Britain in 1800

Jeremy Black describes the impact of the French Wars on the islands and the shifting landscape wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

In 1800 Britain was at war, a war that pressed on every household. Although the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars may seem distant from our standard view of the period, which is one largely based on the televising of Jane Austen's novels (such as Pride and Prejudice begun in 1796 or 1797 although not published until 1811), they impinged on every aspect of life and on society as a whole. Taxes rose, trade was disrupted, goods were produced for the war effort, men were recruited and killed, and families were left to grieve.

With the misleading benefit of distant hindsight, the war appears less of a crisis than it was to contemporaries. 1798 was the year of Nelson's triumph at the Battle of the Nile, a decisive naval victory that put paid to Napoleon's dream of dominating the overland route to India. The image and reality of British naval power was further strengthened by victory over the Danes at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. These naval triumphs seem to lead towards Nelson's final victory, over a Franco-Spanish fleet, at Trafalgar in 1805, to the success of the British expeditionary force in the Peninsular War of 1808-13, and to the Duke of Wellington's victory at Waterloo in 1815. When combined with British triumphs in India - the fall of the Mysore capital Seringapatam in 1799 and Wellington's victories over the Marathas at Assaye and Argaum in 1803 - the picture is of a nation resolute, resourceful and finally triumphant.

No such comforting vista was open to contemporaries. Instead, the French capture of Amsterdam in 1795 had brought to a close the most disastrous campaign for the British in the Low Countries in over a century. An attempt to challenge the French position by invading Holland in 1799 led to a humiliating failure that left its legacy with the nursery rhyme about its commander, Frederick, Duke of York, a younger son of George III. The following year, attempted landings at Belle Isle, Ferrol and Cadiz all failed and Cornwallis described the army as 'the laughing stock of Europe'. A French landing in Pembrokeshire had been defeated in 1797 and in 1798 both an Irish rising and a supporting French landing were crushed, but the situation was precarious.

In 1801-2, the collapse of the Second Coalition of powers against France led to negotiations between Britain and France, but the Peace of Amiens of 1802 solved little and by 1803 the two powers were at war again: disagreements over particular issues were less serious than mutual distrust.

There was also instability at home and widespread hardship. The cost and economic disruption of the war pressed hard, leading to inflation, the collapse of the gold standard under which the Bank of England suspended its obligation to convert paper money to gold on demand (1797), the introduction of income tax, and the stagnation of average real wages. The years 1795-96 and 1799-1801, especially, were years of dearth. The real wages of Lancashire cotton weavers fell by more than a half from 1792 to 1799. In 1797, parts of the navy mutinied over conditions: the fleet at the Nore began to blockade the Thames until quelled by firm action.

Concern about radicalism and economic unrest led to the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, which made combinations of employees (trade unions) for improved pay or conditions illegal. The Luddite riots of 1812 in the Midlands and the North challenged any sense of industrial order across much of England. Numerous attacks on knitting frames in Nottinghamshire in 1812 led the government to send 2,000 troops to the county, and more than 12,000 were deployed overall to deal with this particular form of popular unrest.

Despite this, the country did not collapse. The greater popularity of George III in the 1790s helped. The King cultivated the image of being a father to all and did not inspire the negative feelings that focused on his French and Spanish counterparts. The association of radicalism with the French also helped to damn it for most (but not all) people, not least because of the anarchy, terror and irreligion associated with the Revolutionary governments. British patriotism received a new boost in the lengthy struggle, which was less divisive than the War of American Independence of 1775-83. In response to the French Revolutionaries and their British supporters, nationalism was defined in a conservative fashion, and conservatism was increasingly nationalist in tone and content. War with France was justified on moral grounds and Loyalism was a genuine mass movement. The widespread Volunteer movement against the French threat helped raise forces to repel any planned invasion. The number of militia rose to over 100,000 in the mid-1790s, and Volunteer numbers were comparable.

In the 1800s, God Save the King came to be called the national anthem. His kingdom was changing in many ways. The Irish rising of 1798 encouraged an Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1800 which came into effect on January 1st, 1801. Following the 1707 Union between England (and Wales) and Scotland, this created a single state for the entire British Isles, although it was to have only limited success in producing a lasting primary British identity. Alongside any notion of such an identity, national allegiances remained, particularly in Ireland.

Organised and effective resistance to British authority in Ireland had collapsed on June 16th, 1798, when the United Irishmen had been defeated at Vinegar Hill by a larger force supported by effective artillery. However, in County Wicklow a band under Michael Dwyer continued to defy the government, successfully employing guerrilla tactics, until Dwyer surrendered in 1803 in the aftermath of nationalist Robert Emmet's unsuccessful rising in Dublin. Having prepared a force of about a hundred men, Emmet marched on Dublin Castle on July 23rd, 1803, but his poorly organised men were dispersed by the garrison and the rising collapsed within an afternoon. An Irish element was also prominent in Edward Despard's plot to seize the Tower of London and the Bank of England and to kill George III on his way to open Parliament in 1802. Betrayed by informants, the conspirators were arrested, tried and hanged.

Identification with the idea of Britain and the benefits of the British empire ensured that the situation in Scotland was very different from that in Ireland. Scotland was affected by the same trends as England and Wales, not least the industrialisation, migration and urbanisation that reflected the growth of coal-based industries and the technology of steam. The nineteenth century was to see the development of a sense of national identity centring on a re-emergent cultural identity that did not involve any widespread demand for independence: kilts and literary consciousness, but no home rule party. The religious dimension, so obvious in Ireland, was lacking.

The visual landscape of the new state was changing, a process encouraged by the war. This was true both of enclosure and of the expansion of the metallurgical industries to provide munitions. The enclosure of land for farming, given serious momentum by a series of Enclosure Acts pushed forwards hard in the 1790s and 1800s, made it easier to control and enhanced the prospects for investment in more efficient agricultural regimes, such as rotations that included nitrogenous crops, for example clover. However, enclosing landowners caused serious disruption of traditional rights and expectations, common lands and routes. Those without land lost out badly, especially with the loss of communal grazing rights. Their response was often hostile. There were many disturbances, as in Caernarvonshire in 1809, 1810 and 1812. This was not a rural society of simple deference and order, but one in which the hegemony of the landowners was widely seen as selfish, and as replacing custom by harsh statutory enactments.

Landed society celebrated its position and spent its money on splendid stately homes and on the surrounding grounds. In place of geometric patterns, the latter had been laid out for much of the previous century in a naturalistic parkland style developed by 'Capability' Brown. This was to become part of the visual character of Englishness, a counterpoint to the hedgerows of the enclosed worked landscape. Both reflected the power relationships of the period.

The land was expected to feed a population that, after a period of stagnation, had been rapidly growing for over fifty years. The population of England and Wales rose from 6.2 million in 1751 to 8.61 in 1801. The average age of women at first marriage fell from the 1730s to the 1830s, a factor that helps to account for the rise in fertility. Infant mortality rates dropped in the second half of the eighteenth century, while death in childbirth fell throughout the century, and adult death rates had decreased particularly during the first half.

More of this growing population lived in the towns. The most important by far was London. In 1700, it had more than half-a-million people and in 1800 more than a million, making it the most populous European city and over ten times larger than the second city in England. As a result, notions of urban life were established by the capital. Through its central role in the world of print, London shaped news, opinion and fashion. It was the centre of finance and government, law and trade. The West End of London established the 'classical' style of Georgian town building. London helped promote the interaction of middle-class and aristocratic thinking and values, and also to secure the influence of commercial considerations upon national policy. Furthermore, it helped to mould a national economic space, although specialisation for the London market was accompanied by the persistence of more local economic patterns.

Other towns also expanded. In 1700, there were only five English towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants: Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle, Exeter and York. By 1800, the number (twenty-seven) included important industrial and commercial centres in the North and Midlands, such as Birmingham, Bolton, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Stoke, Sunderland and Wolverhampton. Other industrial and commercial towns also grew. Thus, in south-west England, the ports of Plymouth and Falmouth became far more important.

Although there was much poverty and misery in towns, urban economies were helped by the growing commercialisation of life and by the rise of professions such as law and medicine. New covered markets and shops were opened, as were banks and insurance offices. In a world of 'things', where greater numbers could afford to purchase objects and services of utility and pleasure, towns played a central function as providers of services as much as of commercial and industrial facilities. Theatres, assembly rooms, subscription libraries and shops all provided services to townspeople and to the nearby rural populations and helped bring renewed cultural activity to provincial centres.

Towns were also the nodes of a transport system that had improved greatly with the construction of turnpike roads. By 1770, there were 15,000 miles of turnpike roads in England and most of the country was within 12.5 miles of one. The efficiency of the road system was also improved by bridge-building. In London, Westminster Bridge built in 1750 was followed by new bridges across the Thames at Blackfriars (1769), Vauxhall (1816), Waterloo (1817) and Southwark (1819). The iron Wear Bridge, built by Rowland Burdon in 1796, was the first bridge in Sunderland and was regarded as a great achievement of the age.

Travel was also made faster and more predictable by the development of stagecoach services, the replacement of leather straps by steel coach springs, and the cross-breeding of fast Arab horses. The time of a journey from Manchester to London fell from three days in 1760 to twenty-eight hours in 1788. By 1783, there were twenty-five coach departures a week from Norwich to London, as well as two departures of stage wagons. Road transport of freight improved due to the introduction in the 1760s of flywagons; thanks to changing teams of horses, these could travel day and night, covering forty miles every twenty-four hours.

Speed was less important for the coal moved by the new canals developed from the 1750s, which cut the cost of transporting bulk goods. By 1790, when the Forth-Clyde Canal was finished, the industrial areas of the Midlands were linked to the Trent, Mersey, Severn and Thames. This was not new technology, but the rate of canal construction reflected demand from a rapidly burgeoning economy as well as the availability of investment and a sense that change was attainable and could be profitably directed.

The British also led the way with the technology and practice of rail transport. Wagonways had existed for many years, with horses drawing wagons along rails, especially from collieries to the coal-loading staithes on the Tyne and Wear. The Surrey Iron Railway Company, the world's first railway company and public railway, operated between Wandsworth and Croydon from 1803. Self-propelled steam locomotives changed the situation, not least by making long-distance movement possible. In 1804, Roger Hopkins built a tramroad between Pen-y-darren and Abercynon in South Wales upon which Richard Trevithick tried the first steam railway locomotive engine, essentially a mobile beam engine.

Locomotive technology achieved a breakthrough in the 1820s. The development of the locomotive from the stationary steam-engine provided the technology for the rail revolution, and industrialisation supplied the necessary demand, capital and skills. George Stephenson opened the Hetton Railway in 1822, and the more famous Stockton and Darlington Railway followed in 1825.

The sense that change could be created was crucial to what is termed the Industrial Revolution: a belief in its possibility and profitability fired growth. This was a case not only of an important increase in the scale of activity, but also of changes in the nature of the economy, society and culture. The role of industry as a source of wealth and employment rose. Industrialisation contributed powerfully to a culture of improvement, a conviction that modern achievements were superior to those of former times, and an at times heroic exultation of the new world of production, seen in paintings of industrial scenes such as de Loutherbourg's 'Coalbrookdale by Night'.

Coal and steam power were increasingly important. Coal was a readily transportable and controllable fuel and was plentifully available in many areas. It replaced wood, which, with its greater bulk for calorific value and less readily controllable heat, was a poor basis for many industrial processes. Coal also freed the economy from its earlier energy constraints, reducing costs and increasing the availability of heat energy. Coal production rose from about 3 million tons in 1700 to 15 million by 1800, with the rate of growth accelerating from mid-century. Combined with the application of steam power to coal mining, blast furnaces, and the new rolling and slitting mills, this led to a new geography of economic activity. Industry was increasingly attracted to the coalfields, especially to north-east England, south Wales, south Lancashire and south Staffordshire. James Watt's improvements to the steam engine made it more energy efficient and flexible. In the 1790s, developments in metallurgy made it easier to produce malleable iron. Henry Cort's method of puddling and rolling, invented in 1784, but not adopted until the 1790s, produced malleable iron with coal more cheaply than the charcoal forge and refinery. War encouraged the development of iron production. The largest town in Wales in 1801, Merthyr Tydfil, was the leading centre of iron production in the world. Other industries such as textiles also benefited greatly from technical developments which increased productivity and created a sense of on-going improvement.

While it is important not to exaggerate the scale of economic change, especially the numbers of factories and steam engines, it was more extensive in Britain than elsewhere in Europe or the world, and industrialisation was to make Britain's economy the most powerful in the world. The cumulative impact of often slow and uneven progress was impressive by the end of the century, and, by then, the rate of industrial growth had risen markedly.

The population rose rapidly in industrialising areas on or close to the coalfields: in County Durham from about 70,000 in 1700 to 150,000 by 1801. The economic geography of Britain changed. In 1801, the average figure per head for expenditure on poor relief was far lower in the industrial counties, such as Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, than in those with little industry, such as Sussex, or with declining industries, such as Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.

As yet the plight of the industrialised workforce did not engage the attention of many writers. The 'Condition of England' novels lay in the future. However, literary figures such as Robert Burns (1759-96) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) were engaged with the politics of the period and were far from presenting culture simply as aesthetic concern. The eighteenth century had seen the development of the novel, a process particularly associated with Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson in the 1740s. The use of the vernacular had long been a characteristic of written works, but Britain was also well integrated into European cultural patterns which, in the late eighteenth century, principally entailed the complex, multifaceted and indeed disparate movement known as Romanticism.

Given the importance today of the issue of Euro-convergence, it is worth noting that the co-operation with other powers which Britain sought against France in 1793-1815 did not encourage any real sense of affinity. Instead, a sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness, already well engrained, became stronger during the period. The experience of the Napoleonic wars underscored a patriotic discourse on British distinctiveness, while simultaneously creating a new iconography of national military heroes. Robert Southey (1774-1843), who became Poet Laureate in 1813, wrote patriotic accounts of Nelson, Wellington and the 1st Duke of Marlborough.

There was also an alternative model, deployed in the 1790s by radicals such as Tom Paine. On March 15th, 1792, the Argus, a radical London newspaper, declared triumphantly: However strenuously the ministerial papers may labour to keep John Bull in ignorance, it is certain he begins to look about him, and to ask the why and the wherefore of many things, which appear unnecessary and oppressive.

Radicalism powerfully revived after peace came in 1815, but in the meanwhile it was weakened by a rallying to church and crown.

As these were also years of imperial expansion, Empire came to be powerfully associated with the conservative patriotism of the period. Colonial expansion was generally welcomed, although the theme of the corruption, financial, political and moral, brought by such power was sounded, especially in the trial of Warren Hastings.

The nature of the British Empire and of the English-speaking world altered dramatically in 1775-1815. In 1775, all English-speakers were subjects of the British crown, while the majority of such subjects outside Britain (and the West Indies) were white, Christian, of British, or at least European, origin, and were ruled with an element of local self-government, albeit not to the satisfaction of many in the Thirteen Colonies in North America.

The American Revolution brought a permanent schism to the English-speaking world although it ensured that aspects of British culture, society and ideology, albeit in greatly refracted forms, were to enjoy great influence, outside and after the span of the British Empire. Meanwhile, the conquests and peace settlements of 1793-1815 changed the character of the Empire, not least by bringing numerous non-white and non-Christian people under British control. Some of these gains, such as the Seychelles, Mauritius, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia, Cape Colony and British Guyana, were achieved at the expense of other European powers, while others, especially in India, were gains at the expense of non-European rulers. The distinctive feature of the post-medieval European empires was their desire and ability to project their power across the globe. In this period, Britain was clearly most successful in doing so. It had gained that advantage over the French in the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and successfully defended it in 1798-1801 by thwarting the French attempt to establish themselves in Egypt. In 1799, the British helped block Napoleon's advance into Palestine, and in 1801, their forces successfully landed in Egypt and forced the French there to capitulate.

It is significant that we close, as we began, with war. War cannot be written out of any account of how Britain, despite its relatively small population, transformed itself into the great world empire and the leading commercial and industrial power on the globe. There was nothing inevitable about this process, and it helps to explain the strong sense of precariousness that affected contemporaries.

Further Reading
F. O'Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century (Arnold, 1997); W. Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History 1660-1815 (Oxford University Press, 1998); R. Price, British Society 1680-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); J. Black, Britain as a Military Power 1688-1815 (University College London, 1999).

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at Exeter University

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