War Commemoration and Civic Culture in the North East of England, 1854–1914 by Guy Hinton

Author:Guy Hinton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030785932
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.1 Social, Economic and Political Contexts

There is broad historiographical consensus that the last three decades of the nineteenth century featured disorientating societal change and a perception of decline—change that especially challenged the precepts of middle-class Liberalism and nonconformity. The late 1870s and 1880s, when the colonial conflicts occurred, was a period of socio-economic uncertainty following the mid-century era of national growth and consolidation; this had been facilitated by economic stability and a social balance in which, it was felt, all had generally benefited. Until the 1870s, Britain was obviously the richest nation in the world but by the 1880s commentators were wondering if Britain had already passed its peak: in the 1840s it controlled nearly one-third of the world’s trade but by 1880 this had fallen to less than one quarter.7 Increasing economic and industrial confidence among overseas competitors was tangible, particularly France, newly unified Germany, and the United States. Doubt over Britain’s changing role in the world economy exacerbated domestic uncertainty.

Historians have widely viewed the 1870s and 1880s as a period of economic depression. For Martin Pugh, a ‘Great Depression’ occurred in the twenty-two years after 1874, affecting landowner and capitalist, considered by observers as symptomatic of a long-term phenomenon rather than a mere cyclical fluctuation.8 Others, such as Theodore Hoppen, have seen notions of a Great Depression (and the mid-century ‘Great Boom’) as exaggerated but acknowledge that there was shift towards a more negative perception of the economic state of the nation.9

Economic apprehension interacted with concern over changes to the socio-political fabric. The country was becoming more and more middle class in outlook as the aristocracy lost its pre-eminence. Demographically, the middle class was growing faster than any other: 2.6 million (12.5 per cent of the overall population) in 1851, 9.3 million (25 per cent of the population) by 1901.10 John Garrard considers the period around 1880 as the high-water mark for the industrial urban elites, their dominance over local political, economic and social life at its most entrenched.11 However, fissures were showing within British society, hitherto so assured and united, with many of its tenets being challenged. Bourgeois confidence, previously so buoyant, was shaken by the economic problems, and their more visible (and publicised) manifestations, such as the poverty and deprivation that affected the urban working class. The Victorian credo of Liberalism, the dominant socio-cultural model, began to be disputed and discredited .12

At the same time, the labour vanguard was asserting itself and challenging middle-class hegemony. As François Bédarida astutely adjudges, integration of the working class was only possible in a permissive climate of expansion and prosperity, and in a bourgeois atmosphere that was contented and self-confident; without this, working-class autonomy appeared more viable.13 Socialism, working-class politics and a more coherent trade unionism, the ‘new unionism’, were emerging, presaging the rise of Labour and inciting a new restive political mentality, further encouraged by the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884–1885, which expanded the electorate from 1.3 million to 5.6 million men, many from the working classes.

Contributing to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.