The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  At the same time, it is important to remember that the fortunes of Great Britain had been tied to Europe ever since the Middle Ages. Events in other parts of the globe were viewed as an extension of the European balance of power. More recently, the Glorious Revolution, the wars against Louis XIIV, the support of France and Spain for the Jacobite revolts and the War of the Austrian Succession were all powerfully influenced by events elsewhere in Europe. Between 1689 and 1702, Britain shared a crown with the Dutch while in 1714 she became dynastically linked with a German electorate. Her connections with Europe could scarcely have been more complete. Furthermore, Britain experienced the continent, often at first hand. Britons went in huge numbers on the Grand Tour, they discovered European – especially Italian – opera, bought art from Europe and employed European architects and landscape gardeners. In economic terms, English cloth exports were hugely dependent upon European markets and the development of Levantine, Baltic and Mediterranean trade further bound her to the continent. Some of the features of British agriculture and industrial development could be found across the channel: East Anglian agricultural innovations could be found in Holland, her canal building techniques were used in Russia.13

  In many ways, British society resembled those of several of her continental neighbours. Her society was hierarchical and rural, and her ruling class was a small and privileged aristocracy. The monarchy and the court were the central hubs around which political life revolved. Pan-European themes ran through eighteenth-century British history and have their counterparts across Europe. Furthermore, many aspects of British politics resembled those of a European state such as France. The crown in Parliament was all powerful. (Indeed, the elimination of the powers of the Highland chiefs after the ‘45 could not have happened in France, where the government lacked the power to override local separatism in this manner.) The British fiscal-military state, characterized by its growing bureaucracy, was as powerful as any in Europe. The idea that Britain was treading a unique and exceptional path to constitutional government while her European neighbours were stumbling along the road to absolutism can no longer be accepted unthinkingly. Traditional assumptions that the British ruling order willingly taxed itself in the cause of constitutionalism have had to be revised. It was her ability to raise loans, not to impose taxes, which underpinned British capacity to wage war. Furthermore, there were many practical limitations upon the practice of absolutism in Europe. Strong central government everywhere required cooperation, not compulsion. Britain was like many European states in her ‘composite’ character, her union of crowns and the existence of different nations under the same monarch.

  However, there was no single European standard of an ancien régime state. France differed from Spain, from the Scandinavian countries, from Holland, from Prussia, from Poland and from Russia. The massive variations in the power enjoyed by monarchs and the number of large and important states in which monarchs were self-evidently not absolute – Britain, Sweden, Poland, Holland – and the irrelevance of the label of ‘absolutism’ to so many parts of central and eastern Europe does not change the fact that there were broad similarities between these states: they were hierarchical, they were Christian, they were monarchical. There are differences between them, and these differences explain varying patterns of political change and development in different parts of Europe. Even Professor Clark has noted that ‘in respect of their ideological structure, there were at least three equally viable forms of the ancien regime: Roman Catholic, non-Calvinist Protestant and Russian Orthodox’.14 Nevertheless, the fact that Britain may have differed in some respects from her neighbours does not devalue the notion of Britain as a European state.

  And the differences between states do matter and they came to have important implications. For example, British economic life was different in many respects from that of her neighbours, notably France. The French economy was subject to structural crises of food production of unusual severity, perfectly exemplified by the decade of the 1780s, and France’s vulnerability to famine continued into the nineteenth century. That was not the case in Britain, where famine during most of the long eighteenth century was largely a thing of the past. The productivity of French agriculture was only half that of Britain. As a consequence, Britain had a surplus rural population which flocked into the towns. After the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, Britain constituted the largest free-trade area in Europe, while the French economy was still held back by internal tolls and local Estates. There were, moreover, important political differences. In Britain, the position of Parliament in the political system was guaranteed through its role in public finance, which reinforced the power of the state. By comparison, there was nothing in France to compare with the power and reputation of the House of Commons. There were after 1707 no local assemblies or Estates in Britain, and with the exception of the corporate towns, few privileged bodies of any kind. Its involvement in agrarian and industrial capitalism and its strong sense of personal service distinguished the British aristocracy from the French yet fundamental similarities underpin the respective situations of both aristocracies, and, indeed, rural elites all over Europe. In any case, its involvement in agrarian and industrial capitalism may have distinguished the British aristocracy from her European counterparts, but there are examples of such involvement in many parts of Europe and Britain was not obviously set on a different kind of trajectory from that of her neighbours. Many of the differences between them may be accounted for by their differing levels of political development. Britain was late to develop her central administrative institutions; in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they were not overburdened with debt or weakened by corruption. The government was thus relatively free to innovate and to establish efficient systems of tax collection and state borrowing. As for countries like France and Spain, which experienced administrative centralization earlier, this was not the case.

  Eighteenth-century Britain was a successful European power and contemporaries were just as likely to compare her to Sweden or Holland as to France. It was natural that the frequency of her wars against France led many observers to examine the differences between Britain and France and contrast France’s absolutist regime with Britain’s system on the basis of limited monarchy and parliamentary government. No wonder that many of them may have been blinded through prejudice to the similarities between French and British social and political systems, but which historians may now recognize. But in Britain, as well as in other countries, there was no reason why rapid social and economic change should have been a threat to the prevailing, traditional monarchical and aristocratic regime. In this, of course, the contribution of the ‘polite and commercial people’ of the middling orders, as Paul Langford has termed them, was outstanding. Their importance, as well as their number, was increasing. In addition, the regime itself welcomed their participation and approved their involvement, especially at the local level. Furthermore, it was the economic and political demands of the government itself which acted as a catalyst for many aspects of that involvement. For example, the credit demands of eighteenth-century governments rendered their own securities an admirable vehicle for middle-class investment. Down to the early nineteenth century, at least, the middling orders were prepared to pay for the ‘fiscal-military state’ and to enjoy the economic and political benefits which flowed from it. There was no obvious reason why forces of change should threaten the established order, for it was not only the traditional institutions of church and state which preserved and strengthened the old order in Britain, but also the newer forces of commerce and civil progress. Indeed, the revenues and institutions of the state depended on the taxes of the middling orders, the customs dues of commerce, the trade of the empire, the strength of the navy and the wealth of the City of London.

  Yet, Jonathan Clark finds ‘no room ... for bourgeois modernity’. ‘Until the evolution of class’, he writes, ‘hierarchical subordination was scarcely dissolved.’15 It may not have been ‘dissolve
d’ and it certainly continued to exist, as it had in almost all societies in the past; but it was not unaffected by the new demands of commerce and consumerism. The traditional elite had to make concession after concession to the values of commerce and trade. It was the very nature of the Hanoverian elite to adapt and change with the times. Aristocratic superiors would legitimately seek to exercise their supremacy within a social framework which recognized mutual dependence. Aristocratic domination was always less than complete and it always depended upon careful patterns of negotiation and compromise. As we have seen, aristocratic ‘control’ of the electoral system, for example, so complete and ‘hegemonic’ when viewed from afar, looks very different when examined more closely.16 The values that regulated the electoral system were not handed down by the aristocracy but were the product of decades of negotiation between the needs of the community and those of local patrons. In such ways, the leadership of the ruling order was conditional upon the fulfilment of widely accepted needs. It could only be maintained by negotiation, concession and accommodation. The seeds of the ultimate transformation of the Hanoverian regime lay not merely in the forces to which it was exposed during the long eighteenth century but in the essential, reciprocal features of the regime itself.

  What, then, were the distinctive features of the Hanoverian regime at mid-century? As in many European states, the continued prominence of church, aristocracy and monarchy provided some, but only some, elements of social stability, other elements of which stemmed from the social and economic developments noted for Britain by Professor Holmes. The influence of the church had peaked by mid-century, while aristocratic power was more deeply embedded in the social structure and more limited and conditional in its exercise than is normally appreciated. The one-party rule of the Whigs was triumphant, but the vitality of its party cohesion was weakening. Mid-eighteenth-century Britain derived enormous strength and stability from her monarchy, but she derived no little strength, too, from her ability to discipline and limit the powers of the monarchy and what remained of its pretensions. Furthermore, while Britain did derive strength from her aristocracy and church, she derived increasing strength, too, from commerce and consumption, from the fiscal-military state, from the new bureaucratic and financial structures and from the incorporation of the middling orders into the political and social structures of the age. Furthermore, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain was expanding its empire, experimenting with new imperial institutions and becoming an imperial nation. To these developments we now turn.

  NOTES

  1.J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (1967), p. xviii.

  2.Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, pp. 18, 23, 179–82.

  3.G. Holmes, ‘The Achievement of Stability: The Social Context of Politics from the 1680s to the Age of Walpole’, in J. A. Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (1981).

  4.Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761), Bishop of Bangor, was made a royal chaplain on the accession of George I as a reward for his services to the Whig cause. His sermon of March 1717, ‘A Preservative against Non-jurors’, was a remarkably low-church statement which came close to stripping the church of its doctrinal and disciplinary authority. Not surprisingly, the sermon threw the church into turmoil and provoked a full-scale pamphlet war which attracted over 200 titles.

  5.Here, as elsewhere, Newcastle’s importance has been exaggerated. He did not appoint over the heads of the bishops; he did not even monopolize recommendations to George II, who was more active in ecclesiastical appointments than has been assumed. See S. Taylor, ‘The Duke of Newcastle and the Crown’s Ecclesiastical Patronage’, Albion, 24(3) (1992), pp. 409–33.

  6.J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), pp. 55–6, 141–60, 199–204, 277; 417–18. J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Prosperity: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth Century Political Thought (1983), pp. 141–64.

  7.The works of Lewis Namier found little room for the Anglican church, and Plumb, Thompson, Porter and other writers of the 1960s and 1970s treat the church with hostility as a secularized arm of the state, reinforcing privilege and defending property.

  8.More recently – and certainly since the first edition of this book was published in 1997 – historians have emphasized the spiritual vitality within the church’s ministry. See, inter alia W. Gibson, The Church of England, 1688-1832 (2001); J. Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660-1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their diocese (2000).

  9.D. Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: from the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (1996).

  10.Queen Anne’s Bounty (1704) was an attempt to overcome the problems of clerical poverty. The queen surrendered her right to take First Fruits and Tenths, taxes on the clergy inherited from the papacy in the sixteenth century. The money went into a fund, separately administered, and was used to raise the stipends of poor clerics.

  11.D. Hempton, ‘Religion in British Society, 1740–90’, in J. Black (ed.), British Society and Politics from Walpole to Pitt, 1742–89 (1990), p. 205.

  12.Clark, English Society, p. 7.

  13.For one statement of Britain’s similarities with Europe, see S. Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence, Oxford University Press (2000), pp. 1–6.

  14.J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1986), p. 79.

  15.Clark, English Society, pp. 94, 118.

  16.See above, pp. 147–50.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Patriotism and Empire, 1756–1789

  COMMERCE AND EMPIRE

  The subject of the British Empire in the eighteenth century has attracted enormous attention from historians in recent years. It has been found to intersect with issues such as identity, gender and race, especially when investigated through the prisms of cultural history and criticism. Historians now believe that the empire exercised a strong and varied influence upon British life, culture, theatre, art and literature and even patterns of taste and consumption. Furthermore, ‘the empire’ or some subsection on empire such as ‘the Atlantic’, can provide an alternative context to Europe in which to situate British history and against which to understand the international or even global flow of services, people and their customs. Indeed, the English Atlantic stood out from other nations’ Atlantics because of the sheer size and intensity of the flows of trade communication and exchange. The empire thus constitutes an arena in which the British nations could grow and facilitate the creation of networks which channelled experience and ideas, and shaped the visions in which many people lives their lives.

  Amidst the excitement of the ‘Atlantic’ interpretation of the eighteenth-century empire, it is wise to reflect that for much of the century imperial and naval matters were almost certainly subservient to issues relating to the European balance of power. The empire was acquired not as a separate commitment but as a projection of European issues. Indeed, both before and after 1714 Britain had already involved herself ever more deeply into North European diplomacy, while needing to deal with Spanish and French ambitions in the Mediterranean. Imperial acquisitions were treated as contributing to the safety and security of Britain within Europe.

  The development of the British Empire in the eighteenth century was a logical extension of a domestic regime which was assertive, expansionist and, on occasion, even belligerent. Britain was a product of English imperialism, seen in the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) and the Declaratory Act of 1720, which defined the subordinate relationship of Ireland. Only a strong and coherent state could found and maintain a strong and seemingly coherent empire. The political hegemony of England within Britain was a partial consequence of her economic supremacy. The ‘backwardness’ of the Celtic countries has been grotesquely exaggerated, but it remains true that England was economically in advance of her neighbours and sought to maintain that position b
y using their economies to service her own. In this sense England adopted a ‘colonial’ policy within Britain, just as much as she did in her relations with her overseas possessions. Many of the attitudes, as well as some of the practices, of empire grew out of English dominance of Britain.

  Commerce and empire inescapably became prominent issues of the very greatest importance in Hanoverian Britain – and not just England. Whig ministers may have been willing to allow the internal government of the country to be devolved down to local landed families, but they were determined to take direct responsibility for commercial and imperial matters. In this scheme of things, it was the first duty of the state to promote the national economy by protecting sources of raw materials and by expanding its international markets. Building upon the experiences of the period 1689–1713 and the peacetime lessons of commercial expansion following the Treaty of Utrecht, the ruling elite at mid-century was building a British state whose strength derived not from territorial expansion but from commerce, from the growth of a commercially orientated empire and the existence of powerful marine as well as territorial forces.1 Britain was becoming a trading nation. There was nothing anomalous in a dynastic state flexing its commercial muscle. The landed interest had consciously promoted modernization and entrepreneurial values within a hierarchical social order. Furthermore, commercial expansion was a means of expressing Britain’s identity as a Protestant state. Until the 1740s, however, there was relatively little public support for imperial expansion. Popular fury could be aroused by alleged atrocities committed by the Bourbon powers, but that reaction should not be mistaken for a settled national commitment. The state still preferred to rule many parts of the empire through chartered companies rather than through settlement. Consequently, Britain successfully upheld a protected trading system in North America, Africa and parts of Asia, and one which even penetrated the Mediterranean and the Spanish Empire in South America. The ability of the British navy to retain command of the seas not only protected her trade routes but also maintained the confidence, and protected the investments, of the landed and commercial classes. Commerce also made a massive contribution to the state’s finances in the shape of customs duties and harbour and shipping dues. In some years, such sources were responsible for up to two-thirds of government revenue. Consequently, eighteenth-century governments could not be indifferent to trade. Ministers were usually receptive to commercial opinion and to the complaints and petitions of the mercantile lobby. Commercial pressure groups, such as the East India and West India interests, had the ear of ministers and were active, often successfully, in lobbying for favourable legislation. It was no accident that every war in which Britain was engaged in the long eighteenth century was a commercial war in which colonial issues loomed large. ‘The overwhelming preoccupation of the Hanoverian state was with funding and directing the kingdom’s foreign, strategic and commercial policies.’2 Consequently, over 80 per cent of all public money spent on goods and services between 1689 and 1815 was spent on these, and related, items. These enormous expenditures of money were profitable investments for the economic development of Britain and her empire.