Unit 6. Politics, Society, Economy and Culture in the 18Th Century

6. Politics, society, economy and culture in the 18th century

UNIT 6. POLITICS, SOCIETY, ECONOMY AND CULTURE IN THE 18TH CENTURY

1. THE POLITICAL CONTEXT

1.1. The Hanover Dynasty

In the 18th century, the House of Hanover succeeded the House of Stuart as monarchs of Great Britain and Ireland, and held that office until the death of Victoria in 1901. It was British determination to maintain a Protestant succession that led to the accession of the House of Hanover. This dynasty was of German origin and provided the monarchs George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria.

Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, the succession would pass to the ruling family of Hanover on the death of Queen Anne, since the crown was to go her following William’s death. This Act declared Sophia, granddaughter of James I and great-granddaughter of Mary, Queen of Scots, to be the next in line to the crown of Great Britain. However, Sophia, electress of Hanover, died in June 1714, and Queen Anne died in August of that same year, so Sophia’s eldest son, George Louis, elector of Hanover, arrived in England in September to become George I, king of Great Britain.

1.2. The Jacobite Rebellions

George I was the first of the Hanover dynasty and his accession to the throne was peaceful although controversial. He could speak no English and preferred Germany to England. His accession has been considered the beginning of the Augustan Age for the political stability and power that characterised it, as well as a flowering of the arts that was reminiscent of the Roman period.

However, as in 1688, the succession was a political issue between Whigs and Tories. Some Tories still yearned for a return to the direct line of the Stuart kings. The infant whose birth had sparked the crisis in 1688, was now living in France as James Stuart, known in English history as the “Old Pretender”. He was supported in his aim by a small but passionate minority faction, who remained loyal to James II and now to James his son. They became known as the Jacobites (from the Latin Jacobus for James). The Jacobite feeling was strong in the Highlands of Scotland, and it was there, in September 1715, that the Earl of Mar launched the Jacobite uprising with the aim of overthrowing the Hanoverian succession and placing the “Old Pretender”, James II’s son, on the throne.

The failure of this uprising of 1715 reaffirmed the Hanover dynasty on the English throne. However, the Jacobite cause remained passionately held and in 1745, there was another unsuccessful attempt, this one led by Charles Edward Stuart, popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, who persuaded a number of Scottish clans to join him. The Jacobites, who remained loyal to the main Stuart line in exile, constituted a real, if intermittent threat to the British state, until they were beaten in 1746.

As a consequence of their support for the Jacobites, the British treated the Scots cruelly. Many Highlanders were killed or sent to America and a law was passed that prohibited most of their traditions, such as wearing the kilt or playing the bagpipes.

1.3. The Political Parties

In the 18th century the British Parliament had a two-party system: The Tories and the Whigs. The Whigs represented the financial and mercantile interests of the cities and towns, pressed for industrial and commercial development, a vigorous foreign policy and religious toleration, and were opposed to any interference in politics by the monarchy. They descended from the Parliamentarians and were supported by many of wealthy and commercial classes. The Tories were conservative and descended from the royalists, strongly attached to tradition. They believed in the divine right of the monarchy and opposed religious toleration. The Anglican Church and landowners supported them.

From 1714 to 1784 the Whigs were pre-eminent. The first British Prime Minister was Robert Walpole (1676-1745), a Whig. He was in power for over 20 years. The financial crisis of 1720, the “South Sea Bubble”, brought him to power.

From 1720 to 1750 The Free Market and Wage Economy triumphed. There was a policy of expanding trade and acquisition of foreign markets. In the British Isles, a home market was being formed during this period. A transport infrastructure was built, roads were constructed, capitalist methods of marketing were imposed, and people were forced into the wage economy and off their lands. Under Walpole, coal was mined extensively and cloth-making was a national industry.

Walpole’s policy kept England from foreign conflict so that trade could flourish and taxes could be kept down. Walpole failed to prevent Britain from going to war with Spain in 1739. This conflict merged, the following year, with the broader War of the Austrian Succession. Walpole resigned during the war, in 1742, and retired to Houghton Hall, in Norfolk.

His most important political enemy was William Pitt “the Elder”, later Lord Chatham, who thought that Britain had to beat France in the race of an overseas trade empire. Chatham, a Whig statesman achieved his greatest fame as Prime Minister from 1756-61, during the Seven Years’ War. When Chatham came to power, he decided to make a very strong British navy and directed British efforts to destroy French trade. When George III (1760-1820) came to the throne in 1760, he made peace with France since he did not want to continue with an expensive war. The Treaty of Paris (1763) ceded Canada, Mississippi and India to Britain.

In 1784, the Tories recovered a significant role in British politics when the young William Pitt, known as Pitt the Younger, became Prime Minister and started a mercantilist policy, to make England a strong and competitive country. In this period England expanded its possessions in India, North America, and the Caribbean.

The situation of Ireland changed when it was united with England in 1801, and the Parliament in Dublin was closed. George III refused to give equal voting rights to Catholics, with the support of most Tories and Protestant Irish landlords.

2. COLONIAL EXPANSION AND THE FORMATION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN NORTH AMERICA

2.1. The origins of the rise of the British Empire

In the 18th century, Great Britain became a major power in the world. A series of wars left England the dominant colonial power in North America and India. With the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the British Empire was territorially enlarged. Among the causes that made Britain become a great empire were trade, which made money for British companies, politics, religion, ambition, and adventure.

Britain’s empire really began and grew first in North America and the Caribbean. As early as 1497, the adventurer and explorer John Cabot sailed to the northern part of present day Canada and called the new territories Newfoundland. By the early 1600s, this Virginia settlement was well established and Britain began to set up settlements in Bermuda and in the Caribbean, and throughout the 1660s the British presence in North America grew. In the 1660s and 1670s the British established territories further north. From Virginia they established a series of colonies along the eastern coast of America. By the mid 1700s, there were thirteen colonies and Britain and France were bitter rivals.

From 1756 to 1763, they fought the Seven Years War both in Europe and in America. This was the first war waged on a global scale, fought in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and coastal Africa. The signing of the Treaty of Paris (1763) had important consequences for the future of the British Empire.

By the end of the war, Britain was emerging as the main force in North America. British forces captured Quebec and ruled the lands of Upper and Lower Canada. France was defeated in America, and British predominance was asserted, leaving Britain as the world’s leading power. However, Britain lost the American colonies after the American Revolution.

2.2. Immigration and Population in the American Colonies

The 18th century, especially after the defeat of France in America in the 1760s, and the end of the Seven Years War, saw the formation of the First British Empire with a major expansion in America.

In the 16th century, English people had begun to settle on the northeast coast of North America, in Newfoundland, which was now part of Canada. In 1583, Queen Elizabeth I claimed the sovereignty of these lands for the English Crown.

The first permanent English settlement was established in 1607 in Jamestown, led by Captain John Smith and managed by the Virginia Company. This set the pattern for English colonization. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, England started a second round of colonizing attempts using joint-stock companies to establish settlements.

In 1620, the Mayflower landed in America, bringing Puritan separatists who were escaping from religious persecution in their homeland, so that they could build new settlements, practise their religion as they wanted, and found a colony based on their own religious ideals, purified of the ills they saw in the Church of England.

These Puritans, who later became known as the Pilgrim Fathers, settled in New England, establishing a colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The principle founder of the colony was William Bradford.

Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive of many English would-be colonists who risked the arduous Trans-Atlantic voyage: Maryland was founded as a haven for Roman Catholics, Rhode Island as a colony tolerant of all religions and Connecticut for Congregationalists. The province of Carolina was founded in 1663. In 1664, England gained control of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (renamed New York) via negotiations following the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in exchange for Suriname.

In 1681, the colony of Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, as a refuge for English Quakers. Charles II awarded Penn a charter making him the only proprietor of that area.

The American colonies had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted great numbers of English immigrants, who preferred their temperate climate. The British used a lot of slave labour. At first they used European slaves, captured in wars or sentenced as criminals. Over the next 150 years, they increasingly used African slaves. The profits from this helped fund the industrial revolution and the huge country houses built by the owners of the plantations.

Some of the settlers hoped to practice their religion without interference from the royal government and Church. Others wanted to farm new land and escape from the landowners in England. Merchants hoped to make money from trade. Others, especially in the 17th-18th centuries, were deported criminals. The result was a series of colonies along the eastern coast of what is now the United States and Canada. After the union with Scotland, Scottish people also settled in these colonies and the Empire could be described as British. By the late eighteenth century British traders, soldiers, sailors, administrators and settlers could be found all over North America.

In colonial America, land was plentiful and labour was scarce. Most American colonists worked on small farms. In the southern colonies, there was a system of slavery, and black people worked on large plantations. From the beginning, slavery was the basis of the British Empire in the West Indies. Until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Britain was responsible for the transportation of a third of all slaves that were transported across the Atlantic from Africa. In the Thirteen Colonies, the percentage of the population of black people rose from 10% to 40% from 1650 to 1780. For the slave traders, the trade was extremely profitable, and became an economic mainstay for such western British cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. By 1770, there were urban centres. Philadelphia was the largest city, followed by New York, Boston and Charleston.

There was a representative government in the colonies since Britain was too far away to control the colonists directly. The English king appointed colonial governors who had to rule in cooperation with an elected assembly. Voting was restricted to white males who owned lands.

By 1733, there were 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast. After the Seven Years’ War, a royal proclamation denied the right to settle West of the Appalachian Mountains in order to avoid conflict with the Native Americans.

2.3. The Loss of the American Colonies

Relations between the British Government and the people who lived in the Thirteen Colonies got steadily worse in the 1760s and 1770s, primarily because of resentment of the British Parliament’s attempts to govern and tax American colonists without their consent, to pay for their defence. Taxes were levied on sugar, coffee, textiles and other imported goods, and smugglers were punished. The colonists looked to the ideas of important figures such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Charles Louis de Second at, Baron de Montesquieu, as they attempted to assert their guaranteed Rights as Englishmen. Growing discontent turned to violence and, in 1775, the outbreak of the American War of Independence.

The main sources of grievance began in 1764, when Parliament enacted the Sugar Act, in an attempt to raise revenue in the colonies through a tax on molasses. The tax was to be enforced and consequently the colonists carried out several effective protest measures that focused on boycotting British goods.

With the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, special stamps had to be attached to all newspapers, legal documents created in the colonies, pamphlets and licenses. This tax affected practically everybody and extended British taxes to domestically produced and consumed goods. There was a strong reaction against the tax in the colonies and this developed into a crisis. Colonial Americans thought that only their own colonial assemblies should tax them. The Stamp Act led Americans to ask themselves about the relationship between their colonial legislatures, which were elected bodies, and the British Parliament, in which Americans had no elected representation, and this led to the slogan “No taxation without representation”.