Abstract
The success of the policy of expansion was greatly aided by the organisation of a centralised and efficient public power controlling the whole of the land area of the British Isles. But it was. also made possible by the English revolution in the seventeenth century, which cut short the development of royal absolutism in England and converted the centralised bureaucratic military and legal apparatus, which the English kings had created, into an instrument for the security and progress of the civil society which developed alongside it. The interrelation between successful overseas expansion, the creation of a strong centralised multinational state in the British Isles, and the subordination of the state power to the interests and needs of a dynamic and assertive civil society, are the necessary historical ground for exploring the next major problem that arises from a study of Britain’s hundred years’ decline: why has Britain alone amongst major states experienced such an exceptional degree of institutional continuity, such a gradual evolution in its political arrangements?
In the course of the nineteenth century England adopted peacefully and without violent shocks almost all the basic civil and political reforms that France paid so heavily to achieve through the great Revolution. Undeniably, the great advantage of England lay in the greater energy, the greater practical wisdom, the better political training, that her ruling class possessed down to the very end of the past century.
Gaetano Mosca1
Sitting at your ease on the corpse of Ireland … be good enough to tell us: did your revolution of interests not cost more blood than our revolution of ideas?
Jules Michelet
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Notes and references
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. 119.
Christopher Hill’s many books on the civil war are outstanding. See particularly his book on Cromwell, God’s Englishman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). See also Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) ch. 1.
See the discussion in R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1959).
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Methuen, 1961) p. 26.
See the discussion by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) part I, especially chs 4, 5.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949) p. 229.
The struggle over the Corn Laws was bitter and intense but it did not lead to any armed conflict. The landed interest accepted its defeat. An important reason for this undoubtedly lay in the high rentier incomes which monetary stability provided for all owners of property. See B. Johnson, The Politics of Money (London: Murray, 1970) p. 40.
Quoted in B. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 8.
See the analysis of the public schools in Corelli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London: Methuen, 1971) ch. 2. He writes, for instance; ‘The qualities imparted to this future ruling class by their education — probity, orthodoxy, romantic idealism, a strong sense of public responsibility — admirably fitted them for running the British Empire as they saw it; an unchanging institution of charitable purpose and assured income. Such qualities were however ill-suited to leading the Empire, a great business and strategic enterprise, through drastic internal reorganisations and against ferocious and unscrupulous competition’ (p. 43). The shortcomings and social divisiveness of the public school system have long been major themes in the writing on British decline. A recent example is
G. C. Allen, The British Disease (London: IEA, 1979).
The classic analysis was provided by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in their essays in New Left Review in the 1960s. See especially, Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23, January-February 1964, and Tom Nairn, The Breakup of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977).
This history is vividly described by Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, and by Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), particularly his chapters on the working day (ch. 10), and on machinery (ch. 15).
See, for example, the account in Eric Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), and
Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964).
For a review of the growth and the extent of state involvement in the nineteenth century see J. Brebner, ‘Laissez-faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain’, in E. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History (London: Arnold, 1962) pp. 252–62.
For Chartism see G. D. H. Cole and R. W. Postgate, The Common People (London: Methuen, 1961) section V.
Karl Marx, ‘The Chartists’, New York Daily Tribune, 25 August 1852, reprinted in Surveys from Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 264.
Over three-quarters were estimated to belong to the manual working class. See Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) pp. 154, 157–8. By 1850 more lived in cities than in the country and by 1881 2 out of 5 lived in the six giant conurbations.
See J. H. Goldthorpe, ‘The Current Inflation: Towards a Sociological Account’, in F. Hirsch and J. H. Goldthorpe (eds), The Political Economy of Inflation (London: Martin Robertson, 1978) pp. 186–213.
Richard Cobden, Political Writings, 2 vols (London: Ridgeway, 1867).
See Raphael Samuel, ‘The Workshop of the World’, History Workshop, no. 3, Spring 1977, pp. 6–72.
See Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, ch. 9, and P. Mathias, The First Industrial Nation (London: Methuen, 1969) ch. 15. Recent research has challenged this interpretation.
See Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910–1924 (Oxford University Press, 1974).
The most important socialist element of the new programme was contained in Clause IV of the new constitution. See R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London: Merlin, 1961) for a discussion of its significance.
See Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour (Cambridge University Press, 1970) for a painstaking analysis.
All recent histories of the strike agree on this. See Patrick Renshaw, The General Strike (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975), and
Margaret Morris, The General Strike (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
See R. P. Arnot, The General Strike (London: Labour Research Department, 1926),
and E. Burns, Trade Councils in Action (London: Labour Research Department, 1926). There is little doubt that the solidarity of the strikers was growing; more workers were in fact out on strike the day after it was called off than during the strike itself.
This paradox has given rise to an enormous literature. See especially R. T. McKenzie and A. Silver, Angels in Marble (London: Heinemann, 1968), and
F. Parkin, ‘Working Class Conservatives: a Theory of Political Deviance’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 18, no. 3, 1967, pp. 278–90.
See D. Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1975); Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism’, and
T. Nairn, ‘Anatomy of the Labour Party’, reprinted in R. Blackburn (ed.), Revolution and Class Struggle (London: Fontana, 1977) pp. 314–73.
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© 1994 Andrew Gamble
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Gamble, A. (1994). The unfinished revolution. In: Britain in Decline. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23620-6_3
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