Abstract
Despite the restoration of hereditary aristocratic rule at the Congress of Vienna, the beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of social turbulence and political change. The Industrial Revolution was moving Europe away from an agricultural economy lorded over by nobility and toward a machine economy presided over by manufacturers, merchants, and financiers. This shift in the location of social power accompanied the rise of new political ideologies and value systems like utilitarianism and nationalism. Concrete expressions of such novel ideas were visible in 1830 as popular revolts took place in France, Belgium, Poland, and Switzerland, and then again in 1848 when widespread nationalism brought an even larger outbreak of revolt to the aforementioned states plus principalities in what is today Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Hungary. Toward the end of the century, in 1870, the Paris Commune represented yet another attempt by disenfranchised and exploited urban poor to take over the ruling institutions of France.1
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Notes
Myriad histories of the social and economic history of Europe exist, but this study builds its analysis from the three pivotal books written by Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962); The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage, 1976); and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
This question was most famously posed by Elie Halévy, who used it as the basis for a six-volume study of English history. See Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 6 vols. (London: E. Benn, 1952).
Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
Eric Hopkins, Industrialization and Society: A Social History, 1830–1951 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–126.
See J. Crick and A. Walsham, eds., The Uses of Script and Print. 1300–1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
D. McKitterck, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and
Clementine Oliver, Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth Century England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer: 2010).
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 3.
William Wilberforce, speech before Parliament quoted in Stephen Tomkins, William Wilberforce: A Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), 95.
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Alan Richard, “Slavery and Romantic Writing,” in Duncan Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998), 463. Other noteworthy works included former slave Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Robert Southey’s Poems Concerning the Slave Trade, Samuel Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Marinere, and James Montgomery’s epic The West Indies.
Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 59–60.
Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 156.
Thomas Buxton Howell, The Slave Trade in Africa (London: John Murray, 1839), 281–282.
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Chartism was a movement among the British working classes for the expansion of the right to vote and other basic political rights not extended to those who did not own property or could demonstrate substantial wealth or financial means. See Max Beer, A History of British Socialism (Manchester, NH: Ayer, 1979).
The Corn Laws were tariffs Great Britain placed on the importation of foodstuffs from Europe that kept the price of food artificially high. Amid the poverty and depravation of the 1830s and 1840s, many advocates of free trade (as well as some working-class Chartists) insisted that these social problems could be solved with the repeal of these laws. See Justin McCarthy, The Epoch of Reform: 1830–1850 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882).
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Yvonne Ffrench, The Great Exhibition: 1851 (London: Harvill Press, 1950), 9–12.
The term “Crystal Palace” was originally a term of subtle mockery used in an article about the Great Exhibition in Punch. See Marion Harry Spielman, The History of “Punch” (London: Cassell, 1895), 84.
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 22.
Patrick Howarth, The Year Is 1851 (London: Collins, 1951), 220.
This view reflected the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston, who was prime minister at the time of the Great Exhibition. See Martin Kingsley, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion in England before the Crimean War (London: G. Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1924).
Hannah Arendt referred to this group as “the mob,” and she interpreted it as an important point in the eventual development of totalitarianism in Europe. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1976), 123–304.
For more on the Indian Revolt and its effect on British society, see Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Peter Harrington, “Images and Perceptions: Visualizing the Sudan Campaign,” in Edward M. Spiers, ed. Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 83.
Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day!: A History of Mass Communication in Britain (London: Arnold, 1998), 49–50.
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Raymond L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W.T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 60.
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See Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in Peter Gay ed., The Freud Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 751–753; and
Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1954), 93–101.
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J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 215.
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Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertainment 1870–1914,” in John MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1986), 22.
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Letter from Milner to Schreiner, December 8, 1898. See also Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murrary, 2002), 44.
George Sturt, The Journals of George Sturt, 1890–1927 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 302.
Quoted in Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism, and the British Left 1881–1924 (Woodbridge, Sufflolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1998), 59.
Leslie Stephen, Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen: Volume I, 1864–1882 (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1996), 509.
William E. Carson, Northcliffe: Britain’s Man of Power (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1918), 154.
Jacqueline Beaumont, “The British Press during the South African War,” in Mark Connelly and David Welch, eds., War and Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 11.
See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 277–318; and
Robert Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 211–273.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1987), 198–202.
Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000), 158.
Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the 20th Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 38.
R. W. Setson-Watson quoted in A. J. May, The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy 1914–18, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), vol. 2, 605.
For this and other examples of Irish counterpropaganda, see Ben Novick, Conceiving Revolution: Irish Nationalist Propaganda during the First World War (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2001), 72–102.
Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 63.
In the case of Australia and New Zealand, see Eric Montgomery Andrews, The ANZAC Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations during World War I (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126.
Jacquie L’Etang, Public Relations in Britain: A History of Professional Practice in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2004), 32.
Mariel Grant, Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994), 18. The rise of public relations is discussed more deeply in the next chapter.
Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 133–134.
John MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1986), 209.
Eric Louw, The Media and Political Process (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 122. 130.
Winston Churchill, “Civilization: An Address to the University of Bristol, July 2, 1938,” in Winston Churchill and Randolph Churchill, Blood, Sweat and Tears (Camden, NJ: Haddon Craftsmen, 1941), 46.
Lord Windelsham, Broadcasting in a Free Society (London: Blackwell, 1980).
Nicholas John Cull, Selling the War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (New York: Oxford, 1995), 136–137.
Burton Paulu, British Broadcasting (Minneapolis, MN: Jones Press, 1956), 392.
M. A. Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 101–102.
For further elaborations on the nature of “black propaganda,” see Garth S. Jowett and Vitoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999).
Eric Barnouw, Media Lost and Found (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 109.
Dwight Eisenhower quoted in Frederick Taylor, “Breaking the German Will to Resist: Allied Efforts to End the Second World War in Europe by Non-Military Means, 1944–45,” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18, no. 1 (1998): 5.
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© 2014 Eric M. Fattor
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Fattor, E.M. (2014). Legitimacy through Popular Entertainment: Bringing the British Empire to Life (1815–1945). In: American Empire and the Arsenal of Entertainment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382238_2
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