United Kingdom

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources of the United Kingdom; People and Society of the United Kingdom; Culture and the Arts of the United Kingdom; Economy of the United Kingdom; Government of the United Kingdom; History of the United Kingdom

18th-Century British Politics

Following the union with Scotland, the British government functioned according to an unwritten constitution put in place after the Revolution of 1688. This agreement between the monarchs and Parliament provided for the succession of Anne’s German Protestant cousin, George of Hanover, and his heirs. It excluded from the throne the Catholic descendants of James II who now lived in France and who periodically attempted to regain the throne. Their supporters were known as Jacobites, and they rose in an unsuccessful rebellion in 1715. The Church of England remained the official religious establishment, but most Protestants who belonged to other churches enjoyed toleration.

The revolution also resolved the struggle for power between the monarch and Parliament, which had been an ongoing issue under the Stuarts. Parliament emerged as the leading force in government. The Hanoverians ruled as constitutional monarchs, limited by the laws of the land. During the 18th century, British monarchs ruled indirectly through appointed ministers who gathered and managed supporters in Parliament. Landowners eligible to vote elected a new House of Commons every seven years, although membership into the upper house of Parliament, the House of Lords, remained limited to hereditary and appointed lords and high church clergy. Parliament passed laws, controlled foreign policy, and approved the taxes that allowed the monarch to pay the salaries of officials, the military, and the royal family.

The Hanoverian monarchs associated the Whig Party with the revolution that brought them to power and suspected the Tory Party of Jacobitism. As a result, the Whigs dominated the governments of George I (1714-1727) and his son, George II (1727-1760). Neither king was a forceful monarch. George I spoke no English and was more interested in German politics that he was in British politics. George II was preoccupied with family problems, particularly by an ongoing personal feud with his son. Although they both were concerned with European military affairs (George II was the last British monarch to appear on a battlefield), they left British government in the hands of their ministers, the most important of whom was Sir Robert Walpole.

Walpole led British government for almost 20 years. He spent most of his life in government, first as a member of Parliament, then in increasingly important offices, and finally as prime minister. Walpole had skillful political influence over a wide range of domestic and foreign policy matters. He was chiefly interested in domestic affairs and was able to improve royal finances and the national economy. He reduced the national debt and lowered the land tax, which had slowed investment in agriculture. He secured passage of a Molasses Act in 1733 to force British colonists to buy molasses from British planters and ensure British control of the lucrative sugar trade. Walpole kept Britain out of war during most of his administration. A growing sentiment in Parliament for British involvement in European conflicts forced Walpole to resign in 1742.

British Colonial Expansion

The First British Empire

Britain already controlled many overseas areas by the 18th century. For more than 100 years English explorers had ventured east and west in search of raw materials, luxury goods, and trading partners. The eastern coast of Canada gave the British access to rich fishing grounds, New England provided timber for the Royal Navy, the southern American colonies exported tobacco, and the West Indies produced sugar and molasses. From Asia came coffee, tea, spices, and richly colored cotton cloth. Enslaved people from western Africa were sent to work on plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean.

The first British Empire sprang from the enterprises of individuals and government-sponsored trading companies. They risked money, ships, and lives to establish England’s presence around the world. The British government created royal monopolies—private companies to whom the monarch granted exclusive rights to trade in a particular region or field of commerce. For example, the East India Company had a monopoly to trade in the east, the Royal African Company to enter the slave trade, and the Hudson’s Bay Company to exploit the fisheries of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. The lands that these companies claimed became possessions of the crown, and investors bought shares in successful companies on the London Stock Exchange.

In the early 18th century optimism ran so high that speculation in one royal monopoly created one of the great financial panics in British history. The government awarded the South Seas Company a monopoly on trade with South America and the Pacific Islands. Investor interest drove the price of the company’s stock higher and higher until it reached ten times its actual value. When some of the company’s directors sold their stock, other investors panicked, and the price of the stock plummeted. Thousands of stockholders met with financial ruin when what came to be known as the South Sea Bubble collapsed in 1720.

The most important of Britain’s imperial possessions, however, were not trading posts but settled colonies in the Americas. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, settlers established communities for religious reasons; in Virginia and Barbados, farmers, tradespeople, and merchants were in search of economic opportunity. As a result of successful wars with Netherlands and Spain, England acquired New York and Jamaica, both thriving settlements. Prosperous cities sprang up along the eastern seaboard of North America in imitation of the towns of Britain. England’s colonies grew rapidly. The tens of thousands of settlers in the mainland North American colonies in 1650 grew to 1.2 million inhabitants by 1750.

The Navigation Act of 1651 regulated trade between England and its colonial outposts. The act followed an economic philosophy known as mercantilism. Under this system, governments regulated economic activities by increasing exports and limiting foreign imports in an effort to generate wealth. According to the theory of mercantilism, the value of colonies lay in their natural resources, which could be transported to Britain and converted into exportable products. The Navigation Act benefited British merchants by restricting the types of products produced in the colonies, mandating that only British ships transport products to and from the colonies, and prohibiting direct trade between the colonies and other nations. Mercantile policies made Britain the greatest center of trade in the world.

Imperial Wars

As a consequence of its military exploits under William III and John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough, Britain had become a great power. Britain’s military strength and its growing prosperity created an international rivalry among the three great colonial powers—Britain, Spain, and France.

Spain controlled extensive colonies in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Because the Spanish and British empires both employed the restrictive mercantile system to regulate trade with their colonies, Spanish and British colonies were not allowed to trade directly with one another. The Spanish navy attacked British ships when they attempted to trade in South American ports. However, Spanish traders carried on a lucrative smuggling operation with the British colonies, exchanging sugar, rum, molasses, and other goods for raw materials and agricultural products from the British colonies.

Relations were particularly tense between Britain and France. The French resented the expansion of Britain’s American colonies as well as the ban on direct trade between the colonies and non-British merchants. French territories in the Americas included Saint-Domingue (the largest of the Caribbean sugar islands), mainland North America from the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi River, and all but the easternmost part of Canada. Clashes between French and English forces became frequent in the North American colonies.

It had been Walpole’s policy to keep Britain out of European wars, but the merchants’ interest in expanding British control of overseas trading routes and the desire of the Hanoverian monarchs to protect their German properties ultimately made this impossible. In the mid-1700s Britain became embroiled in two major wars. Both the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) were world wars, fought by great armies on the European continent, by navies in the Atlantic, and by privateers in the West Indies and the spice-rich islands of Asia.

The War of the Austrian Succession erupted following the death of Charles VI, Holy Roman emperor and archduke of Austria. The war was fought over the succession of his daughter, Maria Theresa. It pitted England, the Netherlands, and Austria, who were trying to defend Maria Theresa’s succession, against an alliance of France, Spain, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony (Sachsen), and Sardinia. After eight years of fighting, the conflict ended when the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle confirmed Maria Theresa as Charles’s heir. The treaty returned almost all the conquered lands to their original owners, except for the Austrian province of Silesia, which was ceded to Prussia.

The Seven Years’ War was one of the greatest of all British triumphs. A coalition of Britain, Prussia, and Hannover fought against France, Spain, Russia, Austria, Sweden, and Saxony. The war began as a European conflict, when Maria Theresa attempted to regain Silesia from Prussia. It soon expanded into a major contest between Britain and France for control of their colonial empires.

British prime minister William Pitt, 1st earl of Chatham, engineered the expansion of the war. Pitt was known as William Pitt the Elder to differentiate him from his son, William Pitt the Younger, who served as Britain’s prime minister in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Pitt’s family made its fortune in colonial trade, and Pitt saw clearly that Britain’s best interest lay in enlarging its colonial empire rather than in dominating Europe.

Pitt backed young military leaders and supported them with the forces they needed. He was rewarded beyond all expectation. In India, Robert Clive, the governor of a small British trading post, achieved two major victories. In 1757 he captured Chandernagore, the principal French settlement in India, and at the Battle of Plassey he defeated the army of the Indian ruler of Bengal. These victories established a permanent British foothold in India. In North America, where the war was known as the French and Indian War, British general James Wolfe took Québec and drove the French from the province. At the conclusion of the war, Britain secured all French territory in Canada and east of the Mississippi and acquired Florida from Spain. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the war in 1763, represented a French surrender around the globe.

George III and the American Revolution

Domestic Politics

Although William Pitt had become a national hero, he did not survive the change of monarchs in 1760. George III came to the throne determined to rule Britain without the help of the Whigs. He chose his former tutor, Lord Bute, as his first chief minister, but quickly replaced him with a series of successors. George III was determined to participate actively in Parliament’s political decisions; this brought him into conflict with his own ministers, who foresaw parliamentary opposition to a politically active monarch. The king also faced opposition from critics such as political reformer John Wilkes, a member of Parliament who was arrested for libel when he criticized one of the king’s speeches.

Wilkes became an advocate of freedom of the press and a champion of parliamentary reform. One of Wilkes’s proposed reforms involved redrawing parliamentary districts. He advocated the elimination of rotten boroughs—parliamentary districts in depopulated rural areas. The boundaries of many of these boroughs had not been adjusted since the 15th century. In some rotten boroughs, a few dozen voters returned members to Parliament, while the entire city of Manchester went unrepresented. Parliament defeated a bill to eliminate the worst of the rotten boroughs in 1785, largely because many members of Parliament depended on the patronage system, which was controlled by politicians who came from these boroughs. “Wilkes and Liberty!” became the cry of a host of discontented groups within English society.

Colonial Unrest

Britain’s role in the imperial wars cost the country a staggering amount, and the national debt rose higher than it had ever been before. In order to lower the national debt, the king’s ministers decided to make colonial government pay for itself. Beginning in 1763 Parliament passed laws to tax colonial commodities such as sugar, glass, cider, and tea. The most controversial of these duties was the Stamp Act of 1765, which taxed legal documents and publications. Americans not only complained about the cost of these taxes, they also questioned the British government’s right to impose them. They decried being taxed by Parliament when they were not allowed representation in British government.

The American Revolution (1775-1783) divided the governing classes in Britain. Prominent intellectuals such as political philosopher Edmund Burke were accused of treachery for supporting the colonists. However, the government of Prime Minister Lord North continued to try to enforce colonial taxation. In 1775, 13 of the American colonies rebelled against British rule.

The American Revolution gave France and Spain an opportunity to strike back at the British Empire. Both supported the American colonists with money and ultimately declared war on Britain. The British army was unprepared for war in North America, and it suffered a series of humiliating defeats, culminating in the surrender of British general Charles Cornwallis to American forces at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781 (see Siege of Yorktown). The Royal Navy fared no better. When hostilities ended, Florida was returned to Spain, and the 13 rebellious colonies achieved independence as the United States of America.

Domestic problems accompanied these military disasters. In London mobs ruled the streets for nearly a week as the worst rioting of the century—the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in 1780—left 700 dead. Indignation at government incompetence in the handling of the American Revolution led to the formation of public associations to reform government. After Lord North’s ministry fell in 1782, Parliament passed several reform laws, including the Economical Reform Act, which reduced the patronage powers of the king and his ministers.

The loss of the American colonies came at great cost to Britain’s self-image. George III was blamed for the disaster, and he decided to withdraw from direct control of government. He would soon have the first of a series of bouts with porphyria that eventually left him incapable of ruling the nation.