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HIS 352 Professor Adelson

Metropolitan Britain, from the 1870s to the 1940s

Plutocratic London dominated the country and the empire as never before. The Great War from 1914 to 1918 intensified pre-war trends, vastly increased the power of the state, but did not fundamentally alter the character of British society, while postwar economic changes widened the gap between the rich and poor in Britain. This section examines demography, society, economics, politics, and culture, and is divided into pre-World War I, World War I, and Interwar periods.
Demography from the 1870s to 1914
1. The decade's increase in birth rate had peaked in 1871. According to the censuses of 1871 and 1911, the population of Britain grew from 31 to 45 million, a decline in the birth rate which has persisted in the twentieth century. Population grew because the death rate dropped from 20-25 per 1000 in the mid 1800s to 15 in the early 1900s, but infant mortality stubbornly resisted public health and sanitary improvements. The middle class and the upper working class sought similar respectability, practiced birth control, and had smaller families, based upon working class calculation of less child labor, children becoming a liability, and required attendance at school meant children cost parents more. The average married woman went from having six children in the 1860s to three in the 1900s. The marriage rate rose; urban promiscuity declined from 6.68% in 1851 to 3.94% in 1901; celibate women (unmarried women 45-54) rose from 12.2% in 1871 to 16% in 1911.
2. Britain's population became older, with more adults, fewer children
3. Emigration remained on a high level: 1.5 million in the 1870s, 2.5 in the 1880s, 2 in the 1890s, millions of emigrants continued to leave for the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a few to South Africa and Latin America. Thousands of immigrants from Ireland came to England and Scotland, and from Eastern Europe to London's East End.
4. Britons continued to flock to the cities, especially London, where the best opportunities were, with urbanites preferring row houses in suburbs to the continent's high rise housing; Britain has had a housing shortage since before World War I; mass transportation conveyed people to and from their homes to their work.
Society from the 1870s to 1914
1. Society consisted of approximately 5% upper class; 15% middle class; and 80% lower classes. Live-in domestic servants remained the criterion for being middle class; domestic service was still the main employment for women; their numbers and availability decreased somewhat before World War I, dramatically after.
2. The upper class remained aristocratic in tone, but plutocratic in fact, as their source of income shifted from agriculture to finance
3. The middle class, a main engine of change before the 1870s, wanted to hold on to what it had, becoming more conservative, class conscious.
4. The working class was divided between the skilled and unskilled; the former aped the values of the middle class; the unskilled enjoyed their own publications, sports, recreation, and entertainments
5. Underemployed or unemployed poor numbered 20-30% of Britain.
Economics from 1870 to 1914
1. Industrially, Britain lost its technological lead to Germany and the United States, although it remained competitive in some industries; the government did not fund research and development, as on the continent, and in the United States.
2. Financially, Britain remained the world's leader, as the "City" served big corporations with rich investors seeking more lucrative international opportunities, and with invisible exports such as investment, banking, and insurance companies thriving.
3. The agricultural sector declined with the depression in grain prices from the 1870s to the 1900s
4. Since food prices rose less high than wages, real income increased from 1870 to 1900; real income declined from 1900 to 1914
5. Britain became the most unionized country in the industrial world
Politics from 1870 to 1914 (see Arnstein's appendix, pp. 463-471).
1. Universal manhood suffrage came through 1867-68 and 1884-85 acts
2. Liberals and Conservative-Unionists compared; mostly similar in parliamentary organization, but their supporters, and finance as well as in their domestic programs and tax policies differed.
3. Gladstone split the Liberal Party with the First Home Rule Bill of 1886, which helped Conservative-Unionist domination of parliament until after World War II; the Liberals were at Downing Street only from 1892-94; 1905-1915; they ruled coalitions from 1915-1922; the Labour Party did not have a parliamentary majority until 1945.
4. The hottest political issues before World War I had to do with the empire: loaning money to debt-ridden regimes throughout the world at high rates; purchasing control of stock in Suez Canal Co.; the two-navy standard of the 1880s; the defense of India; the partition of Africa; the Boer War; government purchase of Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914; national chauvinism, hysteria, and the media.
Cultural values less dominated by the middle class from 1870 to 1914
1. Questions posed with different answers, depending mainly upon class and region:
  1. Do you do what your parents, church, school, or community says?
  2. Do you do what the metropolitan media and advertisements say?
  3. Do you do what you want and keep the public from finding out?
2. Increased class consciousness in hi-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture
3. Hierarchical attitudes toward race and ethnicity
4. Gender and sexuality--patriarchal modes--a boy's or a man's country?
5. Religion on the decline except for evangelicals and temperance activists
6. National education on the cheap--local school board control curricula and rates
7. Red-Brick Universities and lagging research and development
World War I had a great effect on the British people at home and abroad, increasing state power over the economy and society. It accelerated changes mostly emanating from London that had already been set in motion before 1914, but most of the plutocratic and elitist institutions and values of British society survived the war.

Demography and the Great War

Pre-World War I population patterns continued, i.e., declining birth rate and death rate; population growing older and more urbanized; emigration still measured in the millions. Arnstein's text, p. 445, gives British census figures of 45.2 million in 1911 and 44 million in 1921 (the latter including only Northern Ireland).

The major demographic upheaval was war casualties, with overall estimates at 10 million killed, 20 million wounded.

Country	Dead	Wounded	Prisoner

Britain & Empire	947,000	2,122,000	192,000
France	1,385,000	3,044,000	446,000
Russia	1,700,000	4,950,000	2,500,000
Italy	460,000	947,000	530,000
United States	115,000	206,000	4500
Germany	1,808,000	4,247,000	618,000
Austria-Hungary	1,200,000	3,620,000	2,200,000
Turkey	325,000	400,000

Of the 947,000 British killed, 723,000 were from the British Isles; of the 2.1 million wounded, 1.7 million were from the British Isles. The upper and upper-middle classes were hit quite hard, with 20% of Oxbridge graduates killed

Society and the Great War
1. The tone of society remained plutocratic and elitist, although less flamboyantly so. The working class benefited the most through full employment and higher wages, while the upper and middle classes held on by absorbing losses in revenue, rising inflation, and more taxes.
2. One big change took place in gender relations as more women left their homes or domestic service to do war work in hospitals, offices, factories, and fields (praised by the press). Greater independence was apparent in the shortened dresses, but this was done to save material for uniforms. The fashion continued after the war. Some intellectuals fed up with male domination and language
3. A great gap between military and civilians.
The economy and the Great War
1. Britain went to war a creditor nation, cam out a debtor
2. Financially, the center of capitalism went from London to New York; Asia and Latin America began to industrialize.
3. The British government was the chief purchaser of goods and services during the war, when the military had a "blank check," which disoriented the British economy. For example, wartime nationalization of railroads and coal mines abruptly ended afterward, when de-nationalization lowered prices and increased unemployment.
4. Economics usually analyzed by historians nationally, not internationally
Politics and the war--Arnstein's index, p. 468 (Asquith 1908-16, Lloyd George to 1922, but from 1915 to 1922, when Britain had coalitions; the Asquith-Lloyd George split Liberals and helped the Tories)
1. From 1910 to 1914, the Liberal majority was not increased in the two elections called in 1910, so it needed the Irish MPs and Labour MPs to retain power in an era rocked by Lords veto, Home Rule, unskilled workers going on strike, and suffragists willing to use direct action tactics; they got the vote in 1918.
2. Parliament was eclipsed by Downing Street and Whitehall in accord with the dictum, "war is the health of the state," its power multiplying every year of the war
3. Landslide "coupon" election at the end of 1918 entrenched the coalition led by Lloyd George, who became suspect to Liberals and a hostage of the Conservatives
Britain and the waging of the "Great War" or "1914-1918 War"
1. On the origins of the war and the first "total war"
2. The course of the war, its nature and extent, strategy and tactics-"westerners" vs. "easterners," soldiers vs. politicians.
3. War censorship, propaganda, and "war aims"
Britain at Versailles in 1919, and at League of Nations to 1922
1. Made Germany pay, fought against Russia's Bolsheviks; sought the "balance of power" in Europe, took "lion's share" of Middle East and Africa; used "big stick" to repress nationalism in India and throughout the empire
2. British White Dominions sick of Downing Street -- Chanak
3. British Conservatives outraged by Lloyd George's Irish policy
Metropolitan Britain, 1922-1939: The large shadow cast by the war and its immediate aftermath continued to be apparent to all during the period until the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. The great metropolis of London still exercised dominance over the rest of the country, but its hold on the empire and influence upon the world lessened.
Demography in the interwar period
1. The 1911 census was the last double-digit increase in Britain's population, dropping to less than 5% after the war, with England, Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland going from 44 million in 1921 to 46 in 1931. This relative decline is all the more significant since emigration from Britain virtually ceased in the 1920s. The birth rate only managed to stay ahead of the death rate, with birth control more widespread
2. A larger percentage of the population was older
The postwar economy slipped behind its financial as well as industrial competitors
1. As before the war, Britain continued to import more than it exported, but no longer was the difference made up by "invisible exports: i.e., shipping, banking, insurance, and investments based on the British currency tied to the gold standard. Post-war Britain was weaker so investors when nervous sold off their pounds sterling. The British tried in 1925 to restore investor confidence by returning to the gold standard and holding the British currency to the 1914 level of one pound equaling $4.86, which proved harmful..
2. In the 1920s, non-interventionist governments cut expenditures, kept interest rates high, and reduced wages as preferable to protectionism, which the British also adopted in the 1930s, when the world-wide depression hit and Britain had to go off the gold standard.
3. The coal that had empowered steam technology gave way to electricity, the latter being produced by coal except for hydroelectric resources in Scotland and northern England.
4. Britain's industrial sector lagged in the old staples of cheap cotton textiles, hardware, coal, and simple machinery
5. The engineering sector did improve with complex machines
6. Agriculture was protected by import quotas, not tariffs
7. In transport, the internal combustion machine meant cars for the rich and coaches for the rest, reduced railway travel. The government nationalized London Transport, nationalized two subsidized airlines, and poured millions into two Atlantic liners.
8. British exports halved from 1929 to 1930, with unemployment hitting its peak and wholesale prices at their lowest in mid-1932, when 25% of England, 33% of Welsh were unemployed and a total of 7 million people got some kind of government assistance. The unemployed were most numerous in the older industrialized north and west that were tied to coal mining, shipbuilding, railways, and textiles, while the service sector concentrated in the southeast still grew.
Society--more British identified with their class than their country or empire
1. Women and workers lost most of their gains from the war and the powerful plutocracy and elitist education remained dominant.
2. Tremendous housing shortages in London and cities despite the government getting the private sector involved
3. Class consciousness increased, with the three classes more suspicious of each other especially with the contrast between "the bright young things" and those on the "dole" as well as the ideological divisions tearing Europe apart, with central and eastern Europe terrified of the Communists and turning fascist, along with Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Only northwestern Europe and Scandinavia avoided fascism.
Culture--Americanization continued, but hit all classes after the war and there was some resistance to Yankee takeovers
1. The BBC radio became a bastion of the British way
2. The upper classes very identified with the U.S.
Politics, striving for "business as usual" with poor leadership
1. The soldiers get fed up, with some turning to Oswald Moseley's Blackshirts, Britain's fascist movement; and some ideologues looking to the Soviet model for change
2. The Conservatives dominated the national political scene
3. The Labour Party became the main opposition party, but collaborated in coalitions with the Conservatives in the 1920s and the 1930s under Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay Macdonald.
4. The League of Nations seemed to be working until the rise of nationalism among "revisionist powers" that wanted to revise the Versailles settlement of 1919.
5. After the Great Depression, Britain got on the bandwagon of economic nationalism at Ottawa Conference early in the 1930s
6. Fear of war and Pacifism in Britain during the early 1930s
7. U.S. indictment of Munich and idealization of Churchill
Metropolitan Britain before, during, and after the Great War, 1914-1918, found society more divided, its economy less competitive in the world, its politics more divided by ideology, its culture more nationalized, but still ridden with class consciousness, elitism, and insularity.