624 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0525557890
If I could go back in time and be anything I wanted to be, I would be a member of the English landed gentry in the 19th Century (Did that rhyme? Total accident): I would be born on Sunday, June 18th, 1815 (the same day as the Battle of Waterloo) and assume room temperature on Friday, May 6th, 1910 (the same as Edward VII), and for the whole of my life I would glory in the name of Briton, because man, the era of the Pax Britannia was second to none – if you were born right. That comes across plain as day in David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800 – 1906 as he charts the rise and rise of Britain from Small Islands to Top Nation and the men who made it happen (yes, it was all men; Queen Victoria may have given her name to the era but all the Big Decisions were made by men. Deal).
As to the timeframe chosen by the author, it corresponds to the Acts of Union in 1800, in which the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland resolved to unite the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland and create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Scotland having been united with England in 1707); the acts came into force on January 1st 1801 with the merged Parliament of the United Kingdom sitting for the first time on January 22nd, 1801. It ends with the landslide Parliamentary victory of the Liberal Party in 1906 in which the Conservatives under Arthur Balfour lost more than half their seats (including Balfour’s own, in Manchester East), leaving the Conservatives with its fewest recorded seats ever in history. Ouch. Talk about a political spanking.
As to Cannadine’s opinion of this most-important of eras, it can be best encapsulated in his quoting Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. In his telling, Britain was able to establish and maintain its status as a global power because of its leading role in the Industrial Revolution and her Royal Navy, the largest in the world at the time. However, severe internal problems and social conflicts rocked the nation, as well, leading to the Reform Act of 1832, the Chartist movement and the Reform Act of 1867, to name but three. With Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne in 1837 a new era bearing her name opened for Britain in which active enthusiasm and the drive for a globe-spanning empire became the driving task of both the right-wing Conservative and left-wing Liberal Parties.
The Great Exhibition in 1851 is justly seen as a
milestone in British cultural and imperial history, but none of the important
wars, exploratory expeditions or cultural achievements are short-changed. The statesmen
of the victorious century are also examined, especially William Pitt, Robert
Peel, Viscount Palmerston, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli and more,
besides. The book analyzes Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee as a fitting tribute to
the Queen’s reign that saw her nation become the largest empire in history and
claim dominion over 412 million people (23% of the world population at the time)
and cover 13,700,000 square miles (24% of the Earth’s total land area). By the
time Cannadine concludes his history, the might of Britain looked permanent and
unshakeable to all the world, the Brits especially.
That it would be rocked by the first European Ragnarök of 1914-18 and still sputter on through the second of 1939-45 is a testament to its strength and stability…alas, its end seems almost inevitable by today’s lights, as all of the diverse peoples around the globe at last found their footing and decided that they would much prefer their native bad government than foreign good government, thank you very much. That the British Empire ended as all empires end is not a testament to failure but rather a statement of honor, for so many of its former holdings have established and maintained the Westminster form of Parliamentary democracy that the Mother Country bestowed upon them. As Victorious Century shows, when the balance sheet is drawn up, Britain’s positive ledger is greater than its negative.
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