swing’ counties, enclosure had taken place on a grand scale. In the 1820s, high poor rates led to increasing attempts to cut relief. Between 1815 and 1820, Poor Law spending was 12/10d per head; by 1830, it was 9/9d. Reductions were made by stopping people asking for relief. This created a hatred of the Poor Law but it is noticeable that between 1824 and 1830, rural crime rates increased by 30 per cent--mainly poaching and food thefts. Pauperism, desperation and discontent were almost universal in agricultural areas.

The Swing riots[11] lasted from August until well into December 1830 and took several forms. In some areas, there were demands for higher wages; in others, tithes were the issue; Poor Law officials and workhouses were attacked but the destruction of threshing machines was most widespread. The major difference between protests in 1816 and 1822 and those in 1830 was their scale. Although the ‘Swing’ riots are normally associated with southern and eastern England with over 3,000 incidents, workers across the North responded to the political and social unrest in 1830 and over 50 incidents of actions against farmers, whether threatening letters, machine-breaking or arson occurred in northern England between 1830 and 1834. Why was there such a widespread mobilisation of agricultural labourers in 1830? The aims of the rioters were remarkably similar throughout the ‘Swing’ counties. Men demanded a minimum wage, the end of rural unemployment and tithe and rent reductions. Farmers supported the labourers in the two latter demands.

The leaders of the riots were often craftsmen and the led were predominantly labourers, often paupers on poor relief. Rioters were usually young men, many of them married. Their concern was for a living wage. The riots began slowly and initially machine breakers were given lenient sentences. This was interpreted by many labourers as tacit approval of their actions and led to protests gathering momentum. Revolution in France in July gave rural protest a more threatening dimen­sion than in either 1816 or 1822. The Whig government made suppressing the disturbances its first priority on achieving power in mid-November. Concerted local action, especially by the gentry of Wiltshire and Hampshire, the use of troops and unwillingness of Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, to tolerate weakness or compromise on the part of local magistrates gradually restored order.

 

After Swing

Swing did not destroy the willingness of agricultural labourers across the country to protest. There was widespread, if unsuccessful, rural action against the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1835, rural trade unionism in the south-east and at Tolpuddle and protests in the form of arson. Labourers were experts in slacking in undetectable ways. More seriously, they could steal their employers’ corn, fruit and game despite the severity of sentence if caught; transportation to Australia was widely used. Sheep and horse stealing were capital offences until 1831 and arson remained so until 1837. Poaching was endemic in rural areas. Stacks could be fired, farm buildings lit, fences pulled down, animals maimed and drainage channels breached though the systematic nature of these actions died down after the 1840s. Rural protest after 1790 can be explained by the failure to understand the nature of change by both labourers and their employers. Change imperfectly understood aroused fear. This was made worse by ‘want’ and ‘distress’ and under- or unemployment.

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[1] Fodder crops were used to feed animals in the winter.[2] Large areas of England consisted of wasteland. This land had previously not been cultivated because it would have been unprofitable to do so. The new crops ended this practice. They had the same effect on leaving land fallow for a year to restore its fertility.[3] ‘Town muck’, the product of the swelling urban population, was either given to farmers willing to take it away or sold by people who collected urban sewage: a further example of recycling waste products.[4] Britain’s soils can be divided into three broad types: sandy, chalk and clay. In the late eighteenth century, sandy soil was the easiest to cultivate because it was generally fertile and porous. Chalk soils were less fertile than sandy soils. Clay soil was very fertile but suffered from major drainage problems.[5] Winter employment was often provided by farmers for their regular workforce especially in southern England. This helped keep the parish poor rate at a lower level but also reflected the widespread belief that farmers had a paternal responsibility for their ‘men’. The same responsibility, however, was not applied to casual workers and there was chronic under-employment in rural England especially after 1815.[6] In 1851, James Caird, in his study of British farming, divided the country into high and low wage areas. In northern and parts of central England, where industrialisation was widespread, farm labourers’ wages were high. In southern England, where there was no alternative and attractive employment available supply exceeded demand and wages were significantly lower.[7] Enclosure was achieved either by agreement between the local landowners or, increasingly, by getting Parliament to pass an enclosure act.[8] Historians disagree about the impact of enclosure on rural labour. Some argue that farmers who had enclosed their land needed fewer workers. Others suggest that during and immediately after enclosure more workers were needed. In the longer term, the combination of enclosure and mechanisation led to a reduction in the agricultural workforce.[9] It had been customary for farm workers to be hired for a year receiving food, clothes, board and a small annual wage in return for work, only living out when they wished to marry.[10] The Speenhamland system was named after the village of Speen, near Newbury where the Berkshire magistrates met in May 1795.[11] The Swing riots were called after their assumed leader, Captain Swing. There is no evidence that the riots were coordinated in this way.

What was the nature and extent of change?

The view that the industrial revolution represented a dramatic watershed between an old and a new world has recently been questioned by historians. Growth was considerably slower and longer than previously believed. Few historians would go as far as Jonathan Clark, ‘England was not revolutionised; and it was not revolutionised by industry’. Recent research suggests that change in the economy was two-dimensional. There were dynamic industries like cotton and iron where change occurred relatively quickly and that may be called ‘revolutionary’. In other industries, change took place far more slowly. Between 1750 and 1850, the British economy experienced rapid, and by international standards, pronounced structural change. The proportion of the labour force employed in industry (extractive, manufacturing and service) increased while the proportion employed in farming fell.

Much employment in industry continued to be small-scale, handicraft activities producing for local markets. These trades were largely unaffected by mechanisation and experienced little or no increase in output per worker. Increased productivity was achieved by employing more labour. The experience of cotton textiles, though dynamic and of high profile was not typical and there was no general triumph of steam power or the factory system in the early nineteenth century. Nor was economic growth raised spectacularly by a few inventions. The overall pace of economic growth was modest. There was no great leap forward for the economy as a whole, despite the experiences of specific industries. By 1850, Britain was ‘the workshop of the world’. Productivity in a few industries did enable Britain to sell around half of all world trade in manufacture. This, however, needs to be seen in the context of the characteristics of industrialisation. The ‘industrial revolution’ involved getting more workers into the industrial and manufacturing sectors rather than achieving higher output once they were there. The cotton and iron industries existed with other industries characterised by low productivity, low pay and low levels of exports.

Inventions and mechanisation

Between 1760 and 1800, there was a significant increase in the number of patents giving exclusive rights to inventors, what the historian T.S. Ashton called ‘a wave of gadgets swept over Britain’. Certain key technical developments pre-dated 1760. Coke smelting was developed by Abraham Darby in Shropshire in 1708-1709 but it was not until the 1750s that it was widely used. Thomas Newcomen’s steam-atmospheric engine was developed between 1709 and 1712 but its cost and inefficiency meant that it too was not widely used until mid-century. James Kay developed the ‘flying shuttle’ in 1733 increasing the productivity of weavers but it was thirty years before advances were made in spinning. Registering patents was expensive and some inventions were not patented as a result. Samuel Crompton, for instance, did not register his spinning mule. Many of the patents covered processes and products that were of little economic importance, including medical and consumer goods as well as industrial technologies. Some patents represented technological breakthroughs while others improved existing technologies. Although figures should be used with care, between 1700 and 1760, 379 patents were awarded. In the 1760s, there were 205, the 1770s, 294, the 1780s, 477 and the 1790s, 647 with growing awareness of obtaining patents and the danger of failing to do so.

Despite these reservations, there were important groupings of technological advances after 1760. In the textile industries, there were advances in spinning thread (James Hargreaves’ ‘jenny’ 1764, Richard Arkwright’s water frame 1769 and Samuel Crompton’s ‘mule’ 1779), weaving (Edmund Cartwright’s power loom 1785) and finishing (mechanised printing by Thomas Bell in 1783). James Kay’s ‘flying shuttle’ had speeded up the process of weaving producing a shortage of hand-spun thread. The mechanisation of spinning after 1764 reversed this situation. The new jennies allowed one worker to spin at least eight and eventually eighty times the amount of thread previously produced by a single spinner. Improvements by Arkwright and especially Crompton further increased productivity. The problem was now weaving. The power loom did not initially resolve the problem and the decades between 1780 and 1810 were ones of considerable prosperity for handloom weavers.

Although the introduction of new machines for textile production, especially cotton occurred over a short timescale, their widespread use was delayed until the 1820s. There were three main reasons for this. The new technologies were costly and often unreliable and modifications were necessary before their full economic benefits were realised. It was not until the early 1820s that the power loom was improved and the self-acting mule was introduced. There was also worker resistance to the introduction of the new technologies and some employers continued to use handworkers because they were cheaper than new machines. This was particularly evident in the Yorkshire woollen industry that lagged behind cotton in applying new technology. Finally, the original spinning jennies were small enough to be used in the home but Arkwright’s water frame was too large for domestic use and needed purpose-built spinning mills. These early factories used waterpower though increasingly steam engines were used. By 1800, a quarter of all cotton yarn was spun by steam. It was not until after 1815 that factories combined powered spinning and weaving. By 1850, some factories employed large numbers of workers, but many remained small. In Lancashire in the 1840s, the average firm employed 260 people and a quarter employed fewer than a 100. The mechanisation of the textile industry was a process of technological evolution rather than an immediate revolutionary process.

This was even more the case in the iron industry. In 1700, charcoal was used to smelt iron but it was expensive and Britain increasingly relied on European imports. Although Abraham Darby perfected coke smelting in 1709 it was fifty years before coke-smelted iron posed a major threat to charcoal. It was not until demand for iron rose rapidly after 1750 that coke became the fuel for smelting. The stimulus for expansion in iron making came from the wars with France and the American colonies in the 1750s and 1770s and especially between 1793 and 1815. This led technological change. Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling process of 1782 was of comparable importance to Darby’s earlier discovery. The new technologies led to a four-fold growth of pig iron between 1788 and 1806, a significant reduction in costs and virtually put an end to expensive imports. The ‘hot-blast’ of 1828 further reduced costs. Rising demand for iron stimulated developments in the coal industry. Here the major technological developments were led by the need to mine coal from deeper pits. Pumping engines, first Newcomen’s and then Watt’s helped in this process. Sir Humphrey Davy’s safety lamp improved safety underground from inflammable methane gas (or ‘firedamp’) though mining remained a dangerous occupation. Increases in productivity were, however, largely the consequence of employing more miners.

Contemporaries emphasised the importance of the steam engine to the industrial revolution though this has been played down by recent writers. Wind and water remained important as sources of mechanical energy. Windmills were used for grinding corn, land-drainage and some industrial processes. Waterpower was far more important and remained so until the mid-nineteenth century. Before 1800, most textile mills were water powered and in 1830, 2,230 mills used waterpower as against 3,000 using steam. Metalwork, mining, papermaking and pottery continued to use waterpower. The development of steam power in the eighteenth century was gradual. Newcomen developed his engine in 1712. It was largely used for pumping water out of mines and though costly and inefficient was in widespread use by 1760. Watt trebled the efficiency of the Newcomen engine by adding a separate condenser in the mid-1760s. This made steam engine more cost-effective but they could still only be used for tasks involving pumping or vertical motion. The breakthrough came in 1782 with the development of ‘sun and planet’ gearing that enabled steam engines to generate rotary motion and power the new technologies in textiles. By 1800, about a fifth of all mechanical energy in Britain was produced by steam engines. Steam power was a highly versatile form of energy and its impact on British industry was profound. It allowed industry to move into towns often on or near to coalfields where it could be supplied by canals. Though older means of generating energy remained important, the application of steam power to mining, iron-making, the railways and especially the booming cotton industry meant that by 1850 it was the dominant form of energy.

How important was technical advance to the industrial revolution? Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations published in 1776 seemed unaware that he was living in a period of technical change and mechanisation. For him, economic growth was achieved through the organisational principle of division of labour rather than the application of new technologies. Others followed Smith in assigning less importance to technical change that historians subsequently did. The effect of technological change was neither immediate nor widespread until after 1800. Cotton and iron set the pace of change but other industries, like glass and paper-making, shipbuilding and food-processing were also undergoing organisational and technological change. Change varied across industries and regions. Steam power did not replace waterpower at a stroke. Work organisation and the uses of newer technologies varied and in 1850 factories coexisted with domestic production, artisan workshops and large-scale mining and metal-producing organisations. Both revolutionary technologies and traditional techniques remained important to Britain’s economic development

Geographical diversity and urbanisation

 

The pace of economic change and its geographical distribution after 1780 was uneven. Dynamic growth took place in specialised economic regions. Cotton was largely based in south Lancashire and parts of the joining counties of Derbyshire and Cheshire. Wool was dominant in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Iron dominated the economies of Shropshire and South Wales. Staffordshire was internationally renowned for its pottery. Birmingham and Warwickshire specialised in metal-working. Tyneside was more diverse with interests in coal, glass, iron and salt. London with its huge population and sophisticated manufacturing and service sectors--docks, warehouses, engineering, shipbuilding, silk weaving, luxury trades, the machinery of government and the law, publishing and printing, financial centre and entertainment--was also an economic region. De-industrialisation was also regional in character. After 1780, the West Country and East Anglia textile industries declined. The iron industry disappeared from the Weald in Kent and the Cumberland coalfield declined.

Regional growth or decline depended on a range of factors. Growth depended largely on access to waterpower as an energy source or as a means of processing, easy access to coal and other raw materials, and an ample labour force. In 1780, regions and their industries retained their rural character in varying degrees. Increasingly, however, industrial growth took on an urban character and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rapid expansion of towns that specialised in various industries. Around each of these urban centres clustered smaller towns and industrial villages whose artisan outworkers specialised in particular tasks. Walsall in the Black Country, for instance, specialised in buckle-making; Coventry in ribbon production; tobacco boxes at Willenhall. The concentration of specialised commercial and manufacturing industries, especially skilled labour, in and around towns was a major advantage for entrepreneurs and businessmen. They were helped by the expanding communication network of roads and canal and after 1830, railways that provided cheap supplies of raw materials and fuel as well as helping distribute finished products.

Economic change and population growth led to the rapid expansion of urban centres. Towns, especially those in the forefront of manufacturing innovation, attracted rural workers hoping for better wages. They saw towns as places free from the paternalism of the rural environment and flocked there in their thousands. For some migration brought wealth and security. For the majority life in towns was little different, and in environmental terms probably worse, from life in the country. They had exchanged rural slums for urban ones and exploitation by the landowner for exploitation by the factory master. Between 1780 and 1811, the urban component of England’s population rose from a quarter to a third. This process continued throughout the century and by 1850, the rural-urban split was about even. The number of towns in England and Wales with 2,500 inhabitants increased from 104 in 1750 to 188 by 1800 and to over 220 by 1851. England was the most urbanised country in the world and the rate of urban growth had not peaked. London, with its one million inhabitants in 1801, was the largest city in Europe. The dramatic growth of the northern and Midland industrial towns after 1770 was caused largely by migration because of industry’s voracious demand for labour. Regions where population growth was not accompanied by industrialisation or where deindustrialisation took place found their local economies under considerable pressure. Surplus labour led to falling wages and growing problems of poverty.

Economic growth and rates of development

What was ‘economic growth’ in the late-eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries and what were its major characteristics? The main indicator of long-term growth is the income the country receives from goods and services or gross domestic product (GDP). During the eighteenth century, GDP grew slightly from just under one per cent per year to just over it. Between 1800 and 1850, growth remained at over two per cent per year. Growth in GDP depends on three things: an increase in labour, an increase in capital investment and an increase in productivity. Growing population accounted for the increase in labour after 1780. Labour grew at around one per cent per year between 1780 and 1800 and 1.4 per cent for the next fifty years. Increased capital investment is also evident after 1780. Between 1780 and 1800, capital investment rose by 1.2 per cent per year. This rose slightly to 1.4 per cent between 1800 and 1830 and, largely because of investment in railways rose to 2.0 per cent between 1830 and 1850. Increasing productivity is more difficult to estimate.

The debate about economic growth and rates of development is largely statistical. Historians face major problems in trying to work out precisely what rates of development were in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Statistical information is far from reliable. This has led to major discrepancies in modern estimates. For instance, the production of coal in the late-eighteenth century is estimated to have grown annually at 0.64 per cent or alternatively at 1.13 per cent, twice that speed. The statistics also show only part of the picture and it is very difficult to extrapolate from specific data on specific industries to the economy as a whole. Total figures also blur the important differences between the experience of different industries and regions. It was not until the development of the railways after 1830 that the notion of a British economy, as opposed to localised economies had real meaning.

 

Conclusions

Historians face significant problems in examining the industrial revolution. There is the problem of what precisely the ‘industrial revolution’ was. In addition, its national nature has been questioned. How far was there a British industrial revolution or was economic change essentially local or regional? There is also the question of timing. When did the revolution begin? When did it end? Finally, historians increasingly recognise the diversity of economic experiences and the existence of both change and continuity of experience in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century? The ‘industrial revolution’ is increasingly seen as a metaphor for the changes that took place in the British economy between 1780 and 1850. While it would be perverse to refrain from using a term ‘hallowed by usage’, it is important to recognise that change occurred slowly in most industries and rapidly in a handful.

Contemporaries were aware that they were living through a period of change. Robert Southey wrote in 1807, ‘no kingdom ever experienced so great a change in so short a course of years’. Population growth, economic and social change, technological advances, changes in the organisation of work, the dynamism of cotton and iron as well as urbanisation were bunched in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth. This was revolutionary change. However, change was itself a process that extended across the eighteenth century. The revolution in the economy did not begin in 1780 nor was it entirely completed by 1850.

The First Industrial Nation

In the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain underwent what historians have called an ‘industrial revolution’ with factories pouring out goods, chimneys polluting the air, escalating exports and productivity spiralling upwards. This was an epic drama, of Telford, the Stephensons and the Darbys, Macadam, Brunel and Wedgwood, a revolution not simply of inventions and economic growth but of the spirit of enterprise within an unbridled market economy. This is, however, misleading. Industrial change was not something that occurred simply after 1780 but took place throughout the eighteenth century. There was substantial growth in a whole range of traditional industries as well as in the obviously ‘revolutionary’ cases of textiles, iron and coal. Technical change was not necessarily mechanisation but the wider use of hand working and the division of labour. Changes were the result of the conjunction of old and new processes. Steam power did not replace waterpower at a stroke. Work organisation varied: the ‘dark satanic mills’ were not all conquering. In 1850, factories coexisted with domestic production, artisan workshops, large-scale mining, and metal production. Change also varied across industries and regions.[1]

 

 

How did industrialisation occur in Britain 1780-1850?

 

Why did economic change occur in Britain between 1780 and 1850? Answering this question usually focuses on why industries like cotton, iron and coal expanded and what influence the spread of steam power had. These areas were important but undue emphasis on them neglects the broader economic experiences of Britain. Similarly, the question ‘Why did the industrial revolution take place in Britain rather than France or Germany?’ misses the crucial point that economic change did not occur in Britain as a whole. Growth was regional and industrialisation took place in particular locations like Lancashire, the Central Lowlands of Scotland and South Wales and around Belfast. Explaining the industrial revolution is a very difficult undertaking since economic change had an effect, however small, on all aspects of society. Some circumstances that were present in Britain made change possible and, in that sense, can be said to be causal. Others held back progress but change occurred despite them.

 

Population

 

If it is possible to identify a single cause for the industrial revolution, then a strong case can be made for population increase. Between 1780 and 1850, the population of England and Wales increased from over seven to nearly eighteen million. This led to mounting demand for goods like food and housing. Nevertheless, the increase in demand for other goods--more manufactured goods or more efficient means of communication--did not necessarily follow from population expansion. The problem is one of timing. When did population growth occur? When did economic growth occur? Did they correspond? Although historians broadly accept population growth from the mid-eighteenth century, they do not agree when the economy began to grow.

 

If population growth stimulated demand, you would expect economic and population growth to coincide. However, they did not. Accelerated economic growth was concentrated in the last quarter of the eighteenth century while the maximum rate of population growth on mainland Britain was not achieved until after 1810. Population began to expand after 1750 and some historians argue that this provided the final ingredient necessary to trigger off industrialisation. Berg and Craft have shown that the origins of higher growth rates went back to the early decades of the century. In this scenario, population growth came after the beginnings of economic growth.

 

The impact of population growth causes problems for historians who argue for economic growth from the 1780s and those who see growth as something that began earlier in the century. It had favourable effects on economic growth in three important respects. Population growth provided Britain with an abundant and cheap supply of labour. Population growth also stimulated investment in industry and agriculture by its effects on demand for goods and services. Urbanisation made it profitable to create or improve services.[2] For instance, the building of the canal from the Bridgewater coalmines at Worsley to Manchester took advantage of the growing demand for domestic coal. The role of population growth in the origins of Britain’s industrial revolution was far from straightforward. Population growth in mainland Britain stimulated an already growing economy. However, in Ireland population growth in the eighteenth century was followed by stagnation in the first half of the nineteenth century and by famine.

Investment

 

Britain was a relatively wealthy country in the mid-eighteenth century with a well-established system of banking. This enabled people to build up savings and provided them with capital to invest. Between 1750 and 1770, there was growing investment in roads, canals, and buildings and in enclosing land. This process continued after 1780 through to the 1850s with continued investment in transport and enclosure and in the expansion of the textile and iron industries, and after 1830 in the development of railways.

 

The annual rate of domestic investment rose from about £13 million in the 1780s to over £40 million by the 1830s. The ratio of gross investment to the gross national product rose from 6 per cent in the 1770s to 12 per cent by the 1790s at which level, it remained until 1850. Widespread capital investment was largely confined to a small, though important part of the economy. Capital investment rose in farming, communications and textiles, especially cotton and in iron and steel. Other areas of the economy were often undercapitalised relative to these industries.

 

Capital investment in farming was largely on enclosures, drainage and buildings. Landowners ploughed back about 6 per cent of their total income into the land. This rose to about 16 per cent during the French wars when high wheat prices encouraged investment in enclosure. Investment fell back after 1815 with the onset of depression and did not revive until the 1840s. In the 1780s, a third of investment was in farming. By 1850, this had fallen to an eighth. By contrast, there was a rapid growth of investment in industry and communications. Annual investment in industry and trade rose from £2 million in the 1780s to £17 million by 1850. Between 1780 and 1830, there was an annual investment of £1.5 million on canals and roads and for the improvement of docks and harbours. These figures were dwarfed by investment in railways that peaked at £15 million per year in the 1840s, some 28 per cent of all investment. The increase in the availability of capital to invest allowed economic growth to occur.

 

 

Trade

 

Britain was already a well-established trading nation. Colonies were important sources of raw materials as well as markets for manufactured goods. London was a major centre for the re-export trade. The slave trade played a major role in the development of Liverpool and Bristol and its profits provided an important source of capital for early industrialisation. By the 1780s, the export trade was expanding annually by 2.6 per cent. Cotton production depended on international trade and was responsible for half the increase in the value of exports between 1780 and 1830, for just over half Britain’s exports by 1830 and three-quarters of all exports were associated with textiles. This represented a narrow trading base and helps to explain why the British economy underwent depression in the 1830s and early 1840s. British factories were over-producing for European and global markets already saturated with textile goods. The result was some changes in the goods exported with iron exports growing from 6 per cent in the 1810s to 20 per cent by 1850 and the growing importance of coal exports. In the 1780s, Europe was a major market for British goods and this remained the case in 1850.

 

However, there were important changes in the destination of British goods. The United States increasingly became a focus for exports of manufactured goods and for raw cotton. This process was helped by the opening up of the Latin American markets in the early nineteenth century. India was a huge market for cotton goods. Similar possibilities exited in the Middle East and South America. Britain increasingly shifted trade towards less developed economies that provided growing imports of tropical products to Britain and other industrialised countries like Germany and France. Overseas trade has been highlighted by some historians as a primary cause of economic growth. The growth of export industries at a faster rate than other industries was closely linked to foreign trade.

To what extent was the growth in trade between 1780 and 1850 central to Britain’s economic development? It stimulated a domestic demand for the products of British industry. International trade gave access to raw materials that both widened the range and cheapened the products of British industries. It provided purchasing power for countries to buy British goods since trade is a two-way process. Profits from trade were used to finance industrial expansion and agricultural improvement. It was a major cause of the growth of large towns and industrial centres. The role of British trade must, however, be put into perspective. Changes in the pattern of British trade between 1780 and 1850--the export or re-export of manufactured goods in return for imports of foodstuffs and raw materials--were relatively small and the industrial developments from the 1780s consolidated already existing trends. Exports may have helped textiles and iron to expand but they made little impact on the unmodernised, traditional manufacturing sectors.

 

 

Transport

 

By 1750, Britain was already a highly mobile society. Travel may have been slow and, on occasions dangerous but it was not uncommon. Within a hundred years, the British landscape was scarred by canals and railways and traversed by improved roads and the movement of goods and people quickened dramatically. Turnpike roads and the emergence of a sophisticated coaching industry, canals with their barges carrying the raw materials and manufactured goods of the industrial revolution, new harbours and the railways were symbolic of ‘progress’ as much as factories and enclosed fields.

 

Britain’s road system in the mid-eighteenth century was extensive but under-funded.[3] Just over £1 million was spent annually but this was insufficient to maintain the road system necessary to growing trade and manufactures. Turnpike roads, the first was established in 1663, grew slowly in the first half of the eighteenth century. An average of eight were established each year. From the 1750s, this went up to about forty a year and from the 1790s, to nearly sixty. By the mid-1830s, there were 1,116 turnpike trusts in England and Wales managing slightly more than a sixth of all roads, some 22,000 miles. Parallel to this, there were improvements in the quality of road building associated particularly with Thomas Telford and John Loudon Macadam. What contribution did turnpike and parish roads make to improved communication in Britain between 1780 and 1850? Spending on parish roads did not increase markedly though there was a significant growth in spending by turnpike trusts. This reached a peak of £1.5 million per year in the 1820s. The problem was that improvements to the road system were patchy and dependent on private initiatives. Despite this, there were significant reductions in journey times between the main centres of population. In the 1780s, it took ten days to travel from London to Edinburgh; by the 1830s, 45 hours. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of passengers carried by a rapidly expanding coaching industry. The road system transported all kinds of industrial material and manufactured goods. There was a significant growth of carrier firms after 1780. In London, for instance, there were 353 firms in 1790 but 735 in the mid-1820s and a five-fold increase in the number of carriers in Birmingham between 1790 and 1830. These firms were, however, unable to compete with the canals or the railways and concentrated on providing short distance carriage of goods from canals and railway stations to local communities.

 

The major problem facing early industrialists was the cost of carrying heavy, bulky goods like coal or iron ore. The solution was to use water, rivers, coastal transport and from the 1760s, canals. The first phase of canal development took place in the 1760s and early 1770s beginning with the construction of the Bridgewater canal. The second phase, in the 1790s, has rightly been called ‘canal mania’ with the completion of several important canals and the setting-up of fifty-one new schemes. By 1820, the canal network was largely completed linking all the major centres of industrial production and population.

 

Canals dramatically enhanced the efficiency of the whole economy by making a cheap system of transport available for goods and passengers. The price of raw materials like coal, timber, iron, wood and cotton tumbled. The needs of farming, whether for manure or for access to markets for grain, cheese and butter, were easily satisfied where farmers had access to canals. Canals were a means of overcoming the fuel crisis that threatened to limit industrial growth by making cheap, abundant coal supplies available. The building of canals created massive employment and spending power at a time when growing industries were looking for mass markets. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of canals to Britain’s industrial development between 1780 and 1830.

 

From 1830, railways were the epoch-making transport innovation. Between 1830 and 1850, 7,000 miles of track was laid with railway ‘manias’ in the 1830s and between 1844 and 1847 when investment was at its peak. Their economic importance lay in their ability to handle both major types of traffic--people and goods--that no other single mode of transport had previously been able. They offered lower costs and greater speed attracting passengers, mail and high-value goods. Mail went to new railways within six months and coaches running in direct competition lost out. However, canals were able, by cutting their rates and improving their services, to continue to carry goods for several years. In 1840, the volume of traffic carried by canal from Liverpool to Manchester was more than twice that carried by railway. The Victorians had no hesitation in assuming a direct link between railways and economic growth though historians are today far less convinced. There was increased demand for coal and iron. In the 1840s, 30 per cent of brick production went into railways and between 1830 and 1845, some 740 million bricks were used in railway construction. Towns grew up round established engineering centres at Swindon, Crewe, Rugby and Doncaster. Food could be transported more cheaply and arrived fresher. There is, however, no doubting their social and cultural impact of railways. This is clearly supported by the statistics. 64,000 passengers were in 1843 but 174,000 in 1848 with an increase in the third-class element from 19,000 to 86,000 in the same period.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 reinforced this increased mobility of population.

 

Between 1780 and 1850, great output was achieved by the transport industry, as in manufacturing industry, by applying a rapidly increasing labour force to existing modes of production as well as using new techniques and applying steam-driven machinery. Historians have emphasised the importance of canals and railways that respectively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in reducing transport costs. However, coastal and river traffic and carriage of goods and people by road remained important and the horse was the main means of transport well beyond 1850.

 

 

Social factors

 

British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was profoundly conservative. How was a society with highly traditional structures able to generate changes in so many areas of economic life? By 1780, British society was capitalist in character and organisation. Its aristocracy was remarkably ‘open’, allowing the newly rich and talented to ‘climb’. The most successful merchants, professional and businessmen in each generation were funnelled off into landed society. Success brought wealth and the ultimate proof of success in business was the ability to leave it. In France, where social climbing was discouraged there was political and social discontent and ultimately political revolution. In Britain, where social climbing was not obstructed, there was an industrial revolution.

 

Britain was already a highly market-oriented society. Imports, whether smuggled or not, were quickly moved to market. Domestic goods, both agricultural and manufactured, were bought and sold directly at the network of markets or through middlemen, who acted as a channel between producer and consumer. Until 1830, the key to economic growth was growing home demand for consumer goods. Growing consumption influenced trade and economic growth. Possessing and using domestic goods enhanced social status or displayed social rank. Lower food prices after 1780 may well have stimulated a consumer boom: people had more disposable income. There was a dramatic increase in the number of permanent shops in major urban centres and many of the characteristics of modern advertising emerged with circulars, showrooms and elaborate window displays. Changing patterns of consumption created an environment in which manufacturers could exploit known and growing demand.

 

Finally, entrepreneurial skill and ‘enterprise’ played a major role in the development of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century economy. British society did not prevent entrepreneurs from using their talents and motivation. Entrepreneurs organised production, brought together capital (their own or others’) and labour and selected the geographical site for operations, the technologies to be used, bargained for raw materials and found markets for their products. They often combined the roles of financiers, capitalists, work managers, merchants and salesmen. Three main explanations for the place of entrepreneurs in leading economic change have been identified by historians. There was a change in the ways people viewed social status from one where it was the result of birth to one where it related to what individuals achieved. Status was based on what you did, not who you were. This was a reflection of the openness and mobility of British society. Nonconformity seems to have been a crucial experience for many of the first-generation entrepreneurs encouraging a set of values outwardly favourable to economic enterprise. Entrepreneurs were able effectively to exploit advances in technology and industrial organisation. Most entrepreneurs were not pioneers of major innovations or inventions but realised how best to utilise them. James Watt would not have been successful but for the entrepreneurial skills of Matthew Boulton. This allowed them to manufacture and market goods effectively within a highly competitive consumer society.

 

Conclusions

 

There was no blueprint for the ‘industrial revolution’. Population growth stimulated demand that entrepreneurs were able to satisfy. Developments in transport led to reductions in the cost of production making manufactured goods cheaper. Investment in industry often brought good returns. The state made little attempt to control growth. Foreign trade brought raw materials and profits that could be invested in enterprise. The social structure was adaptable and relatively flexible. Each of these factors helped create an environment in which change could occur.

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[1] Historians disagree on a number of issues concerning the industrial revolution. It is, however, increasingly clear that the traditional view of the revolution as dynamic and relatively short-lived provides an incomplete picture. We have to consider change ‘in slow motion’ as well.

[2] There were 800 market towns in England and Wales in the 1780s. This reflected the intensity of production and the ability of particular areas to specialise in particular products. These products were then moved to markets across the country often using the turnpike roads. In 1767, 16,000 sheep and 14,000 cattle passed through the Birdlip Hill Turnpike in Gloucester en route from south Wales to London. Imports of coal into London from the north-east rose from one million to three million tons per year between 1720 and 1790.

[3] From the 1550s, the parish had responsibility for maintaining roads. This may have been adequate for dealing with local roads but the major or trunk roads not maintained very well. Local people thought that the people who used these roads should pay for their upkeep. The result was the development of turnpike roads, financed by private turnpike trusts, which people were charged a toll to use.

How did Palmerston secure British interests 1830-1841?

Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, became the Whig Foreign Secretary in late 1830. Born in 1784, Palmerston ­entered Parliament in 1807. In 1809, he became Secretary at War, without a seat in the cabinet. He remained at the War Office until 1828. He was generally regarded as hard-working and competent but in the late 1820s seemed destined to be only a minor political figure.

 

Canning brought Palmerston into the Cabinet in April 1827 but his unexpected death in August 1827 led to political disarray. Canningites led by Huskisson and Palmerston remained in office under Goderich and continued under Wellington until May 1828. The five months the Canningites were in Wellington’s Cabinet frustrated Palmerston and, freed from the constraints of office, he vigorously attacked government policy over Greece and Portugal, arguing for an extension of Greek territory and against Wellington’s support for the absolutist Miguel. His speech of 1 June 1829 was a comprehensive denunciation of foreign policy on both these issues, in which he presented his interpretation of Canningite foreign policy.

 

 

The speech had little impact at the time. Wellington did not take it too seriously. This was not Palmerston’s view and he circulated copies to the press and later provided a version for inclusion in Hansard.[1] Palmerston saw himself as Canning’s true successor but his emphasis was different. Canning was aggressive in his approach but his policies were cautious. Palmerston was more uncompromising arguing for intervention in support of Britain’s vital interests. He gave the foreign policy debate a distinctly ideological slant, insisting that Britain stood for the defence of constitutional rights in other countries and for the extension of ‘liberty and civilisation’. There is little evidence that Palmerston was making a play for the Foreign Office in preference to any other offices. Grey had considered him as Leader of the House of Commons, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary before making him Foreign Secretary.

 

Palmerston did not take a prominent part in the reform debates in the early 1830s. He had reservations about parliamentary reform though he did believe that ‘piecemeal’ reform could prevent revolution. Grey had a major influence on foreign policy between 1830 and 1834 and his support and often-detailed guidance were central to Palmerston’s success. He did not control Palmerston’s actions but a kind of inner cabinet consisting of Grey, Lansdowne, Holland and Palmerston was largely responsible for foreign policy decisions. Certainly, Palmerston did not have the prestige he enjoyed later but even under Melbourne from 1834 to 1841, he was still engaged in trying to balance often-contradictory opinions.

 

In the 1830s, Palmerston was faced with the results of a series of challenges to the Vienna Settlement. The July Revolution of 1830 in France was seen by Palmerston, and ironically by Wellington and Aber­deen as a limited political revolution, which the Bourbon king had brought upon himself. He also recognised that the new government of Louis Philippe was not aggressive and that the best way of maintaining stability in Europe was to recognise the fait accompli. Revolution had, however spread from France into Belgium, where riots broke out in August.

 

The Belgian problem

 

The decision to unite Belgium and Holland in 1815 under the Dutch House of Orange provided a barrier to French expansion into the Low Countries. The two countries had economies that were complementary and religious and linguistic divisions did not correspond to existing boundaries. However, it proved a difficult union and the Belgians increasingly felt repressed by the Dutch. In early 1830, Wellington had established an ambassadorial conference in London to discuss the problem that Palmerston inherited. The outbreak of revolution in Poland in mid-1830 distracted the eastern powers that would have supported Holland had France intervened and Louis Philippe’s government was too insecure to risk a serious quarrel with Britain.

 

The Belgians drew up a new constitution and in February 1831 elected the Duke of Nemours, the son of Louis Philippe, as their king. Knowing this would prove unacceptable to the other Powers, Louis Philippe vetoed it and Leopold of Saxe-Coburg became Leopold I of the Belgians. William I of Holland accepted Belgian independence in January 1831 but his claims over the Duchy of Luxembourg led to a Dutch invasion in August 1831. Leopold appealed for aid and while the British fleet blockaded the coast, the French army forced the Dutch to withdraw.

 

The great powers agreed as early as January 1831 that Belgium should become an independent state and that they should guarantee its neutrality. The details of the agreement were modified in June and again in October 1831. The terms were acceptable to the Belgians but not to the Dutch. William I, who still controlled Antwerp, stubbornly refused to withdraw and the French intervened again in 1832. Palmerston was prepared to accept limited French military intervention but, he had considerable difficulty in persuading both king and Parliament of the policy, which seemed a complete reversal of the ‘containment’ of France, agreed in 1815. A new armistice was agreed in 1833 but a final settlement was delayed until the Treaty of London of 1839.

 

Revolutions in 1830

 

Revolution also erupted in Poland, Germany and Italy in 1830. Public opinion in Britain was generally on the side of the Poles and radical groups urged Palmerston to act. In practice, there was little that he could do other than stress that as a signatory of the Treaty of Vienna Britain had the right to be consulted before Poland’s status was changed. By 1832 the Poles had lost their independence and became yet another Russian province. Palmerston did little to support liberal groups in Germany and by 1832, the conservative stability had been restored.

He had little success in his policies over Italy. In 1831-1832, there were a number of unsuccessful risings in the Papal States and in Modena and Parma. Anti-papal feeling in Britain ran high and again the radical groups in Parliament urged Palmerston to take action. From the Foreign Office viewpoint, the important thing was to prevent conflict between France, which showed some gestures of support for the rebels, and Austria, which gave military aid to the recently elected conservative Pope, Gregory XVI. Palmerston argued that moderate reform would stave off revolution. The Pope took no notice and absolutism was re-established throughout Italy. War between France and Austria had been averted but the cause of liberalism here, as in Poland and Germany, had been put back.

 

The Iberian Peninsula

 

Palmerston’s reputation was improved by his handling of problems in Portugal and Spain where, as in the Low Countries, Britain had long-established strategic and commercial interests. In Portugal, British support for Maria had collapsed with Canning’s death and by November 1830 Miguel, the conservative claimant was in control of the whole of the country. Maria’s supporters held only Terceira in the Azores. In 1831, the French, with British approval, sent a fleet to Lisbon. This coincided with the French invasion of Belgium and again Palmerston came under attack from the Tory opposition because of his support from France. British opinion was better pleased when he extended his sup­port to Pedro, who abdicated his Brazilian throne to come to the assistance of his daughter. He landed at Oporto in July 1832 and Palmerston made little attempt to stop British volunteers, notably Charles Napier, from enlisting under Pedro. Napier defeated Miguel’s fleet off Cape St Vincent in July 1833 and took possession of Lisbon three weeks later.

 

Spain was also divided between liberals and absolutists in the 1830s. King Ferdinand VII died in September 1833. The succession was disputed between the supporters of his young daughter, Isabella and her mother Christina who had been proclaimed Regent and the supporters of Ferdinand’s younger brother, Carlos, who argued that the Salic Law forbade the accession of women to the throne. Carlos had the support of conservatives and the Catholic Church while Isabella was supported by the liberals. For Palmerston the attitude of Russia, Prussia and Austria was more disturbing. They had signed an agreement at Munchengratz in September 1833 pledging them to uphold conservative causes and one effect of this was that they provided financial assistance to Carlos. In April 1834, Palmerston countered this by establishing the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, France and the queens of Portugal and Spain. This prevented the intervention of the Eastern Powers and established, in an embryonic form, the idea of two balancing power blocs, the absolutist powers of Eastern Europe and the constitutional powers of the West. Despite this, the conflict between Christina and Carlos continued until late 1839. Palmerston’s influence on Spain was less than in Portugal, but in both countries, he had prevented unilateral intervention by France.

 

Palmerston’s actions in his early years as Foreign Secretary were domi­nated by either revolutions that had swept Louis Philippe to power in France and then spread to the Low Countries, to Poland, Germany and Italy or by the conflict between ‘liberals’ and conservatives in the Iberian Peninsula. His degree of success was, however, limited to the western edge of Europe where French military and British naval power and influence could be exerted. In Eastern Europe Palmerston could do little more than protest at the suppression of the Polish Revolt while in Italy, Austria and the Pope were able to restore the status quo. In Belgium alone was a solution found that was completely in line with his plans.

 

The Eastern Question

 

Palmerston, however, took a more decisive stand on the Eastern Question and here his influence on events was undeniable. The basic questions remained as they had done under Castlereagh and Canning: could the Ottoman Empire survive and, if not what would take its place? Palmerston hoped that the Turks would leave Europe. However, he recognised that this would leave a political vacuum that would benefit Russia and, as a result adopted a policy of support for the empire. In the 1830s, the Turks were under serious attack from rebellious Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, who had ruled Egypt since 1805.

 

Mehemet Ali had used his large army on behalf of the Sultan in Greece in the 1820s, aid that would probably have been successful but for the intervention of the great powers. In return for his assistance, the Sultan had promised him Syria and Crete. After the Greek settlement, Mehemet Ali demanded his reward but in view of his limited success, the Sultan refused to give him Syria as well as Crete. In 1831, he invaded Syria and the following year defeated the Turkish army at Koneih. Constantinople was threatened and the Sultan appealed to Britain for assistance. Palmerston would have been willing to provide aid but the Cabinet overruled him. It was the middle in election campaign after the Reform Act and the Whigs were unwilling to accept commitments where British interests were not directly affected. The Cabinet also rejected French offers of joint intervention.

 

In desperation, the Sultan turned to Russia. A Russian naval squadron entered the Bosphorus, the strait separating the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. Mehemet Ali’s forces retreated and with the worried British and French pressing him to compromise, peace was made at Kutahiya in May 1833. This gave the Egyptians what they wanted in Syria. The Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi in July 1833 formalised Russian influence in Constantinople, an agreement that aroused consider­able suspicion in Britain and France. Though it was essentially defensive, there were secret clauses of which the most important was an Ottoman undertaking to close the Dardanelles, the western end of the Bosphorus to foreign warships if Russia requested it. The three Eastern Powers publicly agreed to maintain the integrity of the Sultan’s dominions and in secret clauses to oppose any further advance by Mehemet Ali.

 

Central Asia

 

Russia had established a dominant influence at Constantinople and the revival of the conservative alliance provided sufficient justification for Palmerston’s alarm. Britain was concerned by threats to communications with India. Between 1833 and 1839, Palmerston pursued a policy in Central Asia which aimed at the containment of Russia. In Persia, Britain was concerned to prevent Russia’s advance both on her lines of communication with India and on the frontiers of India itself. In 1809, Britain had secured treaties with Persia, Sind and Afghanistan to hold off the Russian advance but its victories against Persia between 1826 and 1828 upset this arrangement. Russian influence in Teheran was as powerful as in Constantinople further undermining Britain’s previously dominant position in Persia. Both Tories and Whigs were worried by this development. Under Wellington, Grey and Melbourne there was a conscious policy of extending British power into Central Asia to counteract the threat from Russia. As a result, Palmerston gained control of the Khyber Pass linking Afghanistan to India. Palmerston pursued this policy with some vigour, opening up the River Indus to British trade and influence as a counter to Russian advances. Though Britain and Russia cooperated in the Persian succession in 1834, Palmerston remained suspicious of Russian intentions and believed that their representatives were pressing the Shah of Persia to renew his attack on the strategic Afghan fortress of Herat, which he did in July 1837.

 

By 1836, Palmerston wanted to retaliate against Russian policy but the internal chaos in Afghanistan proved a major difficulty. Despite their encouragement of the Persian attack on Herat, the Russians had also gained ascendancy in Kabul, the Afghan capital. British intervention in support of a favourable candidate occurred in 1839 but it proved impossible to maintain this position and in 1841, the British suffered a series of military defeats in the First Afghan war. It was not until late 1842 that Kabul was reoccupied. Britain eventually accepted a compromise that restored the former pro-Russian candidate to power. The events of 1837-1842 demonstrated the extent of the Russian threat in Central Asia and the difficulty of dealing with it diplomatically and militarily. St. Petersburg had little control over the actions of over-zealous agents in Teheran or Kabul. The real aims of Russian expansionism--whether determined from the centre or locally--was contrary to Britain’s quest for security for India.

The Eastern Question revived

 

An uneasy peace prevailed in the Near East until 1839. Neither the Sultan nor Mehemet Ali was content to leave things as they were. The former wanted revenge against an ambitious subject while Mehemet Ali continued to press, if not for complete independence, at least for hereditary possession of Egypt under nominal Ottoman sovereignty. By 1839, the Sultan’s army had been reor­ganised and, recognising that he was a dying man, he invaded to drive the Egyptians out of Syria. Mehemet Ali’s son Ibrahim had little difficulty defeating him and once again, the road to Constantinople lay open. On 1 July 1839, the Sultan died and was succeeded by Abdulmejid I, a sixteen-year-old boy. The Ottoman Empire seemed on the point of total collapse and the great powers were seriously alarmed.

Palmerston was in a difficult position. He recognised that the crisis gave Russia further opportunities to strengthen its position in Constantinople but by 1839, he was more suspicious of France than Russia in the Mediterranean. The agreement reached between Britain and France in the 1834 had gradually been eroded. The French had consolidated their bold over Algeria after 1830 and favoured giving considerable concessions to Mehemet Ali who posed a real threat to British economic and strategic interests. He directly threatened British routes to the River Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, which his forces reached in 1838. At the same time, he was also threatened the Red Sea route to India. To offset this, British forces had occupied the important strategic position of Aden in 1839. The means of defending Britain’s interests in the Near Fast and of resolving the contest for supremacy in Constantinople were not to be found in the Western Alliance.

 

Palmerston attempted to co-ordinate his policy with France, as he had done over Belgium, but during 1839 and early 1840 he moved closer to Russia. Increasing divisions between Britain and France were reinforced by the appointment of Thiers as French Prime Minister in March 1840 and French support for Mehemet Ali now became more open. Palmerston did not hesitate to join with the Eastern Powers and Turkey in an agreement to which France was not a party, the Conventio­n of London, on 15 July 1840. Mebemet Ali was offered the hereditary possession of Egypt and the possession of Syria during his lifetime. He failed to respond in the twenty days given and on 3 November, a British fleet bombarded Acre.

 

Palmerston again found himself in a difficult position. The French, angered by the attack on Acre, increasingly spoke in warlike terms. However, the French cabinet was equally divided between peace and war parties. Though contemporaries criticised Palmerston for his threatening approach to France, Thiers’ policy in Egypt was a direct threat to British interests. Just before the bombardment, Thiers was replaced by Guizot, who was a more pacific individual and had been recalled as French ambassador to London to head the ministry. Instead of ending the crisis without directly involving the French, Palmerston allowed them to re-join the Concert once Mehemet Ali had submitted in early 1841. The agreement of July 1840 was superseded by the Straits Convention of 13 July 1841 that for­bade the passage of foreign warships through the Bosphorus while the Ottoman Empire was at peace and ended the advantages that Russia had gained in 1833. Palmerston regarded his Near East policy as a triumph He had successfully resolved the crisis in conjunction with the Eastern Powers and had not humiliated France by involving her in the 1841 Convention. The Conservatives were willing to back him but his own party and the cabinet was divided. The press was very critical but the Con­servative Lord Aberdeen persuaded The Times to call off its attacks.

 

China and opium

 

The assertiveness Palmerston displayed was not confined to his handling of France in the Near East and Russia in Central Asia. His approach to the Chinese question demonstrated the same approach. Trade with China had always been difficult and was, until the abolition of its monopoly in 1833, under the control of the East India Company. After 1833, the protection of British trade and British citizens fell to the British govern­ment. The result in 1839 was war, though wider issues were involved than opium. Britain was determined to open up the Chinese trade and to compel Peking to adopt normal western diplomatic conventions, but opium smuggling was the flashpoint.

There was a considerable demand for opium in China and the East India Company made good profits by growing it in India and exporting it in return for Chinese merchandise. The Chinese authorities in the 1830s hesitated between banning opium imports or regulating them. In the late 1830s, those calling for a ban won the argument. The authorities in southern China were unable to board British ships to search for opium and placed the small British trading community at Canton under virtual house arrest. They then attacked The Arrow, a British warship and ordered the suspension of all trade with Britain. Banning trade was one thing but the arrest of British citizens and attacks on British shipping another. Palmerston found himself in the position of having to endorse policy being made by British officials in India and China but did so whole-heartedly. The British government in India had already sent naval assistance to Canton, which had little difficulty in defeating the Chinese fleet sent against it.

 

Palmerston’s handling of the Chinese question was criticised by contempor­aries, though given the limited extent to which he determined the policy much of this criticism was partial. Gladstone raised the question of the morality of the opium trade but his attack was exceptional. To Palmerston the issue was not whether Britain could protect opium smugglers; he did not question the Chinese government’s right to ban the trade. The issue was that British interests in the trading community in Canton, not implicated in the opium trade, were under attack. The Chinese maintained that the community to which criminals belonged should be held accountable for their actions and this notion of collective responsibility was alien to the British concept of individual innocence or guilt. Palmerston did not accept that this gave the Chinese the right to interfere with British subjects. The war was still in progress when the Whigs were defeated in the 1841 election but the incoming Conservative government made no significant change in policy. The war continued until the Chinese made concessions in the Treaty of Nanking of 1842. Five treaty ports were opened up to foreign trade, and not merely to the British, though they did get a special grip on China by the annexation of Hong Kong as a Crown Colony.[2]

 

Britain and the United States

 

Britain had several outstanding disputes with the United States of America especially slavery and the slave trade, the Canadian boundary, and the problem of Texas that resulted from the breakup of Spain’s American empire. Britain had declared the slave trade illegal in 1807. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna, under pressure from Castlereagh also outlawed it. Enforcing the ban proved a more intractable problem. Britain had signed a number of ‘right of search’ treaties with the smaller nations of Europe, permitting British ships to arrest slavers flying their flags. Larger nations were more difficult to convince. Palmerston negotiated treaties of this type with France in 1831 and 1833 and in 1838 almost secured the agreement of all the great powers of Europe to one treaty that would have allowed a common right of search over all slavers. French anger at Palmerston’s handling of the Eastern question led them to withhold ratification and the treaty never became as effective intended.

The United States had consistently refused to enter any right of search agreement with Britain. This was partly the result of Britain’s action against American shipping during the Napoleonic War but largely because of the powerful lobby of the slave-owning southern American states. Palmerston accepted that Britain could not in the absence of a treaty, stop and search American shipping but was concerned that slavers of other nations hoisted the American flag to escape capture. He therefore argued for a more limited ‘right of visit’ to check whether a suspected ship was entitled to the flag she was flying. Palmerston inflamed Americans by saying that they would not want slavers to escape simply by hoisting a ‘piece of bunting’.

 

The most likely catalyst for war between Britain and America, however, was the failure to agree the boundary between Canada and the United States west of Rocky Mountains and in the east between the American state of Maine and Canadian New Brunswick. The 1814 Treaty of Ghent had left the matter to be settled by independent arbitration and in 1831, the disputed territory was arbitrarily divided between the two claimants. As settlers entered the disputed areas clashes were inevi­table. In 1837-1838, there were rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada (present-day Ontario and Quebec) caused by local demands for greater political autonomy. This embroiled Britain and America in a series of incidents on the disputed borders. Some Americans ran guns into Canada and the defeated rebels found safe refuge in Maine and Vermont. In the north-east, British and American settlers and trappers clashed violently over the disputed border.

 

A major crisis was initially avoided by the overtures of the American government, despite warlike pressure from British public opinion and by Palmerston’s preoccupation with the Eastern Question. However, in December 1837 a band of Canadian volunteers crossed into American territory and sank the American steamer, the Caroline, which had been involved in gunrunning and killed an American citizen. In November 1840, a Canadian, Alexander McLeod, was arrested and charged with the murder. Palmerston made it clear that he would regard McLeod’s conviction and execution as an occasion for war. Matters were still uncertain when Lord Aberdeen became Foreign Secretary in the new Conservative government in September 1841 but matters calmed after McLeod was acquitted.

 

Palmerston also became involved in the problems of Texas that had broken away from Mexico and formed an independent republic in 1836. The Texans, many of whom were American immigrants, initially sought entry into the American Union. This was refused, largely because of the opposition of the northern states. In 1837, the Texans sent agents to all the leading commercial powers in Europe to obtain commercial treaties and loans. Palmerston recognised the value of an independent Texas since she was a major cotton producer and could free Britain from dependence on Ameri­can cotton. British anti-slavery groups hoped that Texas would abolish slavery in return for commercial concessions. In November 1840 Palmerston signed three treaties with Texas: a commer­cial treaty; a treaty offering British mediation between Texas and Mexico which still claimed jurisdiction over Texas; and a mutual ‘right of search’ treaty.

 

Palmerston 1830-1841: success or failure?

 

His­torians have generally regarded the period between 1830 and 1841 as the most consistently successful period in Palmerston’s career. He believed that bluff was an essential part of diplomacy and perhaps he not only bluffed his contemporaries into believing his successes were greater than they were but also later historians. This period showed Palmerston more as an opportunist than as a man of principle. His pragmatism gave room for manoeuvre but it also meant that he embarked on policies without seeing where they could lead. He desired, like Castlereagh and Canning, peace and stability in Europe and some sort of ‘balance of power’, though this meant different things at different times. His achievements were modest. He did little for Poland, Germany and Italy. His plans in Spain and Portugal were of limited success. He sought to contain Russia in the Near East and Central Asia. His actions against America could have led to war and in China they did. Only in Belgium was he entirely successful.

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[1] Hansard. A written verbatim record of what was said in the two Houses of Parliament

[2] Hong Kong was under British rule from 1841 to 1997 excluding the Japanese occupation of 1941-1945. Although Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to Britain in perpetuity, the New Territories--which made up over 90 per cent of Hong Kong’s land was leased for 99 years in 1898. When the lease expired in 1997, Britain transferred sovereignty of the entirety of Hong Kong to China.

How did Canning secure British interests 1822 -1830?

George Canning had already held the post between 1807 and 1809. Only his unwillingness to serve with Castlereagh prevented his reappointment in July 1812. By 1816, Canning and Castlereagh appeared to have made up their differences, at least outwardly, and Canning joined the cabinet. He had a hand in drafting the 1820 State Paper and accepted it as the basis for his own policies once in office. The real contrast between Castlereagh and Canning was not in policy but in personality and public image. Castlereagh was hesitant and shy, Canning was a speaker with a strong sense of humour. Castlereagh was popular at Court but largely because as Leader of the House of Commons he had had to defend the government’s repressive policies against radicalism, unpopular in the country. Canning was very popular with the public. Castlereagh was cautious and was only pushed into disagreement with Britain’s allies by the pressure of public opinion. Canning was more flamboyant, setting himself vigorously in the van of public opinion and ruthlessly pursuing British interests and gained a reputation as a crusader for liberalism and nationalism. Metternich saw him as the evil genius of revolution, ‘a malevolent meteor, this scourge of the world, a revolution in himself’.

 

 

This contrast exaggerates differences between Castlereagh and Canning. Both were well aware of the limitations of both British interests and power and were pragmatic in their approach. Both sought to pursue Britain’s aims of security, trade and support for liberal causes. The difference between them was over how policy should be put into practice. Castlereagh and Canning represented the alternative approaches that ran through nineteenth century British foreign policy. Castlereagh, Aberdeen and Gladstone sought cooperation with foreign states. Canning, Palmerston and Disraeli were more competitive and belligerent in approach.

 

 

Canning and the Americas

 

Britain feared the extension of the forces of reaction to Portugal and Spanish America where she had important economic interests. Castlereagh had been anxious about this but for Canning, spokesman for Britain^’s commercial interests and MP for Liverpool, it was of central importance. The United States had already recognised the rebel governments in Latin America. Canning moved more cautiously. He was opposed by the king and Wellington but exerted sufficient diplomatic pressure on France to get agreement that its intervention should not be extended to the rebel Spanish colonies. The uneasiness of Anglo-American relations and American suspicions of Canning’s motives led President Monroe to issue his famous message (the Monroe Doctrine) in December 1823 banning European assistance to Spain in her struggle against the rebels and any transfer or extension of European possessions to the New World. Canning’s defence of the rebel colonies and his pose as a true friend of the United States were not very convincing. By mid-1823, he was isolated from the European powers. His attacks on French intervention caused criticism at home and he needed to drum up popular support against opponents in his own party. Support for the rebels had commercial and political advantages for Canning and it was popular outside Parliament. His claim that he had ‘called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old’ must be seen in this domestic context.

 

Canning and Portugal

 

The Royal Navy allowed Britain to intervene in Portugal where revolutionaries and reactionaries were struggling for power. Canning wanted to main­tain the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. He sent the fleet to Lisbon to support King John VI in 1824 and helped to arrange the peaceful separation of Brazil from direct Portuguese rule. King John’s death in 1826 saw the accession of the eight-year-old Donna Maria. Her father Pedro renounced the throne preferring to remain as Emperor of Brazil. This led to a revival of the claims of her uncle Miguel. Spanish interfered in support of Miguel and this led to direct British action. Canning rushed 5,000 troops to Lisbon and threatened Spain with war. This ensured Maria’s succession and the acceptance of the 1826 liberal constitution. British naval power played a major role in the success of Canning’s actions and a naval presence at Lisbon maintained British influence. Events in Portugal and the New World made the weaknesses and strengths of Britain’s position very clear. Naval power let her operate effectively only where water dominated communication.

 

Canning and Greece

 

Canning’s influence on European countries was, by contrast limited. Britain remained isolated as long as the conservative alliance of Russia, Austria and Prussia was united. Disagreement between Austria and Russia over the Greek revolt against the Turks permitted Canning to take a leading role.

Greece was a major problem for Canning. It was in Britain’s interest to prevent Russia becoming a Mediterranean naval power and to secure the stability of the Ottoman Empire, opening it to British trade.[1] The Greek revolt roused mixed feelings in London. Canning agreed with Castlereagh that preserving the Ottoman Empire offered the best hope of stability in the area. There was, however, a great deal of sympathy for the Greeks among the educated classes. Turkey’s refusal to compromise combined with a growth of popular philhellenism[2] in Britain, personified by the poet Lord Byron who died in Greece in 1824, threatened to undermine British policy.

 

Russia was sympathetic to the Greek struggle and had an interest in eroding the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. This broke the conservative alliance with Austria against revolution. Canning recog­nised the Greeks in March 1823. Tsar Alexander tried first to get the British to agree to joint intervention, but by the end of 1824, he abandoned this strategy. The Greeks suffered from Ottoman military victories and in July 1825 appealed for protection and mediation directly to Great Britain. Canning wanted to avoid a Russo-Turkish war and the possibility of Russian territorial expansion. The St. Petersburg Protocol of April 1826 gave him roughly what he wanted. Nicholas I, who had succeeded Tsar Alexander in late 1825, agreed that Greece should become an autonomous state, nominally under the sover­eignty of the Sultan, and that Russia should support Britain’s mediation to achieve this. Austria and Prussia refused to accept this. This was formalised in the Treaty of London in 1827. The Turks, strengthened by further victories over the Greeks, refused the demands of the great powers and British, French and Russian ships were sent to the east Mediterranean. On 20 October 1827, a combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet was annihilated within two hours at Navarino. This was followed by the outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey in April 1828.

 

Canning did not live to see the breakdown of his policy. Navarino changed the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean and outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey marked an end to the policy pursued since 1826. Canning might have been able to limit the effects of this situation but under Wellington, Britain’s Greek policy simply drifted. Domestic issues rather than foreign policy dominated Parliament and Lord Aberdeen, who became Foreign Secretary in June 1828, though sympathetic to Greek demands, believed that a narrowly defined state would limit Russian influence. Russia made small territorial gains from the war with Turkey that ended with the Treaty of Adrianople in September 1829. Greek independence was achieved the following year. Little of the limited success Wellington and Aberdeen had between 1828 and 1830 was the result their efforts. They badly bungled the situation in Portugal by withdrawing the British naval presence and giving the initiative to the reactionaries. They almost destroyed Canning’s achievement in dismantling the con­servative alliance and, over the Greek issue, came close to restoring Britain’s isolation.

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[1] Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks controlled large parts of the Balkans throughout the nineteenth century. The Eastern Question reflected concerns about the future of these Balkan territories. Britain was concerned about Russian expansion into the Balkans and often supported Turkey against Russia aggression.[2] Philhellenism or love of things Greek.

 

 

 

A question of dates!

 

 

There are occasions when doing research that you come across something that you’ve always accepted and then find out you’ve been wrong all the time and, more to the point, so has everyone else.  While working on a chapter on 1848 and Chartism, I checked the reference for:

‘We desire no fraternisation between the Irish people and the Chartists--not on account of the bugbear of physical force, but simply because some of their five points are to us an abomination…’

I wanted to get the correct page reference in the Dublin Weekly Nation for this statement written by John Mitchel, the paper’s editor, and published on 14 August 1847.  I’d always accepted this as the correct date based largely on Dorothy Thompson’s reference to it.  In fact it was published a year earlier on 15 August 1846 in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ section on page 8. In fact, the quotation is cited on three occasions in the Northern Star editorials as its banner: ‘‘The Nation’ and ‘The Charter’’, Northern Star, 19 September 1846, p. 4, ‘‘The Nation’ and ‘The Charter’’, Northern Star, 10 October 1846, p. 4, and ‘‘The Nation’ and ‘The Charter’’, Northern Star, 17 October 1846, p. 4.  So how have so many historians—and there are exceptions such as –got this wrong?

It’s the classic case of an initial source giving a date that is then perpetuated in subsequent work.  As far as I can see the first reference to Mitchel’s comment was in  Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History 1845-1849: A Sequel to ‘Young Ireland’, (Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.), 1883, p. 450 and was, for instance cited as the reference by Christine Kinealy in her Repeal and Revolution: 1848 in Ireland, (Manchester University Press), 2009, p. 125. 

 

Mitchel’s statement was written, according to Charles Gavan Duffy, because he was angered by ‘The Chartists who listened to the egotistical declamation of Mr Feargus O’Connor did not understand the party [Young Ireland]’.  The full statement is as follows:

 

We have received a printed address from the Chartists of England to the Irish people, with a request that we should insert it in THE NATION. ‘We desire no fraternisation between the Irish people and the Chartists--not on account of the bugbear of physical force, but simply because some of their five points are to us an abomination, and the whole spirit and tone of their proceedings, though well enough for England, are so essentially English that their adoption in Ireland would neither be probable not at all desirable.  Between us and them there is a gulf fixed; we desire not to bridge it over, but to make it wider and deeper.

 

As far as I can ascertain, this is a case of ‘false news’.  Having checked the Northern Star for the months before August 1846, I have not come across any ‘printed address from the Chartists of England’ and can only assume that Mitchel concocted the whole thing.  He is not saying anything that was not widely known: Mitchel was opposed to Chartism in Ireland and beyond as he did not see it as offering any relief to Ireland’s problems.  He could have just as easily written this in 1847 as 1846.  It was not until early 1848 that his view changed and he urged the Irish not to reject Chartism…cynical opportunism I suspect as much as a Damascene conversion.

 

Lincolnshire Lives

Having completed eleven volumes in his series of books on Birmingham, Stephen Roberts has now broadened his horizons into Lincolnshire.  I suggested, flippantly, that he call it Lincolnshire Sausages but he wisely settled on Lincolnshire Lives.

The first volume in the new series, written in conjunction with Mark Acton, looks at Charles Seely, a major figure in Lincoln’s economic and political development. 

 

Seely died at his country house on the Isle of Wight on 21 October 1887 at the age of eighty-four, leaving a personal estate valued at almost £500,000 and a real estate reckoned to be worth £2 million. He owned more land on the Isle of Wight than anyone else. He had been a Member of Parliament for Lincoln for a quarter of a century, a Justice of the Peace in three counties and a Deputy Lieutenant for two. As an entrepreneur and local and national politician he exemplified the enterprise of Victorian Britain. Though not of humble origins, he began life in modest circumstances and, as the result of investment in coal mining and land, ended up in possession of great wealth. This the first biography of Charles Seely. It tells a story of upward mobility that is remarkable even by Victorian standards.