To examine the political and social history of the period is, inevitably, to be struck with the complexity of its values and practices, especially within the four nations of the British Isles and within the heavily localized communities in which people lived their lives. With all this in mind, it may help the reader if I identify a number of central themes which give narrative shape and structural cohesion to the long eighteenth century. These themes will be found in particular, relevant places throughout this book. For example, the first theme, the nature of the United Kingdom, is dealt with initially in Chapter 1 (‘Place’), Chapter 2 (‘The Glorious Revolution and the Unity of Britain’), Chapter 4 (‘The Identity of Britain’) and Chapter 11 (‘The United Kingdom’). The second theme, religion, is discussed initially in Chapter 1 (‘Belief’), Chapter 6 (‘A Confessional Regime’) and Chapter 10 (‘The Retreat from the Confessional State’). Each theme may thus be followed at different periods of the long eighteenth century.
The themes with which I shall be concerned in this book are six in number. The first of these is the development of the internal structure of Britain during the long eighteenth century, a period when a United Kingdom of Scotland and England emerged and a sense of British nationhood became a vital historical force. The Glorious Revolution acted as a powerful catalyst in this process, making for the greatest degree of unity and cohesion which these islands had ever known, although it did so with great violence and at the price of creating powerful religious and national resentments. Wales had been peacefully absorbed in the sixteenth century, but the loyalty of Scotland to England was uncertain for at least forty years after the Act of Union of 1707. Ireland, moreover, was a colony suffering military occupation, dominated by English troops and a small number of English native, and largely non-resident, landowners. During the course of the century, these unwilling partners were, to a degree, integrated with England, but in many respects, it was an uneasy and incomplete integration. Those communities furthest from London had not been fully integrated nor even fully Anglicized even by the end of this period.
The second theme of the book is the role of religion in the life of the state and the life of the people. After all, religious divisions had been of vital – indeed, of revolutionary – importance during the seventeenth century. Recent attempts to depict England as a ‘confessional state’, an Anglican state whose essential unifying force was Protestantism, have served the invaluable function of reminding historians that England, to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland, in the eighteenth century, remained a profoundly Christian society – one that rested on a nexus of traditional beliefs and practices. Although there can be no denying the importance of secular forces in this period, especially new developments in thought and science, the new opportunities for leisure and the massive hunger for new consumer commodities, church institutions survived and religion remained a powerful factor in most people’s lives. Complete loss of faith was a rarity. The Church of England was by no means as moribund as used to be thought, Scotland retained her church after the Union of 1707 and Catholicism remained a dominant force in Ireland. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, in fact, a powerful religious revival was under way, manifesting itself, on the one hand, in a number of humanitarian reform movements and, on the other, in the emergence and rapid development of new churches. Obviously, then, religious sectarianism did not disappear during the ‘long eighteenth century’. Although the bitterness of religious divisions was normally controlled and kept in check, such divisions retained their ability to excite people’s passions. On numerous occasions, both locally and nationally, religious excitement broke the surface of politics, most spectacularly during the Gordon Riots in 1780, when anti-Catholic mobs stormed through the streets of London in a riotous binge of arson and violence.
Of comparatively less significance is a third theme with which this book will be concerned, the cohesion of the social order. We do not intend to celebrate, nor indeed, to invent, a ‘social consensus’ in Hanoverian Britain. Indeed, there was always acute tension between the forces of social control and those of social protest. The legacy of the work of Edward Thompson has memorably portrayed the chasmic divisions between the masses and the upper classes, especially during periods of shortage, and the resultant fear and bitterness which existed between them. Thankfully, social divisions in England, at least, were perhaps not quite as severe as those that prevailed in several European countries. In the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century, Britain remained a society of finely graded orders and hierarchies between which a mixture of familiarity, routine cooperation and mutual acceptance enabled a civilized social life to be maintained and acceptable compromises negotiated. Furthermore, some reasonable degree of harmony prevailed between the landed elite and the increasingly wealthy, and numerous, middling orders. This collaboration was to be of the greatest importance, especially in view of the exclusion of so many of the poorer elements in society from the growing affluence of the times and their subsequent social and political alienation. This collaboration, together with the striking ability of the propertied classes, in the end, to maintain the patriotic loyalty of the masses, will be a recurrent theme in this book.
Fourth, and indeed, one of the most widely remarked themes of the long eighteenth century – and one that may go some way, at least, to explaining the third – was the commercial and imperial expansion that contributed so much to the prosperity of British society. Although Britain remained a largely rural country with an agrarian economy, land was not the only source of social and economic power. In this period, Britain steadily became a much more urban, commercial and industrial society. In fact, during the eighteenth century, the wealth of Britain roughly doubled in real terms. The consequence was a growing domestic market that could only be satisfied through commercial expansion both at home and overseas. Britons were island peoples and they were becoming conscious of themselves as a trading nation. They were mobile, expansive and, not least, enthusiastic consumers of foreign as well as domestic products. Consequently, the defence of her empire, her markets and her raw materials constantly engaged British statesmen. Convinced that political and military power depended upon economic power, Britain sought and won an extensive commercial empire against severe international competition. London was the centre of, what became in the eighteenth century, one of the great commercial empires in the history of the world, but provincial cities and ports also made increasingly significant contributions to Britain’s imperial dynamism. It is not too much to claim that the wealth she derived from her commercial and imperial expansion made victory possible in the successive wars in which she was involved after 1688.
The fifth theme of the book follows naturally from the fourth. It addresses the role of Britain in Europe and considers the status of Britain as a European state. In the eighteenth century, the fortunes of Britain were closely bound up with those of her European neighbours. It is scarcely too much to say that the outcomes of the Glorious Revolution, the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and the American War of Independence – to take just three major issues of the period – were determined by the actions of other European states. After a century in which Britain’s role in Europe had been modest and even marginal, Britain became a major European power in the eighteenth century. She was involved in six major European wars during 63 of the 144 years (over 44 per cent) between 1688 and 1832. The consequences of warfare of such frequency were to be considerable, in the end affecting the everyday lives of millions of people. There is, moreover, a further advantage in viewing Britain in her European context. It enables us to establish illuminating comparative views of British society. For example, recent writers, not least Prof. J. C. D. Clark, have treated Britain as an ancien régime society, similar in her aristocratic, monarchical and religious structures to many of her European neighbours. To what extent is this true? Alternatively, was Britain, as the Whig historians used to argue, unique in her political arrangements and in her social and economic circu
mstances? In dealing with such issues, we deepen our understanding of Britain in the long eighteenth century.
The final theme with which this volume is concerned has been the standard fare of many writers on this period, the development of liberal forms of political thought and action which restricted and limited the power of the state. Perhaps some historians have been more concerned about celebrating this development than about explaining and analysing it. The Glorious Revolution ended the prospect of a centralized and absolute monarchy, giving rise to a system based on local political and judicial independence, annual meetings of parliament, regular parliamentary elections and freedom of speech and a drastic devolution of administrative powers and functions. Consequently, many key activities ranging from law enforcement and tax collection to economic regulation and the raising of armies were placed in the hands of the local gentry and aristocracy. As a result of all this, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that already by the end of the eighteenth century, royal government had been transformed into government by the King-in-Parliament. Nevertheless, as many incidents will remind us, the power of the monarchy was far from coming to an end, and its popularity and prestige, indeed, were actually growing. In any case, there is far more to ‘politics’ than the traditional fare of parliaments and parties. It is a distortion of the political structure of the long eighteenth century to erect artificial polarities between ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, with the former imposing itself upon the latter. The political process was led, even commanded, by the landed elite, but it depended upon, and found room for, men from humbler backgrounds. Their contribution to public life was to be immense. It was they who manned the local committees and canvassed the voters at election time, who wrote and distributed political literature, who collected and spent political money and who, in general, organized political events ranging from processions to petitions. Even lower down the social scale, the world of popular political culture, symbolic, festive and unwritten, could serve as an arena for political conflict between the humble and the great. To those excluded from formal patterns of political power, popular culture provided the stage and the language for protest, whether against the state, the church, the market or the landlord.
Much of this would have been familiar to the Whig historians of earlier generations, but historians of the twenty-first century no longer accept the Whig historians’ agenda for the long eighteenth century. We no longer see the period as a great patriotic drama, or as a continuing story of national success, because we can see the massive evidence of inertia, continuity and reaction. It is now much less permissible than it was in the days of the Whig historians to use the historical record as an opportunity to celebrate the virtues and victories of any particular social and political regime. Today, we are more genuinely aware of the harsh face of eighteenth-century life than our predecessors were. Polite society rested somewhat precariously upon the tolerance of millions of people for whom life remained hard, uncomfortable and unhealthy. It took little to drive the social leaders of this reputedly strong and stable society into alarmism and panic. Contemporaries may have been agreed about the merits of the British constitution, for example, but they – Whigs and Tories, court and country, government and opposition, Anglican and Dissenter – disagreed deeply about political issues, and sometimes with a terrifying intensity. Contemporaries may have boasted about the stability of the social order, but that order was easily panicked. Furthermore, on many occasions it was clear that there was not much love lost for the upper classes, who protected themselves and their wealth behind the symbolic fencing of the legal system.
I have attempted, in what follows, to recognize the complexity of the long eighteenth century while attempting to identify some of its key thematic patterns. From the existing viewpoints available to historians in the early twenty-first century, the long eighteenth century has no single identity, no single vocabulary and no single characterization. This is arguably healthy, if sometimes confusing, since overarching interpretations always seem to oversimplify some complex issues and ignore others. Certainly, we must not simply and casually assume that the long eighteenth century automatically witnessed the onset of modernity. Much of life in the period was anchored in tradition and many of its motivations were inclined to preserve as much as to transform. Several of the themes mentioned above may seem like harbingers of modernity, but it is too rarely realized that such developments may strengthen existing institutions while proposed reforms may be motivated by the desire to return institutions to an earlier condition. Even in the early nineteenth century, ideals of citizenship were still conceived in corporate terms within an institutional structure dominated by the monarchy, by the church, by land and by other forms of property. The closing decades of the long eighteenth century continue to be dominated by themes with a late-seventeenth-century ancestry. In any case, we lack convincing, universally agreed definitions of modernity. Finally, I have tried to recognize that social, cultural and political histories are inextricably intertwined without assuming that one determines the other. In this way the book may illuminate all three.
NOTES
1.For a discussion of recent text books on this period, see the bibliography.
2.A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959).
3.L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd edn (1982); England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd edn (1961). The student seeking an easily digestible introduction to Namier’s ideas is recommended to try ‘Monarchy and the Party System’ in Namier’s Personalities and Powers (1955).
4.E. P. Thompson’s works have been of particular importance; see The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Harmandsworth: Penguin; Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (1975); ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971). See also G. Rudé, The Crowd in History, 1730–1848 (1964); Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (1970); Wilkes and Liberty (1965).
5.See J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832 (1985); Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1986); ‘A Theory of Party, Opposition and Government, 1688-1832’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980). Many of the books and papers published by Jeremy Black have drawn attention to issues and institutions which underscored continuity in British life in the eighteenth century. See, for example, The Politics of Britain 1688-1800 (1994) and Convergence or Divergence: Britain and the Continent (1994).
6.P. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2. The Eighteenth Century (1998); K. Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (2004).
7.J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (1989).
CHAPTER ONE
Britain in the Later Seventeenth Century
PLACE
Britain in the early modern period was a decentralized state in which political and social authority were widely delegated. Although Britain, unlike most European states, was blessed with geographical cohesion, her history in the early modern period is not the history of a single political and social entity. Most states in seventeenth-century Europe were ‘composite states’ made up of diverse units acquired either by dynastic union, by military conquest or by political negotiation. Britain was just such a composite state, a dynastic union of the crowns of England and Scotland, to which Ireland was attached by conquest and colonization. Arguably, Britain’s problems as a composite state were more serious than those of, for example, Spain, where a common religion prevailed.1 The three kingdoms were united only by the monarchy; their political institutions, their social systems, their economies and, most importantly, their reformed religious establishments continued largely independently. As a consequence, Britain and Ireland were subjected to serious political, economic and, not least, religious divisions. Yet, this composite state survived intact and, within a century, had become the greatest power
in Europe. How this happened is the theme of this book.
At the end of seventeenth century the islands of Britain were sparsely populated. Somewhere under 5,000,000 people lived in England, about 2,500,000 in Ireland, around 1,000,000 in Scotland and perhaps 400,000 in Wales, a total of slightly under 9,000,000 people. Over one-tenth of the English population lived in and around London, a concentration of population unmatched anywhere in Europe. The capital city far outstripped its challengers. Dublin had perhaps 60,000 people, but only three towns in Britain had a population of over 20,000: Edinburgh had 40,000, Norwich and Bristol around 30,000 each. Of the population giants of the next century, Newcastle had only15,000, Birmingham and Glasgow had perhaps 12,000, Manchester and Leeds only 10,000. We now believe that the population growth of the early seventeenth century was arrested in the second half and may even have gone into reverse. It did not resume until the eighteenth century.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 2