Britain's Naval & Imperial Supremacy in Victorian Era: Prosperity & Challenges, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Britain's Naval & Imperial Supremacy in Victorian Era: Prosperity & Challenges e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Naval supremacy 'When Britain really ruled the waves, in good Queen Bess's time' was the assessment of the late Victorian age's leading satirist, WS Gilbert. (He put these words into the mouth of a spoof peer of the realm in the comic opera 'Iolanthe', which he wrote with Arthur Sullivan in 1882.) Gilbert's Lord Mountararat got it wrong. Naval exploits in the age of Elizabeth I are regularly romanticised and their significance exaggerated. Late 16th century England, though growing in importance under an able, crafty and ruthless monarch, remained a bit-part player on the European stage. Britain's naval might was not openly challenged on the high seas between the battles of Trafalgar and Jutland. Britain 'really ruled the waves' throughout Gilbert's own lifetime. He lived from 1836 to 1911, during the reigns of Victoria and her successor, Edward VII. Britain's naval might was not openly challenged on the high seas between Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson's famous victory at Trafalgar in 1805 and the World War One Battle of Jutland with the German navy in 1916. During the Victorian age, Britain was the world's most powerful nation. Though not always effortlessly, it was able to maintain a world order which rarely threatened Britain's wider strategic interests. The single European conflict fought during Victoria's reign - the Crimean War of 1854 - 1856 - contrasted markedly with the 18th century, during which the British were involved in at least five major wars, none of which lasted less than seven years. The Victorians believed that peace was a necessary pre-condition of long-term prosperity. Victoria's empire In 1882 Britain was in the later stages of acquiring the largest empire the world had ever seen. By the end of Victoria's reign, the British empire extended over about one-fifth of the earth's surface and almost a quarter of the world's population at least theoretically owed allegiance to the 'queen empress'. These acquisitions were not uncontested. A number of colonial wars were fought and insurgencies put down as bloodily as the colonisers considered necessary. Many colonial administrators took on their duties with a fierce determination to do good. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim, as many contemporaries did, that those living in a British colony felt privileged to be ruled by a people anxious to spread the virtues of an ordered, advanced and politically sophisticated Christian nation to those 'lesser breeds' previously 'without the law'. That said, there is no gainsaying the fact that both many colonial administrators and Christian missionaries took on their colonial duties with a fierce determination to do good. Britain's status as the financial capital of the world also secured investment inflows which preserved its immense prosperity. One has only to walk along Liverpool's waterfront and view the exceptional 'Three Graces', (the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, Royal Liver and Cunard buildings) planned and erected in the decade or so after Victoria's death, to understand the centrality of commerce and overseas trade in making Britain the world's greatest power during the 19th century. Liverpool's status as a World Heritage City is fitting testament to a period when Britain did indeed 'rule the waves'. Industrial Revolution Victoria came to the throne during the early, frenetic phase of the world's first industrial revolution. Industrialisation brought with it new markets, a consumer boom and greater prosperity for most of the propertied classes. It also brought rapid, and sometimes chaotic change as towns and cities expanded at a pace which precluded orderly growth. Life expectancy at birth - in the high 30s in 1837 - had crept up to 48 by 1901. Desperately poor housing conditions, long working hours, the ravages of infectious disease and premature death were the inevitable consequence. The Victorians wrestled with this schizoid legacy of industrialism. The Victorian town symbolised Britain's progress and world pre-eminence, but it also witnessed some of the most deprived people, and depraved habits, in the civilised world. Taming, and then improving, Britain's teeming cities presented a huge challenge. Mortality data revealed that, in the poorer quarters of Britain's larger cities, almost one child in five born alive in the 1830s and 1840s had died by the age of five. Polluted water and damp housing were the main causes. Death rates in Britain as a whole remained obstinately above 20 per thousand until the 1880s and only dropped to 17 by the end of Victoria's reign. Life expectancy at birth, in the high 30s in 1837, had crept up to 48 by 1901. One of the great scourges of the age - tuberculosis - remained unconquered, claiming between 60,000 and 70,000 lives in each decade of Victoria's reign. Civic engagement Despite substantial medical advances and well-informed campaigns, progress in public health was desperately slow in Victoria's reign. This had much to do with healthy scepticism about the opinions of experts, particularly when those experts advocated greater centralised state interference in what they considered to be the proper sphere of local authorities and agencies. Furthermore, state involvement meant higher taxes and higher taxes were said to hamper both business and job creation. Localism undoubtedly stymied many public health initiatives at least until the last two decades of the reign. Christian gentlemen considered it a duty to make legacies to worthy causes. The Victorian era saw considerable expenditure on monuments to civic pride. The competitive ethic which drove so much business enterprise was channelled by local worthies into spending on opulent town halls and other civic buildings. By no means all of these were intended for the use of a propertied elite. Libraries, wash-houses and swimming baths were all funded as part of a determination to provide working people with the means to improve themselves. Civic identity and civic engagement were more powerful forces in Victorian than in early 20th-century Britain.