national government as well as voluntary agencies were called on to remedy

social evils. Despite a high level of emigration to British colonies and

the United States—more than 200,000 per year during the 1880s—the

population of England and Wales doubled between 1851 and 1911 (to more than

36 million) and that of Scotland grew by more than 60 percent (to almost 5

million). Both death rates and birth rates declined somewhat, and a series

of changes in the law made it possible for a minority of women to enter

universities, vote in local elections, and keep control of their property

while married.

The Late Victorian Empire

A relative lack of interest in empire during the mid-Victorian years gave

way to increased concern during the 1880s and 1890s. The raising of tariff

barriers by the United States, Germany, and France made colonies more

valuable again, ushering in an era of rivalry with Russia in the Middle

East and along the Indian frontier and a “scramble for Africa” that

involved the carving out of large claims by Britain, France, and Germany.

Hong Kong and Singapore served as centers of British trade and influence in

China and the South Pacific. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 led

indirectly to a British protectorate over Egypt in 1882. Queen Victoria

became empress of India in 1876, and both Victoria’s golden jubilee (1887)

and her diamond jubilee (1897) celebrated imperial unity. The Conservative

ministries of Lord Salisbury were preoccupied with imperial concerns as

well. The policies of Salisbury’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain,

contributed to the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Britain suffered

initial reverses in that war but then captured Johannesburg and Pretoria in

1900. Only after protracted guerrilla warfare, however, was the conflict

brought to an end in 1902. By then Queen Victoria was dead.

The Edwardian Age (1901-1914)

In the aftermath of the Boer War, Britain signed a treaty of alliance with

Japan (1902) and ended several decades of overseas rivalry with France in

the Entente Cordiale (1904). After Anglo-Russian disputes had also been

settled, this link became the Triple Entente (1907), which faced the Triple

Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy. As the reign of King Edward VII

began, however, most Britons were more concerned with domestic matters.

Arthur Balfour’s Education Act in 1902 helped meet the demand for national

efficiency with the beginnings of a national system of secondary education,

but the measure stirred old religious passions. In the course of Balfour’s

ministry, the Conservative Party was divided between tariff reformers, who

wanted to restore protective duties, and free traders. The general election

of 1906 gave the Liberals an overwhelming majority. Union influence led to

the appearance of a small separate Labour Party of 29 members as well. The

Liberal government, headed first by Henry Campbell-Bannerman and then by

Herbert Asquith, gave domestic self-government to the new Union of South

Africa and partial provincial self-government to British India in 1909 and

1910. Under the inspiration of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, it

also laid the foundations of the welfare state. Its program, from 1908 to

1912, included old-age pensions, government employment offices,

unemployment insurance, a contributory program of national medical

insurance for most workers, and boards to fix minimum wages for miners and

others. Lloyd George’s controversial “people’s budget,” designed to pay the

costs of social welfare and naval rearmament, was blocked by the House of

Lords and led in due course to the Parliament Act of 1911, which left the

Lords with no more than a temporary veto. The Conservatives made a

comeback, however, in the general elections of 1910, and the Liberals were

thereafter dependent on the Irish Nationalists to stay in power. Although

the economy seemed to be booming, wages scarcely kept up with rising

prices, and the years 1911 to 1914 were marked by major and divisive

strikes by miners, dock workers, and transport workers. Suffragists staged

violent demonstrations in favor of the enfranchisement of women. When the

Liberal government sought to enact home rule for Ireland, non-Catholic

Irish from Ulster threatened force to prevent Britain from compelling them

to become part of a semi-independent Ireland. In the midst of these

domestic disputes, a crisis in the Balkans exploded into World War I.

The Era of World Wars

Although the competitive naval buildup of Britain and Germany is often

cited as a cause of World War I, Anglo-German relations were actually

cordial in early 1914, and Britain was Germany’s best customer. It was

Germany’s threat to France and its invasion of neutral Belgium that

prompted Britain to declare war.

Britain in World War I

A British expeditionary force was immediately sent to France and helped

stem the German advance at the Marne. Fighting on the Western Front soon

became mired in a bloody stalemate amid muddy trenches, barbed wire, and

machine-gun emplacements. Battles to push the Germans back failed

repeatedly at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Efforts to outflank

the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, and Turkey) in the Balkans, as at

Gallipoli (1915), failed also. At the Battle of Jutland (1916), the British

prevented the German fleet from venturing into the North Sea and beyond,

but German submarines threatened Britain with starvation early in 1917;

merchant-ship convoys guarded by destroyers helped avert that danger.

In May 1915 Asquith’s Liberal ministry became a coalition of Liberals,

Conservatives, and a few Labourites. Lloyd George became minister of

munitions. Continued frustration with the nation’s inability to win the

war, however, led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George, heading a

predominantly Conservative coalition, in December 1916. Problems in

Ireland, chiefly the 1916 Easter rebellion, resulted in several hundred

dead. By 1918 the annual budget was 13 times that of 1913; tax rates had

risen fivefold, and the total national debt, fourteenfold.

Although many Britons welcomed the end of czarist rule in Russia in 1917,

they saw the Communist decision to make a separate peace with Germany as a

sellout. Only the entry of the United States into the war made possible

General Douglas Haig’s successful tank offensive in the summer of 1918 and

the German surrender in November. The election called immediately

thereafter gave the Lloyd George coalition an overwhelming mandate. The

Labour Party, now formally pledged to socialism, became the largest

opposition party, while the Asquith wing of a divided Liberal Party was

almost wiped out. By then the Reform Act of 1918 had granted the vote to

all men over the age of 21 and all women over 30.

Changes Wrought by the War

Lloyd George represented Britain as one of the Big Three (together with

France and the United States) at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The

resulting treaties enlarged the British Empire as former German colonies in

Africa and Turkish holdings in the Middle East became British mandates. At

the same time Britain’s self-governing dominions—Canada, Australia, New

Zealand, and South Africa—became separate treaty signatories and separate

members of the new League of Nations. An intermittent civil war in Ireland

ended with a treaty negotiated by Lloyd George in 1921. Most of the island

became the Irish Free State, independent of British rule in all but name.

The six counties of Northern Ireland continued to be represented in the

British Parliament, although they also gained their own provincial

parliament. The immediate postwar years were marked by economic boom, rapid

demobilization, and much labor strife. By 1922, however, the boom had

petered out. That year a rebellion by a group of Conservative members of

Parliament ended the prime ministership of Lloyd George, and the wholly

Conservative ministry of Andrew Bonar Law represented a return to “normal

times.”

The Interwar Era

During the early 1920s a major political shift took place in Britain. The

general election of 1922 gave victory to the Conservatives, but another

one, called a year later by Bonar Law’s successor, Stanley Baldwin, left no

party with a clear majority. As a consequence, Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour

Party leader, became the first professed socialist to serve as prime

minister of Great Britain. His first ministry in 1924, rested on Liberal

acquiescence; it lasted less than a year, when yet another election brought

back Baldwin’s Conservatives. Lloyd George’s and Asquith’s efforts at

Liberal reunion failed to restore the party’s fortunes, and it has remained

a minor party in British politics. The Baldwin ministry restored the gold

standard and enacted several social-reform measures, including the Widows’,

Orphans’, and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act, a national electric power

network, and a reform of local government. In 1928 women were given voting

rights that were equal to those of men.

Between 1929 and 1932 the international depression more than doubled an

already high rate of unemployment. In the course of three years, both the

levels of industrial activity and of prices dipped by a quarter, and

industries such as shipbuilding collapsed almost entirely. MacDonald’s

second Labour government found itself unable to cope with the depression,

and in 1931 it gave way to a national government, headed first by MacDonald

and then by Baldwin and made up mostly of Conservatives. The Labour Party

denounced MacDonald as a traitor, but the national government won an

overwhelming mandate in the general election of 1931. It took Britain off

the gold standard, restored protective tariffs, and subsidized the building

of houses. Between 1933 and 1937, the economy recovered steadily, with the

automobile, construction, and electrical industries leading the way.

Unemployment remained high, however, especially in Wales, Scotland, and

northern England. Interwar society was influenced by the radio (monopolized

by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was begun in 1927) and the

cinema, but British life was little affected by the continental ideologies

of communism and fascism. The empire remained a fact, even though the

Statute of Westminster (1931) proclaimed the equality of Commonwealth

nations such as Canada and Australia. Religious attendance declined, but

King George V maintained the prestige of the monarchy. When his son, Edward

VIII, insisted on marrying a twice-divorced American in 1936, abdication

proved to be the only acceptable solution. Under Edward’s brother, George

VI, the monarchy again provided the model family of the land.

Britain and World War II

Memories of World War I left Britons with an overwhelming desire to avoid

another war, and the country played a leading role in the League of Nations

and at interwar disarmament conferences such as those in Washington, D.C.

in 1921 and 1922 and London in 1930 that limited naval size. Conscious that

Germany might have been unfairly treated at the 1919 peace conference, the

British government followed a policy of appeasement in dealing with Adolf

Hitler’s Germany after 1933. Germany’s decisions between 1934 and 1936 to

leave the League of Nations, rearm, and remilitarize the Rhineland in

defiance of the Treaty of Versailles were accepted. So was the German

annexation of Austria in 1938. In his efforts to keep the peace at all

costs, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain also acquiesced to the Munich

Pact of 1938, which gave Germany the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia.

Only after the German annexation of Prague in March of 1939 did Britain

make pledges to Poland and Romania.

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared

war, and World War II began. The

defeat**********************************************************************

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**************************************************************at achieved

by any other power. Although a German invasion plan was foiled by British

air supremacy, large parts of London and other cities were destroyed and

some 60,000 civilians were killed. Beginning early in 1941, the still-

neutral United States granted lend-lease aid to Britain.

The nature of the war changed with the German invasion of the Union of

Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on

Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Churchill then forged the “Grand Alliance”

with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt

against Germany, Italy, and Japan. In the immediate aftermath of the

Japanese intervention, much of the British Empire in Southeast Asia was

overrun, but late in 1942 the tide turned. The British contribution

included the Battle of the North Atlantic against the German submarine

menace and the campaign led by General Bernard Montgomery against the

German army in North Africa. Churchill corresponded continually and met

often with Roosevelt, and British forces joined American in the 1943

invasion of Sicily and Italy, the invasion of France in 1944, and the

ultimate defeat of the Axis powers in 1945.

The Winds of Change

The general election of 1945 gave the Labour Party for the first time a

majority of the popular vote and an overwhelming parliamentary majority.

The result was less a rebuke of Churchill’s wartime leadership than an

expression of approval of Labour’s role in the war and of hope that the

party would bring more prosperity.

Clement Attlee’s Ministry (1945-1951)

During the years that followed, Labour, led by Clement Attlee, sought to

build a socialist Britain, while surviving postwar austerity, dismantling

the empire, and adjusting to a cold war with the USSR. The two measures

that established a welfare state in Britain, the National Insurance Act of

1946 (a consolidation of benefit laws involving maternity, unemployment,

disability, old age, and death) and the National Health Service, set up in

1948, were widely popular. Both drew on the wartime reports of Sir William

Beveridge, a Liberal. The nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal

industry, gas and electricity, the railroads, and most airlines proved

relatively noncontroversial, but the Conservatives vigorously if vainly

opposed the nationalization of the trucking and the iron and steel

industries. In 1948 Labour eliminated the last remnants of plural voting

(that is, voting in more than one constituency) and reduced the delaying

powers of the House of Lords from two years to one. These changes were

instituted in the midst of a postwar era of austerity. The national debt

had tripled, and for the first time since the 18th century Britain had

become a debtor nation. With the end of U.S. lend-lease aid in 1945, the

British import bill had risen abruptly long before military demobilization

and reconversion to peacetime industry had been accomplished. Wartime

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