Abstract
Queen Victoria died at Osborne on 22 January 1901. Her funeral marked the end of a splendid epoch, ‘the most glorious one of English history’. Orators and leader-writers engaged in a wild outpouring of praise for the past and forebodings about the future. Their tone was shared by a wide section of the population whose mood represented a strange amalgam of optimism and pessimism. There were those who looked forward to a future when life would be easier and more prosperous for all. The believers in progress spoke of expanding trade, scientific and technological improvements, an enlarged imperial connection and the uplifting, both materially and spiritually, of those who lived in the ‘dark continents’. There was the vision of arbitration, international law and perpetual peace. But there were also the voices of doom, a swelling chorus in the years after the Queen’s death, warning of a less comfortable and peaceful future. The belief in progress had been shattered by the events of the preceding decades. The advance of democracy posed problems which were not easily solved by the repetition of old liberal clichés. The progress of science and technology, as Matthew Arnold and Lord Tennyson had foretold, might well prove to be a human disaster. The costs of Empire had to be reckoned as well as its benefits.
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Notes and References
On the changing base of the Conservative party, see J. Cornford, ‘Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, VII (1963); and ‘The Parliamentary Foundations of the Hotel Cecil’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (1967).
H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, 1892–1914 (1973) p. 100.
Ibid., p. 103.
P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (1971). For a different interpretation see P. Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London, 1885–1914 (1967); R. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (1975).
The Speaker, 8 September 1900; quoted in Emy, Liberals, Radicals..., p. 90.
For a wider claim for the importance of the ‘efficiency school’, see G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (1971).
Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour...; Howarth, ‘The Liberal Revival in Northamptonshire, 1880–1895’, Historical Journal, XII (1969). For a study of Blackburn, see P. F. Clarke, ‘British Politics and Blackburn Politics, 1900–1910’, Historical Journal, XII 2 (1969).
There is an enormous literature both on the ‘Great Depression’ and on the trade union movement. For a summary of the material on the economic side I have relied on W. W. Rostow, British Economy of the 19th Century: Essays (Oxford, 1948); S. B. Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression (London, 1969); E. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (1968); Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation (1969). On trade unions, H. A. Clegg, A. Fox and A. F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, vol. I (1964); A. E. Dufy, ‘New Unionism in Britain 1889–1890: A Re-appraisal’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIV 2 (1961); H. Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism (London and New York, 1963).
F. Bealey and H. Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906 (1958); H. Pelling, Popular Politics...in Late Victorian Britain (1968); R. G. Gregory, The Miners in Politics in England and Wales, 1906–1914 (London, 1968); Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour (1967).
See P. F. Clarke and H. V. Emy, cited above.
T. W. Fletcher, ‘The Great Depression of English Agriculture, 1873–1896’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIII 3 (1961); D. Spring, The English Landed Estate in the 19th Century, its Administration (Baltimore, 1963); F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London and Toronto, 1963).
Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, p. 319.
I owe the term to Clive Trebilcock. For the critical view see Mathias, First Industrial Nation, ch. 15, and Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, ch. 9; D. H. Aldcroft (ed.), The Development of British Industry and Foreign Competition,i875–1914 (1968); D. H. Aldcroft and H. W. Richardson, The British Economy, 1870–1939 (1969).
See some of the arguments in D. McCloskey, Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 (1971) and in D. C. M. Piatt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (London, 1972) especially pp. 173-251.
J. A. S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy (1964) pp. 165-6.
H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists (1973) p. 153. Rosebery, on the other hand, was far less happy with this line of argument.
G. P. Gooch, quoted in D. Read, Edwardian England, 1901–1915 (1972) p. 139.
The classic attack is in R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (1961) and in their subsequent articles, and D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire (1973). But see the important correctives by E. Stokes, ‘Late Nineteenth Century Colonial Expansion and the Attack on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Historical Journal, XII 2 (1969) and ‘Uneconomic Imperialism’, Historical Journal, XVIII 2 (1975).
D. C. M. Platt,‘Economic Factors in British Policy during the New Imperialism’, Past and Present, 39 (Apr 1968); ‘National Economy and British Imperial Expansion before 1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, II I (Oct 1973); and D. McLean, ‘The Foreign Office and the First Chinese Indemnity Loan’, 1895, Historical Journal, XVI 2 (1973).
B.D. vol. III, Appendix B.
A. J. A. Morris, Radicalism against War, 1906–1914 (1972) p. 6.
R. Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class (1972); H. Pelling, Popular Politics..., pp. 82–100.
W. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (London, 1916) p. 32.
P. F. Clarke, British Politics..., p. 347.
D.G.P. vol. XI, no. 53: Hatzfeldt to Holstein (21 Jan 1896).
D.G.P. vol. XVI, no. 234-5: Metternich to Richtofen (19 jan 1903); quoted in O.J.
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© 1977 Zara S. Steiner
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Steiner, Z.S. (1977). The Conservative Watershed. In: Britain and the Origins of the First World War. The Making of the 20th Century. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15841-6_2
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