THE HANOVERIANS
The Hanoverian Dynasty, under “the four Georges” span the period of nearly 115 years. George I (1714-1727) was an elderly German who could not speak English. As a result the Whigs surrounding the King received many of the royal prerogatives and their leader became the Chairman of the King’s Council. That was the beginning of the cabinet system of Government in Great Britain, with a Rime Minister presiding over the Cabinet.
The 18th century was politically stable, as Monarchs and Parliament got on quite well together. Within Parliament the division between the opposing groups of the previous century brought formation of two vaguely opposed parties. One group, the Whigs, were the political descendants of the parliamentarians. They supported the Protestant values of hard work and thrift and believed in government by monarch and aristocracy together. The other group, the Tories, had a greater respect for the idea of the monarchy and the importance of the Anglican Church.
During this century Britain gradually expanded its empire in the Americas, along the west African coast and in India. The increase of trade which resulted from the links with these new markets led to the Industrial Revolution. The many technical innovations in manufacturing and transport during this period were also important contributing factors. London came to dominate, not as industrial centre but as a business and trading centre. By the end of the century, it had a population close to a million.
Radical changes took place in the English countryside in the late 18th century. Since Saxon times, large areas of land had been cultivated in narrow trips by tenant farmers, and common land had been used for grazing. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries this system ended when the Enclosure Acts [огораживание] empowered wealthier landowners to seize the land to which tenants could prove no legal title and to divide it into enclosed fields. Besides, a system of crop rotation, artificial fertilizer and new agricultural machinery, such as seed drill invented by Jethro Tull, made arable farming more efficient and more profitable. But for the tenants evicted from their lands and the labourers thrown out of work by mechanization, it was a disaster. Riots erupted in many areas, but they could not prevent the march of progress.
Not long before the 19th century began, Britain lost its most important American colonies in a war of independence., but soon after the end of the century, Britain controlled the biggest empire the world had ever seen. One section of this empire was Ireland. During this century the British culture and way of life came to predominate in Ireland; and by the end of the 19th century almost the whole of the Irish population spoke English as their first language. Another part of the empire was made up of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where settlers from the British Isles formed the majority of the population. These countries had complete internal self-government but recognized the overall authority of the British government. Still another part was India, an enormous country with a culture more
ancient than Britain’s. Tens of thousands of British civil servants and troops were used to govern it. Because India was so far away, and the journey from Britain took so long, these British officials spent most of their working lives there and so developed a distinctly Anglo-Indian way of life. They imposed British institutions and methods of government on India, and returned to Britain when they retired. Large parts of Africa also belonged to the empire, as well as numerous smaller areas and islands (e.g. the Caribbean).
A change in attitude in Britain towards colonization during the 19th century gave new encouragement to the empire builders. Previously, colonization had been seen as a matter of settlement, of commerce, or of military strategy. By the end of the century, colonization was seen as the matter of destiny. There was an enormous increase of wealth, so that Britain became the world’s foremost economic power. This, together with long years of political stability unequalled anywhere else in Europe, gave the British a sense of supreme confidence, even arrogance about their culture and civilization. The British came to see themselves as having a duty to spread this culture and civilization around the word.
There were great changes in social structure. Most people now lived in towns and cities. They no longer depended on country landowners for their living but rather on the owners of industries. These factory owners had the real power in the country, along with the new and growing middle class of tradespeople. As they established their power, they also established their set of values, which emphasized hard work, thrift, religious honesty in public life and extreme respectability in sexual matters. This is the set of values, which we now call Victorian, by the name of Queen Victoria, who ruled Britain during the time.
This was also the age of the railways. In 1825 the first steam line (from Stockton to Darlington) was opened; it was followed by the first inter-city line from Liverpool to Manchester.
Another dramatic phenomenon of the 19th century was the “Irish Question”. During the potato famine of 1848 about 20 per cent of Ireland’s population dies of hunger and more than a million people emigrated to escape a similar fate. Hostility to Britain was shown through outbreaks of violence over the next decades.
