The Victorian era was a period of British history that lasted from 1837 to 1901, coterminous with the reign of Queen Victoria over the British Empire. The Victorian era was marked by the expansion of the electoral franchise, the Pax Britannica with the other world powers, the expansion of the British Empire in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, the rise of the Reform movement to cure social ills (such as crime, poverty, and squalor) that pervaded major urban centers, and scientific and technological advances such as the advent of the railroad, the postal system, and the theory of evolution.
History[]
Victorian Values[]
Hard work, progress, and self-improvement were important in Victorian Britain. Society's values were increasingly in the hands of an expanding middle class that was growing wealthy through industry. Home, hearth, and family life were central to well-being, while there was a great drive to raise living standards for all.
Background[]

One of Rowland's caricatures
The Victorian era reacted against some moral aspects of the previous century while developing others. Victorian primness was partly a reaction against the decadence and sexual openness of their Georgian forebears, as caught in Thomas Rowlandson's caricatures of Georgian aristocrats. However, the Victorians also inherited some of their zeal for social reform from some notable Georgians, including William Wilberforce.
History[]

A Victorian family room
In Victorian Britain, the home became a powerful symbol of what every right-thinking citizen should aspire to. Here, everyone knew their place, all was kept in pristine order, and family life was nurtured. Having a strong family unit within this home, the Victorians believed was able to be the aim of all. The model home was middle-class, fashioned by money from 19th-century industry, rather than inherited aristocratic wealth. Domesticity was a virtue encouraged in all women and a middle-class wife absorbed herself in home-making or genteel pursuits, such as needle skills. For poorer girls and women, working as a domestic servant was seemly because it supported family life or helped them prepare for their own married lives.
Part of making society an ordered Christian place was sexual restraint. Ladies were expected to behave with decorum and to be accompanied by male chaperones until they were married. At the same time, prostitution was rife because many women who needed to earn money had few other ways available to them of supporting themselves.
Victorian institutions[]

Bobbies from the 19th century
The Victorians set up a number of institutions to control or care for the population. Workhouses were set up in 1834 for those who were unable to work. The idea was that people should work for their food and accommodation, rather than relying on handouts. Conditions in the workhouses were such that many would go to any lengths to avoid going there. The basis of the modern police force was started by Sir Robert Peel. He created the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1822 and London's Metropolitan Police Service ("bobbies") in 1829. The aim was to provide a centralized and ethical crime prevention force. By 1857, there were regional police forces in England, Scotland, and Wales.
Jails and asylums were also built on a grander scale than before - the 1845 Lunacy Act ordered all counties to build asylums. People with psychiatric illness had previously been treated as criminals, so the Act was seen as a force for good, enabling people to receive treatment.
Education for all[]

In the drive to educate the nation, hundreds of schools opened. A series of Education Acts between 1870 and 1891 brought "board" schools (run by boards of governors) and compulsory free education. Discipline was highly valued and schoolchildren were often beaten. Charles Dickens, who campaigned for better education before these Acts were enforced, portrayed several cruel schools in his novels. At the same time, Acts limiting child labor and reducing working hours for all were also introduced. Numerous public lectures and evening classes at Working Men's and Working Women's colleges further raised levels of education.
Social improvement[]

A map of Bazalgette's sewer system
There was social improvement of many other kinds, too. In an age when diseases such as cholera tore through industrial slums, better drains, and sewage systems came into existence: the first part of Joseph Bazalgette's great new London sewer system opened in 1865. Gas street lighting increased throughout the 1800s and in the late 1800s, Mosley Street, Newcastle, became Britain's first street to be lit by electricity. Model middle-class suburbs were built around the larger cities, such as Ealing in west London, and, thanks to increased train links, bankers, doctors, and lawyers led healthier lives far from city smog in new houses with indoor toilets. Public parks and gardens were laid out at the same time in these suburbs, with the aim of improving the health of the nation.
Aftermath[]
Victorian values continued to be a touchstone against which new ideas were measured into later periods. In 1950s Britain, many Victorian buildings were demolished as society looked to the future rather than the past. Later in the century, Victorian architecture was preserved and became much-loved. Many Victorian creations, including buildings, sewers, and museums, are still in use today.
Consumerism, self-improvement, and competition are still at the heart of British society. Some politicians continue to use the term as shorthand for family values and law and order - or narrow-minded repression if you have a different set of views. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher famously praised the "Victorian values" of self-reliance and betterment, and of being one great nation.
Steam and Speed[]
Speed became the watchword of 19th-century Britain. A railway mania pulled Britain out of its rural past, and sent steam locomotives hurtling around an expanding national network. Great steamships also rode the waves. Amazed Victorians found their horizons instantly broadened.
Background[]

The Newcomen engine
While the history of railways is firmly rooted in mining, by the 1700s, large quantities of freight were being transported by water. Between the 1500s and 1700s, wooden, then cast-iron, tracks were used for mining wagons - horse-drawn coal wagons called chaldrons were common in North East England. In the 1700s, Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, and Matthew Boulton developed the steam engine. Early locomotives were used in collieries before being used for passengers.
In the 1700s, much freight was moved around British waters; large wooden sailing boats plied the coasts and oceans with both cargo and passengers. In 1783, the French Pyroschape became the first successful steamboat, and in 1794, the Earl of Stanhope built the Kent, an influential prototype.
History[]
It was the steam engine that revolutionized Britain's transport system forever. It is hard to imagine how incredible railway travel must have seemed in the 1800s. At the beginning of the 19th century, British life for many was slow, rural, and provincial. Travel was by horse and the greatest distance that could be covered at a full gallop in one day was approximately 80 miles.
First steps[]

Richard Trevithick
In 1804, Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) demonstrated the world's first railway journey by steam at Penydarran. By this time, there was a large amount of colliery track across the country, and people were beginning to see the potential for national passenger services. The first major landmark in British railway history was the opening of a rail line between Stockton and Darlington, in 1825. Originally intended to link coal mines, its first locomotive was George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1. This carried passengers at the line's grand opening demonstration, and did so subsequently, marking it as the world's first steam locomotive-pulled public railway. The next milestone was the 1830 opening of the Liverpool to Manchester line, linking two great, rapidly expanding industrial cities. Rocket, George Stephenson's best-known locomotive (1829), ran on this line at speeds of up to around 29 miles per hour.
Railway mania[]

Railways in 1898
After the Liverpool-Manchester line opened, numerous other lines followed at a dizzying speed. By the 1840s, Britain was in the grip of a railway "mania". All kinds of people joined the mad scramble to make money from the railways. A lot of ordinary, inexperienced middle-class investors got caught up in a mess of poor practice, fraud, and chaos, and many lost large amounts of money, as did railway companies. Everywhere there was a frenzy of uncontrolled rail expansion.
By mid-century, most areas of Britain were close to a rail line and trains were giving the country's Industrial Revolution a massive boost, propelling it into position as a world leader. The canals soon became overshadowed by the railways for rapid freight transport, and trades such as mining, and the production of iron, textiles, and manufactured goods, prospered as a result. Coal could be taken speedily from collieries to major ports for onward transport; Welsh coal was transported through great tunnels in the Malvern Hills to Birmingham's expanding factories. The prices of many goods fell in places linked by rail, letters arrived quicker, and people's horizons widened. Building trains, tracks, tunnels, and bridges provided work, and increased the country's engineering and construction expertise - now in demand worldwide.
Steam ships[]
Taking people and goods by ship was important to Britain. There was already a good system of internal waterways, but looking father afield, Britain - an island - needed to be able to trade with as many other countries as possible.

A replica of the Charlotte Dundas
Early steam-engine technology was adapted for the first British steamships, such as William Symington's small wooden paddle-steamer, Charlotte Dundas, in which the steam engine drove a single paddle wheel located in the stern. In 1801-1802, she was put to the test on the Fort and Clyde canal, near Glasgow, and travelled 20 miles in six hours, towing two 70-ton barges, making her the first operational steam tugboat. She became the first vessel in the world to use steam propulsion commercially (although her life was short-lived).
Vying for trade[]

The SS Great Western
By the 1820s, British steamships were an alternative to stagecoach travel for better-off people, and by 1840 they were common on Britain's rivers and around its coasts. Rather like railway mania, competition heated up among the major steamship companies founded in the late 1830s, especially to make the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. In 1838, the flagship of the Great Western Steamship Company, Brunel's Great Western, sailed into New York 14 days and 12 hours after leaving Bristol. It arrived just 12 hours behind Sirius, its rival from the British and American Steam Navigation Company, which had sailed from Ireland and had taken longer to cross the ocean. A regular transatlantic service ensued and steamships became very important for passenger and freight trade alike.
In the 1840s, paddle wheels were replaced with screw propellers, which were much more efficient. Larger engines were needed, but these were too heavy for wooden boats, so iron was introduced, and later steel, supplied by Britain's flourishing metals industry, which gained further strength as a result. Places such as the Clyde, the Tyne, and Belfast became famed for their shipyards and supplied the world, with other jobs created by the maintenance and building work on harbors and ports.
The telegraph[]

A map of submarine cables, 1901
The electric telegraph was another enormously important communications development and it was closely associated with both trains and steamships. Developed in 1837 by British scientists William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, the railways were used for the telegraph system and, from the mid-1800s, telegraph cables were laid across the English Channel and North and Irish Seas. Later, Brunel's Great Eastern steamship was used to lay a transatlantic cable.
Aftermath[]
By the 1890s, British railway companies owned 10% of urban land. The railways increasingly established a vital link between the south and north. In 1934, Locomotive number 4472, the most famous of the Flying Scotsman service, became the first locomotive to travel non-stop from London to Edinburgh and the first steam engine to reach 100 miles per hour. In 1963, the controversial Beeching Report initiated a massive cost-cutting closure of more than 2,000 local stations.
In 1900, Britain had the world's largest navy and a flourishing shipbuilding industry. The Edwardian age produced massive stylish steamship liners carrying wealthy holidaymakers and ordinary people seeking to emigrate. Cunard's speedy RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania were the world's first quadruple screw liners, and by 1912, it took just five days to cross to New York from Southampton. From the 1960s, British shipbuilding gradually declined.
Years of Change[]
Background[]
The Industrial Revolution made its mark on British society, but many people still struggled to adapt to a new situation.
Parliamentary enclosure and new crop systems increased agricultural productivity, while also marginalizing rural workers, many of whom sought employment in towns. Gradually, technology brought further social changes, as it reinvented some types of work, such as textile spinning and weaving, and ironmaking. Older forms of work persisted in small workshops, but thousands of the new industrial workers were exploited in a system akin to servitude.
History[]

An 1800s blacksmith
The impact of machines such as the spinning frame and steam engine on many workplaces is easily exaggerated. Most British people still worked on the land and - outside key regions such as Lancashire, West Midlands, and central Scotland - much manufacturing took place mainly in the home (spinning and hand-weaving) or in small establishments such as blacksmith's shops and iron foundries. Where the factory system was in place, however, work was redefined. Physical strength was less important. Women did the same work as men (for less money). Children tended the machines - reaching in to clear snags, or crawling underneath to recover objects. Mine owners also preferred employing women and children - they were good in confined spaces and cheap to employ. Employers took on families: the male head was responsible for the behavior of his wife and children.
Pay was often docked for disobedience or perceived lack of effort. Employers had other holds over workers and their families. Many factories and mines provided accommodation, but charged high rents. Often workers were paid in tokens exchangeable only in company-owned "truck" shops - where cheap goods were sold at high prices.
All change[]

The Soho Mint
The rhythms of life were changing. While the agricultural day was geared to the sun and the seasons, urban trades involved careful timekeeping. In fact, the advent of railways and their travel timetables increasingly encouraged the observance of a "standard" time across the country.
Highly regimented employees worked regular shifts in factories running 20 hours a day or more. Gas lighting made this possible. It had, for example, been in use at Matthew Boulton's Soho ironworks since the 1790s. City life had always been more anonymous than country life, but there was a sense that workplace relations in the coming age of automation might become more impersonal; workers feared that as factory hands they might be mere cogs in the machine.
United we stand[]

A Chartist meeting at Hyde
From 1838, there was a clamor for a People's Charter, enfranchising the working class (or at least the males). Millions signed petitions demanding votes in annual elections. Chartists held mass protests, some of which ended violently, shocking the establishment. Workers tried to come together to exert influence on their employers, but their scope for action was very circumscribed. The Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800 prohibiting trade unions were abolished in 1824, but, since this triggered a spate of strikes, a tough new act was passed in 1825. When six farm workers in Tolpuddle, Dorset, formed a union in 1832, they were sentenced to transportation. The Tolpuddle Martyrs soon became icons for those who sought to expand the trade union movement and its influence later in the century.
Changing opinions[]

Elizabeth Gaskell
Many opinion-formers worried about the effects of changes taking place. Elizabeth Gaskell called one of her novels North and South - the two were a world away, economically and culturally. Her north and south were stereotypes; much of Lancashire and Yorkshire was agrarian still, while factories operated in southern England, in centers such as Swindon and around the capital. However, Gaskell's title reflects the growing feeling that, society-wide, the ties that bound people together were loosening.
Those who invested in the free market were not dissuaded by the though that it created want as well as wealth. No one was to blame for the poverty of the masses; nor should the wealthy be swayed by their plight. The Times was notoriously to claim it was "the result of Nature's simplest laws." Many reformers were as inhuman as the capitalists, insisted writers such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, for they believed in systems and theories and overlooked the individual. The criticism was harsh, given that individuals were to benefit from the reformers' work, not just in bringing in factory acts and other humanitarian legislation, but in embarking on a new kind of systematic social study - the Blue Book, in which statistics collected by government inspectors in particular places or industries were published.

Snow's cholera map
Other social work set out to improve people's lives. John Snow's research on the distribution of cholera outbreaks in London in the 1850s, brought a breakthrough in medical understanding. Philanthropists founded Ragged Schools for street children, offering basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and - since many founders were clergymen - Bible study. In New Lanark, Scotland, Robert Owen tried to run a factory community that provided comfortable accommodation for his workers and education for their children.
Aftermath[]
Britain marched on in apparent prosperity and peace, but the injustices persisted too: so did the deep resentment of the poor. The Great Reform Act of 1832 expanded the electorate and made the electoral system more accountable. However, the mass of people were still excluded, their helplessness underlined by a sense that they were now the only group that did not have a stake in the nation's fortunes, which had never been better, as Britain reigned supreme as the world's leading industrial nation.
The plight of the poor, and its reflection on society at large, influenced, explicitly or implicitly, everything from architecture to literature and theology. This interest and concern could hardly compensate for lives of toll and chronic hardship - or the lack of any democratic voice. As the 19th century approached its close, living standards for most working people improved, while British workers became better organized, making their presence felt in workplace action and finding their voice in party politics.
The Irish Famine[]
- Main article: Great Famine
The Triumph of Reform[]
- Main article: British reform movement
The Crimean War[]
Background[]
As the 19th century reached its mid-point, Britain was strong and confident.
The country had been quick to translate technological advance into entrepreneurial opportunity since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It had led the way in developing steam power, on the railways and at sea. With all its economic strength, however, its military might had not been substantially tested since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Nicholas I of Russia
India's importance to Britain had been growing since the 18th century. Hence the need to ensure stability on the isthmus of Suez, a vital junction on the route to India. With the Ottoman Empire clearly in terminal decline, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia had designs on the Dardanelles, the straits linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean and Suez.
At the beginning of 1853, Nicholas proclaimed himself protector of the Ottoman Sultan's Christian subjects, with rights over Jerusalem and its pilgrimage sites. The Sultan appealed to France and Britain, and when Russia invaded his Danube provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia that summer, they responded. After the Imperial Russian Navy had destroyed the Turkish fleet at Sinope, the focus shifted to the Crimean peninsula.
History[]
A Franco-British force was sent to Crimea in the spring of 1854, largely to neutralize the Russian Black Sea naval base of Sebastopol. British naval power was crucial, and a base for it was established near the Ottoman capital, Constantinople (Istanbul).
Industrial might[]
Britain's industrial output was 10 times Russia's and its army much better equipped. Its standard musket range was five times that of the Russian equivalent. Russia's infrastructure was almost completely undeveloped. It took three months to get weapons and materiel to Crimea by horse and cart. Britain and France could ship supplies by sea in just three weeks. Crimea anticipated later wars in hinging as much on logistics as on fighting itself. One in three Russian troops did not even make it to the front. But Britain's advantages were offset by poor training and provisioning.
In the public eye[]

The Charge of the Light Brigade
Previous wars had seemed remote to those not involved. The Crimean War was modern in having an important media presence. William Howard Russell went on behalf of The Times newspaper, becoming the first known war correspondent. Since his copy was substantially uncensored by the authorities, war's sufferings were literally brought home to the public in their morning papers. They became available almost instantly through telegraph technology. Photos were published for the first time too. Russell had plenty to write about. In September 1854, after defeating the Russians at the Battle of Alma, the Allies besieged Sebastopol. The Russians tried unsuccessfully to lift the siege on 25 October at the Battle of Balaclava, but Britain's victory was marred by the misunderstanding that led to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Almost 300 men were needlessly killed when the wrong target was attacked. This kind of thing had happened before, but now Russell was on hand to give his unsparing report. The tragic charge was presented as a heroic failure, but official incompetence was unmissable. A fresh attempt by the Russians to dislodge the Allies failed at the Battle of Inkerman on 5 November.

The Siege of Sebastopol
However, the Allies' siege had so far failed too. They dug in for months of miserable trench warfare and artillery bombardment. Freezing conditions became more wretched when winter storms interrupted seaborne supplies: cholera and typhus, rife since summer, tore through the army. In January 1855, while about 83 men died of wounds, 2,761 died from disease. Russell was scathing in his criticism of provision for the wounded and of the general incompetence with which the war was being waged.
A victory...of sorts[]

The Grand Crimean Central Railway
The final victory was one for both British logistics and British capitalism. Engineers Thomas Brassey and Samuel Morton Peto built the Grand Crimean Central Railway to bring up men and artillery to Sebastopol, swinging the fortunes of the siege. However, it was fairer to say that Russia had lost the war than Britain had won. The Tsar could not keep up the struggle, having lost more than 100,000 men, compared to Britain's 17,500 dead, France's 90,000, and Turkey's 35,000. The death of Nicholas and the succession of Alexander II allowed an opportunity for peace talks to be held in Paris in 1856.
Aftermath[]
The immediate outcome of Crimea for Britain was a great deal of soul-searching, its self-confidence and, more specifically, competence were called into question. The war had boosted the prestige of the press, even as it lowered that of the army and the administration, and the newspapers led the ensuing hue and cry. Reforms were introduced in nursing and the army. Officers' commissions once sold to wealthy young gentlemen now went to professionals on merit. Confidence recovered, restored by easy triumphs against China in the Second Opium War and some harder-won campaigns against the Zulu and Ashanti in Africa.
These colonial wars were unequal struggles, fought against poorly armed and primitively equipped adversaries. The Crimean War provided at least a foretaste of what might happen when great modern armies met. Only much later would it become clear how far the dismal conditions of the armies dug in around Sebastopol foreshadowed the trench warfare of the Great War of 1914-1918.
Workshop of the World[]
If the 18th century had seen an Industrial Revolution, it was the 19th that saw Britain totally transformed into what was to be the world's first industrial power. This second phase of transition was as much economic and social as it was technological, touching almost every aspect of British life.
Background[]
Britain's Industrial Revolution gave it a head-start over the competition in the race for economic dominance.
As early as the 18th century, British investors were building the technological foundations on which future prosperity would be built. The cottage industries of the past were giving way to large-scale production, much of it in fully mechanized, meticulously organized factories. British know-how enabled industrial and economic development to surge forwards full-steam-ahead in some of the most modern factories and on the most modern transport infrastructure in the world.
History[]
The Great Exhibition had been a wonderful shop window for the products of the Industrial Revolution, but Britain was busier than ever behind the scenes. For a brief moment, it had been not just the foremost but the only industrial nation, producing two-thirds of the world's coal, half its iron, almost three-quarters of its steel, and about half of its commercially manufactured cotton. Rival nations were reacting fast. For the moment, though, they were struggling to catch up.
A world city[]

While industry was associated with the Midlands and the North, London, a city of manufacturing itself, although mainly in smaller workshops, was growing as a financial center underwriting much industrial enterprise. The skills it developed served entrepreneurs internationally. By 1800, it was the modern world's first city was a population of a million; by 1900, it would have more than six times that number. Railways made it a transport hub, the main stations having been built from the 1830s. The Underground was under construction from 1863.
Textiles, toys, and schools[]

Workers in a British cotton mill
The more familiar industrial activities also continued. The Lancashire cotton mills flourished. Cotton products accounted for more than halt Britain's exports by value by 1830. By 1860, Lancashire alone had 440,000 cotton workers, employed in 2,650 mills. Wool was enjoying comparable fortunes across the Pennines in Yorkshire. Bradford, a small town of 16,000 people in 1800, had 182,000 by 1850. Leeds emerged as a major trading and communications center. Birmingham was booming too: a miscellany of mostly small-scale concerns here made everything from buttons to toys and tools. England's second city soon had an impressive collection of public buildings to advertise its new wealth and status in a golden age of civic pride.
King coal[]
The early industrial heartlands in Lancashire and Yorkshire were fueled by the availability of coal supplies so close to the surface that they could simply be dug out from handy hillsides. Many other seams could not be mined, owing to access problems, though the demand was not so great that this really mattered. From about 1800, deep-mining technology developed, including wooden pit props, winding gear, and engine-driven fans for ventilation. The Davy lamp made mining much safer from 1816.
From iron to steel[]

Coal mining in the 1800s
Welsh coal had been extracted since very early in the Industrial Revolution. Passages could be dug more or less horizontally into the valley sides. The coal extracted was used in the local iron industry. Later, shafts were sunk vertically to depths of 800 meters or more. Tramways, and later railways, were built to take coal to the coast for export (mainly from Cardiff) and use in local steelworks. Centers like Merthyr Tydfil were already important in ironmaking, but production took off during the railway boom. The great blast furnaces built at Dowlais and Cyfartha were the most important in the world by the 1840s. Much iron from Welsh works was exported through Swansea to support rail construction everywhere.
The large-scale switch to steel (an alloy of iron with carbon for extra toughness) was made possible by the introduction of the Bessemer Process in 1858. This used jets of air to remove the impurities from the molten metal and allowed mass production for the first time. Sheffield, the traditional steelmaking center, still used a small-scale crucible method. It was overtaken by big steelworks elsewhere, but had a role making high-quality steel for cutlery and weapons.
Prospering ports[]

The Wapping Dock in Liverpool
All these products had to be shipped to their export destinations, and in many cases raw materials had to be brought in. Seaports boomed along with the general prosperity. London was the world's largest port by 1802; it was linked to the canal network with the construction of the Limehouse Basin in 1820. Wapping Dock (from 1805) could accommodate 300 ships at a time. The East India Docks handled £30 million worth of tea a year by the 1860s. Frozen meat was brought in from Australia by the 1880s.
Other ports flourished too. The boom enabled Liverpool to take the loss of the slave trade in its stride. Already a major port in 1800 (Britain's first wet dock was built here in 1715), it had just over 2 miles of quays, taking £130,000 in dues per year. By 1857, it had 15 miles of quays, and dock dues of £250,000; it almost doubled in size again by 1900.
Shipbuilding[]

The Comet in 1812
The first steam seagoing ship, the Comet, was built in Glasgow in 1812. An estimated 42 steamships had been built along the Clyde by 1280. In general, iron hulls were built on the Lower Clyde by 1820. In general, iron hulls were built on the Lower Clyde and machinery built upriver in Glasgow. Shipbuilding in Belfast began in the 18th century: Harland & Wolff was founded in 1862, although its heyday would not be until the early 20th century. Newcastle, a long-standing port for shipping coal in the coastal trade, emerged as another important shipbuilding center.
Aftermath[]
Britain's industrial dominance could not go on forever; too many competitors wanted their share of the economic spoils. Britain's workers wanted their share of the spoils too. The rise of trade unions and the Labour Party in the early 20th century meant that managers could no longer arrange things on their own terms. If the conflict of 1914-1918 brought Europe its first industrialized war, the peace that followed brought a war of a different sort, as industry battled to progress against the power of an ascendant United States.
The Great Depression after 1929 was deep and worldwide, but for a Britain already bruised by the experience of World War II, the loss of its empire came as another blow. While the chronic labor unrest that afflicted Britain in the 1970s may have been arrested by the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it was at the expense of the industrial economy as a whole.
Cultural Conflict[]
Running through the self-confidence of the 19th century were currents of conflict and dissent. Religious believers underwent crises of faith, while writers and artists criticized the status quo. All kinds of ideas circulated, from the Romantics' call for freedom, to the return to medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelite artists.
Background[]
Religion and Romanticism were two major pillars of the cultural conflicts that engaged many 19th-century thinkers and artists.
The Oxford Movement looked back to the ideals of the pre-Reformation Church. They saw it as a pious and pure religion, untainted as yet by the liberalism and rationality of subsequent centuries.
The Pre-Raphaelite artists admired the art prior to High Renaissance painters such as Raphael (1483-1520), whom they deemed too polished and idealized. They favored early 15th-century Italian and Flemish work, such as the Arnolfini Portait by Jan van Eyck.
The Lyrical Ballads (1798) of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are often seen as starting the high point of English Romanticism. The Romantics fought against the 18th-century Age of Reason. Influenced by French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), they promoted beauty, unconstrained nature, and human emotion and liberty. They were a huge influence on the 19th-century figures, such as the critic John Ruskin, who greatly admired Wordsworth.
History[]

William Wordsworth
Spurred by political revolutions across Europe, a Romantic cultural rebellion took hold in Britain in the early 19th century. Escaping from 18th-century reason, poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the dissolute Lord Byron, stressed nature and the emotional expression of the individual. Notable works included Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820) and Byron's epic Don Juan (1819-24). Another cultural strand, Romantic medievalism, turned away from the mass materialism of Victorian culture, whose values many found superficial. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of young English artists, founded in 1848, rebelled against what they saw as artificial, pompous, and academic art of the day, and sought an anti-dogma truth to nature. They harked back to medieval art prior to the work of Raphael and the High Renaissance, which was revered by the Victorians. Their founder members were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Associated artists included Ford Maxon Brown and, later, Edward Burne-Jones. The frequent mix of realism and religion, rejection of Renaissance styles, and Rossetti's sensual female portraits (such as Bocca Baciata, 1859) all caused initial outrage, although leading art critic John Ruskin championed them.

Dissatisfaction with mechanistic Victorian industrialization spawned tow other historical revivals: the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Ruskin played a major part in both. His love of what he saw as the beautiful Christian spiritualism of medieval architecture was shared by numerous British architects, notably Augustus Pugin, author of The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), whose Victorian Gothic work includes detailing on the Houses of Parliament. George Gilbert Scott became the most successful Victorian Gothic architect, completing London's St. Pancras Station in 1865. Pugin wrote that "all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building." This functionalist idea, that art and design should honestly express its purpose and construction, rather than being a superficial decoration, was also a guiding principle of William Morris, who was at the forefront of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This reacted to mass production by promoting a medieval-influenced idea of the craftsman and of handmade goods.
Faith, radicalism, and hard times[]

The 1830s onwards saw a revival of High Anglican and Catholic ideas, as a way of reinvigorating a stagnating Church of England. It was led by Oxford churchmen John Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey. Often called the Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism (after a series of written tracts), it greatly affected Anglican theology. Though some feared a return to papacy, it saw instead a general religious revival, with new churches built and a desire to help the needy. It was also an age when people, including Ruskin and novelist Thomas Hardy, questioned their faith. The ideas of Charles Darwin on natural, not divine, evolution had a profound effect, and an increasing agnosticism pervaded this age of scientific enquiry.

While some looked to the past, others faced the present head on. Modern industrial society had highlighted poverty and many social inequalities. Ruskin became a social reformer, and taught at London's Working Men's College. Morris formed the Socialist League in 1884 and outlined a socialist utopia in News from Nowhere (1891). Europe's 1848 revolutions furthered radical thought. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), and founded modern communism. Engels, author of The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845), worked in a Manchester cotton mill run by his German family. Marx was a German economist and philosopher, based in England after 1849. His Das Kapital (1867-94) predicted capitalism's ultimate collapse.

The writings of Charles Dickens championed the downtrodden and sought social reform in areas such as sanitation and poor law. Dickens was a contradiction typical of this age of cultural conflicts. The society that he critiqued, albeit often fondly, gave him great success. One of his targets, notably in Hard Times (1854), was the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which was central to Victorian thinking. Through all of this, ran the influence of Thomas Carlyle, a Scots historian-philosopher, based in London after 1834, and author of Sartor Resartus (1833-34). Carlyle disliked Victorian materialism and utilitarianism, and promoted social reform. Doubting conventional Christianity, he developed an unorthodox spiritualism and a belief in the power of strong individuals.
Aftermath[]
In the 19th century, cultural trends forged major modern ideas, from the cult of the individual to the Welfare State. The Romantics' stress on the unfettered individual, rather than on the needs of the group or society, often ran counter to the Victorian utilitarianism and fed the 20th-century "cult of the individual." The Romantic poets' image also did much for the concept of the tortured artist and the special qualities of being creative.
The idea, embraced by Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, that form should express function prefigures the form-follows-function mantra of 20th-century Modernist design. The stylish minimalist chairs of the 1930s owe much to Morris. Even Pugin's Gothic designs, with their functionalist ethos, connects in the unlikeliest of ways with modern British architects.
The socially conscious and campaigning work of figures such as Dickens, Ruskin, and Morris aided the rise of socialism and the Labour Party. Ruskin, with his passion for making lectures and courses available to the working class, and his general interest in social reform, is often said to have influenced the creation of the Welfare State.
Exploring the World[]
Explorers had always experienced the desire to chart the unknown wildernesses of the Earth, but they had never felt so well-equipped as they did now. They were often driven by other motives too: a desire to spread the word of Christ or, perhaps unconsciously, that other gospel - the Anglo-Saxon way.
Background[]
The timeless urge to travel was accompanied by a new-found sense of scientific exploration. Mungo Park, a product of post-Enlightenment Scotland, travelled up the Gambia river to the Niger in 1795. Cook's voyages, were inspired by a hunger for adventure and knowledge.
The anti-slavery campaign generated an interest in Africa. Industrial Britain began to regard the world as a source of raw materials, and as a potential market.
History[]
British explorers in Africa were often impelled by a pious desire to bring salvation to the "savages." It seemed only natural that, along with the good news of Christianity, they should bring tidings of black Africa's divinely ordained subservience to white Europe. Explorer James Richardson's visit to the Sahara oasis of Ghat, in 1845, was a case in point.
Presumed Livingstone[]

Another missionary-explorer, David Livingstone (1813-73), traced the course of the upper Zambezi River from 1851; he then walked to the Atlantic coast at Luanda. Retracing his steps to the source of Zambezi, he followed it down to the Indian Ocean, becoming the first European to cross the African continent from west to east. He was also the first westerner to see one of the largest waterfalls in the world - local people knew it as the "Smoke that Thunders"; Livingstone named it Victoria Falls.
The Queen's name was also given to the lake discovered by Richard Francis Burton and John Speke's expedition in 1856. Speke's claim that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile was correct, though little more than an educated hunch. An 1860 expedition intended to furnish proof was beaten back by hostile tribes.

Livingstone, back in Africa from 1865, disappeared into the interior, occasioning a media outcry in Britain. An American newspaper, the New York Herald, sent Welsh journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley in search of him. In 1871, finding a frail and elderly European in a village by Lake Tanganyika, Stanley hailed him with the iconic words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume..."
Australia opens up[]

Map of the Burke and Wills expedition
The Sydney Cove settlement sat on the doorstep of an enormous continent, so did colonies at Melbourne (from 1835) and Adelaide (1836). Not much was known even of New South Wales before the first forays by farmer-explorer Gregory Blaxland from 1813. Subsequent explorations revealed the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers flowing north and west, away from the ocean. Working round the coast in opposite directions, navigators Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin managed to miss the mouth of the Murray River. The assumption remained that the rivers to the north drained into some inland sea.
From 1829, Charles Sturt began exploring the Darling Basin, finally finding the Murray and tracing it down to the ocean. He struck deeper into the interior during his Central Australian Expedition of 1844-1846. Suffering from scurvy, heat, and dehydration, he was lucky to make it back alive. Explorers Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills were not so fortunate. In 1860, they left Melbourne to cross the continent from south to north. They took camels, which they felt would cope well with the conditions. Even so, only four out of 20 men made it to the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Nine dropped out in the early stages; then seven died, three on the homeward journey, including Burke and Willis themselves. Only one - John King - returned home, but the expedition had achieved what it set out to do.
Arctic agony[]

A map of Franklin's lost expedition
Meanwhile, the centuries-old search for the Northwest Passage continued. Sir John Franklin mapped much of North America's northern coastline from the 120s. His final expedition in 1846-47 ended grimly, with his ship getting trapped in ice, off King William Island in northern Canada. What happened to Franklin and his crew will probably never be known, though rumors of murder and cannibalism circulated at the time.
Heroic failure was the order of the day for British exploration of the North and South Poles, most famously in the case of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. But Ernest Shackleton turned objective setback into triumph when, having first failed to reach the South Pole in 1908, he undertook a new expedition six years later. His ship Endurance ice-bound and his men forced ashore, Shackleton took a small party by boat to South Georgia island, 800 miles away across rough seas, to summon help.
Aftermath[]
The idea gained ground that adventurers were running out of places to explore - that the remaining challenges were more about endurance than exploration. For many Britons, the feeling that the world "out there" was dark and dangerous was only underlined by news of the Indian Mutiny. Paradoxically, though, thanks to a steady flow of emigrant families, many other far-flung places were becoming British homes away from home.
For better or worse, the country became accustomed to interacting with large parts of the outside world mainly through the medium of its warships, its soldiers, and its colonial officials. The responsibilities imperial power brought proved troublesome. In the decades following World War II, it became clear that the sun was slowly setting on the British Empire. While, for some, Mrs. Thatcher's Falklands adventure brought back Britain's self-respect, to others it seemed an incongruous show of bravado by a failing force.
British India[]
- Main article: Company rule in IndiaFor better or worse, Britain's sense of its imperial destiny came of age in 19th-century India. Lives were devoted to the Empire's service - and colossal fortunes were made. The occupiers believed that they had brought their Indian subjects a golden age of good governance, order, civilization, and prosperity.
Dominions and Emigration[]
Britain started to think of itself as an imperial power, but with that status came responsibilities. This unprecedented situation required innovative thinking; how was such a large empire to be run? As the 19th century wore on, British power and people were making their presence felt around the world.
Background[]
Britain had been sending people to America for some time - often unwillingly as convicts or indentured labor. After a difficult start, Britain's colonies along North America's Atlantic coast flourished. Much of eastern Canada was colonized, and more colonies were acquired from the French in 1763. Although the loss of the American colonies hit Britain hard, new possibilities opened up in the Pacific. In the 19th century, men such as Gregory Blaxland and Charles Sturt ventured into the Australian interior. If new lands exerted a pull as potential colonies, a definite push for emigration already existed. The Agricultural Revolution produced slow-motion turmoil in the British countryside over generations. An Ireland still shattered by the famine of the 1840s saw people emigrating in their thousands every year.
History[]
Even as America's colonies were breaking free, Britain had been extending its influence to the north. Naturally, though, there were fears that the Canadian colonists might follow their American neighbors. Rebellions broke out in Lower and Upper Canada in 1837-78, general dissatisfaction compounded in what was formerly French Lower Canada (now Quebec) by a nationalistic impulse. Upper and Lower Canada were in 1840 brought into a single Province of Canada - French-speakers were now outnumbered. However, from 1848, steps were taken to allow a limited degree of autonomy under a system known as Responsible Government.
A better England[]

A map of the colonization of New Zealand
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who founded the New Zealand Company in 1837, said that New Zealand was destined to be "a better England." His vision enthused thousands, and British emigrants flocked there. Difficulties early on with the warlike Maori were apparently settled with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Some 500 chiefs signed the treaty - although it is not clear if they understood the terms they were agreeing to. In any case, new arrivals quickly encroached beyond the boundaries appointed for settlement, causing continuing conflict. Even so, more Maoris were killed by diseases from which they had no immunity. An indigenous population estimated at around 140,000 in 1840 had fallen to 42,000 by 1890.
Initially an outpost of New South Wales, New Zealand was its own colony from 1841. It won what amounted to Responsible Government status in 1852. It was certainly a "better England" as regards electoral representation - extending the vote to women in 1893.
Gold rush[]

The First Fleet
New South Wales got its first, unwilling settlers on 18 January 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip's First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove, bringing 700 convicts. The green countryside was more arid than it seemed, its soils obstinately uncultivable, but the convicts had to make it work in order to survive, and ultimately they succeeded. Soon emigrants were coming voluntarily, not just to New South Wales, but to the other colonies of what from 1817 was called Australia. Tasmania (or Van Diemen's Land), first settled in 1802, was a separate colony from 1825; Western Australia followed in 1832; South Australia in 1836; and Victoria in 1851. These too started gaining Responsible Government status. Queensland (1859) and Northern Territory (1863) received this status from the start.
"Wherever the European has trod death seems to pursue the aboriginal," wrote Charles Darwin when the Beagle sailed into Australia in 1836. Australia's native population fell by 90% through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some were massacred; many more died of Old World diseases. Spectacular gold finds in the 1850s brought fortune hunters flocking in from around the world. In a single decade, Australia's population rose from 400,000 to more than 1 million. The gold rush was quick, but many disappointed prospectors stayed on. Australia was starting to feel like its own nation, but it was not until 1901 that it became a self-governing dominion.
Striking out[]

A map of Irish emigration
"the great tide of emigration flows steadily westward," reported the Illustrated London News in 1850, although this was because the main current of emigration was from an Ireland still reeling from the Famine. The Irish made up the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the British Isles to the United States during the 1840s. Paradoxically, this rural people settled mainly in the big cities. English, Welsh, and Scottish emigrants mostly made their way to existing British colonies - arriving in Canada at a rate of 35,000-40,000 a year through the 1840s.
The Scottish Highlands were undergoing a sort of speeded-up version of English Enclosures in the shape of the "Highland Clearances." As traditional chiefs reinvented themselves as aristocrats, with the authorities' encouragement, they needed cash to sustain their newly lavish lifestyles. Many decided to clear land - which had supported subsistence farming - for grazing by sheep. Whole communities were evicted, sometimes brutally, and many had little choice but to emigrate.
Aftermath[]
The white-dominated dominions continued to maintain the closest of connections with the mother country. This continues to the present day. The restive spirit lingered in the French-speaking areas of Canada, a Quebecois separatist movement sprang up in the 1970s, although calls for secession were rejected in referendums of 1980 and 1995.
Despite a posture of impatience with the "poms" (a mildly offensive word used by Australians and New Zealanders for an English person) of Britain, Australia remains close to Britain, but at an official level and in the informal contacts between family members around the world. Both Australia and New Zealand sent floods of volunteers to support Britain in World War I. ANZAC (the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) suffered terrible casualties in the Gallipoli campaign (April 1915-January 1916). Both countries came to Britain's aid again during World War II.
The independence movement of the postwar period was noticed in Australia, New Zealand, and English-speaking Canada, but their white populations had far more positive feelings towards Britain than the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa. There was, correspondingly, less pressure to break the connection, in particular with the Crown, still held in high affection thanks to the popularity of Queen Elizabeth II. Moves to abolish the monarchy have so far been thwarted.
Imperialist Muscle[]
The world's first industrial power, Britain was a pace-setter in technology, trade, and agriculture. ITs navy ruled the waves and its army occupied vast areas of dry land. It is no surprise, then, that Britain was talking tall. Increasingly, indeed, it was swaggering - a self-appointed policeman, supremely arrogant in its "civilizing mission."
Background[]
Britain's forces had fought abroad for centuries, but taking territories for colonization belonged to a comparatively recent stage in the country's history. England's adventurers missed the boat when the Age of Discovery began in the 15th century. While Portugal and Spain built vast empires, England's early attempts at establishing New World colonies were half-hearted. Not until James I's reign had serious settlement begun. Since them, however, England made great strides, the Thirteen Colonies in North America going from strength to strength while the merchant companies took huge areas of Canada and India under British administration. More territories were taken from the French (and from the Dutch) at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars. Further conquests were made in the Indian subcontinent after the defeats of the Mughal and Maratha empires.
History[]
Britannia began life as a colony - the bleakest and most remote of the Roman Empire. At least, after the cruelties of conquest, its people had been able to enjoy several comparatively untroubled centuries on the Pax Romana - "Roman Peace". Britain's imperial apologists liked to talk of a Pax Britannica, bestowed on the fortunate peoples of Africa and Asia.
The Opium Wars[]

A map of the Chinese wars of the 1860s
Britain's addiction to tea, and to its trade in Chinese silk and ceramics for the European market, was at first paid for with silver. Once America was lost, however, and the price of silver rose, opium was found to be a perfect substitute. High in value and easy to ship, it grew well in the hilly areas of India where labor was also cheap. There was one small problem though - opium had been illegal in China since 1729. Britain used "independent agents" (or, more bluntly, smugglers) to conduct its trade, and it did so on an extraordinary scale. In 1729, 200 chests of opium were brought into China. By 1828, the figure rose to 13,131, despite repeated crackdowns. Quite apart from the social cost of mass addiction, this was a huge drain on the Chinese economy.

The First Opium War
Another anti-opium drive was mounted in China in 1836. The Chinese emperor wrote politely to Queen Victoria asking her to stop the traffic, but was ignored. In May 1839, officials confiscated 20,000 crates of opium at Guangzhou (Canton) and destroyed it. British officials demanded that full payment be made. When the Chinese instead turned back foreign vessels approaching the port, Britain dispatched a punitive expedition of 16 warships, with 4,000 men. These clashed with the Chinese fleet that November, destroying 71 junks and capturing 60 coastal batteries. Having consolidated its hold on this section of the coast, the expedition headed north to Shanghai and smashed another war fleet, before heading up the Yangtze River, destroying property and killing thousands of civilians.

The Second Opium War
Forced to sue for peace, under the Treaty of Nanjing, the Emperor had to hand over Hong Kong, open key ports, and accord Britain "most favored nation" status. This meant that any privilege given to any other nation would automatically apply to Britain too. The Emperor also had to allow the opium trade to continue. Other powers, including the United States and France, then demanded their own treaties. Christian missionaries arrived in China and started preaching.
All this foreign interference - and the continuing opium problem - pushed China too far. The murder of a French missionary and the arrest of a Chinese ship, previously registered as British, for opium-smuggling became the pretext for joint Franco-British hostilities. This Second Opium War (1856-60) was designed to wring further concessions from a thoroughly humiliated China. When the Emperor dragged his feet, the allies attacked with Russian and American support. They sacked Beijing, including the Summer Palace. China was carved up into tranches for exploitation by the foreign powers.
African upstarts[]

Zulu power, built by King Shaka through the 1820s, had carried all before it in southern Africa, but it came up against a technology-gap at Blood River in 1838. More than 3,000 Zulu warriors were cut down here by the rifles of 500 Boers. Things did not always go the white man's way though: on 22 January 1879, as Isandlwana in South Africa, King Cetshwayo's Zulus inflicted a shattering defeat on a bigger and much better-armed British army. The shock to morale back home was tempered by the stirring heroism of a handful of troops who maintained a gallant last stand at Rorke's Drift. European firepower ultimately proved overwhelming: within six months, the Zulu capital Ulundi fell and Cetshwayo was forced to sue for peace.

The Anglo-Ashanti Wars
Britain also clashed with its former partners in the slave trade, the Ashanti. The Ashanti had built a powerful empire centered on present-day Ghana. Britain tried to take it over in the First Anglo-Ashanti War of 1823, but was badly mauled before beating the Ashanti back into the interior. A second war in 1863-64 was inconclusive. Britain won the Third Anglo-Ashanti War (1873-74) convincingly, burning the Ashanti capital Kumasi. After further wars (1894-96 and 1900), the Ashanti territory was finally absorbed into Britain's Gold Coast colony.
Egypt had long been important as a crossing-point between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. It had been still more vital since the opening of the French-built Suez Canal in 1869. Not quite a British colony, it was nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire but was ruled by Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive - a sort of viceroy or governor. It was on his behalf, at least in theory, that Britain's Genera; Charles George Gordon made an expedition southwards up the Nile into Sudan.
Here the Islamic teacher Muhammad bin Abdalla announced he was the Mahdi, a Messiah-like redeemer prophesied in certain traditions of Islam. Thousands flocked to join him, and by 1882 the Egyptian authorities had lost their grip.
Last stand[]

Charles Gordon's death
George Gordon had gone to Khartoum in Sudan to restore order, but since his presence only inflamed the situation, he was ordered to evacuate his troops. Instead, he took the personal decision to stay on and defend the city and Sudan against the Mahdi's forces. By March 1884 he was under siege. A popular clamor in Britain led to the dispatch of a relief expedition from Egypt. But on 26 January 1885 - just a few days before help arrived - the rebels stormed the city, and Gordon had his heroic end, cut down by his attackers.
Fury erupted back home and Lord Herbert Kitchener began a long and arduous campaign to take back Sudan. The battles of Omdurman (1898) and Umm Diwaykarat (1899) were both victories for Britain's Maxim gun and heavy artillery. Might prevailed. Sudan was declared a condominium - jointly ruled by Britain and Egypt, but with the former in charge.
Aftermath[]
However successful the British were in persuading themselves that their empire-building was altruistic in intent, their subject nations were harder to convince. The desire for autonomy among British colonies was strong. By the 1930s, Indians were looking to a future free of British domination. British high-handedness was remembered then - just as it was to be in the period after World War II when the "Wind of Change" began blowing through Africa. It would also be remembered by the Chinese Chinese as they negotiated the arrangements for Hong Kong. Its arrogance would blow up in Britain's face in its humiliation over the Suez Canal. Some would say that Britain had been badly served by the unchallenged supremacy it enjoyed at its imperial noon in the 19th century. The entire postwar period was overshadowed by a sense of long-drawn-out decline.
Irish Home Rule[]
- Main article: Irish Home Rule movement
The Boer War[]
Years of tension between the British and the Boers came to a head in 1899, plunging South Africa into a bitter - and often dirty - guerrilla war. The victory that was eventually wrested was welcomed more with relief than with rejoicing in Britain, and with a good deal of soul-searching on the public's part.
Background[]
Conflict with the Boers was a feature of Cape life from 1795, with the Boers finally establishing their own republics. The British seized Cape Colony during the French Revolutionary Wars, as they feared that France would snatch it from a Dutch Empire in decline. The Boers, Dutch-descendants who had farmed the region since the 17th century, were increasingly irked by British interference. The abolition of slavery was the last straw; the Boers undertook a Great Trek into the interior, establishing new Boer republics in Transvaal and Natal.
History[]
As the music-hall song of the 1870s suggested, "We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do/We've got the men, we've got the ships, we've got the money too!", Britain was in bullish mood as its imperial power expanded in the late 19th century. It met with one significant setback, though, in 1880, when Transvaal's Boers rose up against the 1877 annexation of their state by the British. After 10 weeks of sporadic fighting, a truce was declared and Britain restored the Boers' independence in 1881, but with the Boers accepting nominal British control.
Empire builder[]

Meanwhile, Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) was carving out his own territory within the British Empire. A mining magnate, he founded De Beers in 1880 and the British South Africa Company in 1889. To describe Rhodes as a businessman, however, does not do justice to the extraordinary - even exorbitant - scope of his activities or ambitions. His racial philosophy proclaimed the natural fitness of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to dominate and civilize the rest of the world, reflecting the fact that imperial mission was becoming quasi-religious in some quarters. Rhodes hoped for a corridor of British-ruled territory to extend the length of Africa "from the Cape to Cairo", but his vision for the Empire was greater still. One day, he believed, it would take back the United States and become the supreme government of the world.
In such a context, Rhodes' exploits in southern Africa seem relatively modest, but they were outrageous. Effectively, he was licensed by the British government to extend his company's control as a colonial government over enormous territories to the north of Cape Colony. Malawi and Botswana managed o avoid his interference, making their own protectorate deals directly with London. He was beaten in his bid for Katanga by King Leopold II of Belgium, who incorporated it into his Congo Free State. But Rhodes still took over the whole of what are now Zambia and Zimbabwe; this territory was named Rhodesia in his honor in 1894.
All this time Rhodes was a member of the Cape parliament, and was elected its prime minister in 1890. Rhodes was determined to expand Cape Colony into Transvaal, as gold finds there had sent British prospectors rushing to the territory. To Rhodes, the obvious way of legitimizing the situation was to make this Boer Republic a British territory by force. Led by one of his men, Leander Starr Jameson, a group of irregular soldiers attacked Transvaal in 1895, hoping to trigger an uprising among the English Uitlanders (British residents in the former republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State). The Jameson Raid was a disaster, and Rhodes was forced to resign.
Collision course[]

The Second Boer War
Tensions grew until, on 12 October 1899, the Boers ambushed a British armored train, capturing weapons and ammunition. In the following weeks, the Boers invaded Cape Colony, making rapid headway against an unprepared enemy. They were held at Elandslaagte on 21 October, but British forces then fell back, allowing the Boers to advance and besiege the towns of Ladysmith and Mafeking. The Boers were soon besieging Kimberley as well. Further defeats for Britain came at Magersfontein and Colenso. The latter began with a botched attempt to lift the siege of Ladysmith. A subsequent effort on 23 January 1900 saw British forces taking the summit of Spion Kop in a dawn attack - only to find themselves under fire from Boer artillery on overlooking hills.
However, the Boers had now pinned themselves down. The ensuing stalemate allowed Britain to regroup and bring in reinforcements, resulting in the mobilization of the largest British army yet sent abroad, with almost 200,000 in the field. Ultimately, the advantage in numbers and resources told. The Siege of Ladysmith was finally lifted on 27 February. Amidst jubilant celebrations back in Britain, Mafeking was relieved on 18 May, while Transvaal's capital, Pretoria, was taken on 5 June.
War of attrition[]
Rather than surrender, though, the Boers took to the hills to wage another guerrilla war. Britain reacted ruthlessly, with a scorched-earth policy, creating its own small forces of mounted troops to counter the Boer raiding parties. Trains were used to whisk men and munitions around the country. Controversially, Lord Kitchener, the British Chief-of-Staff, confined more than 100,000 Boer civilians in "concentration camps."
The mood in Britain was somber. There was little glory to be gained in warfare of this kind. Like the Crimean conflict, this was a very well-publicized war, swarming with special correspondents (including the young Winston Churchill). Radicals such as David Lloyd George and the Labour Party leader Keir Hardie made opposition to the war an important rallying point for their supporters. Some maverick Conservatives also came out on the pro-Boer side.
For what it was worth, the war had been won. The Boers were forced to sign the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902, giving up their territory, although they were to be given a degree of autonomy five years later. For now, the Boers agreed to come under British sovereignty. In 1910, South Africa became a self-governing dominion, comprising Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. It would have to wait until 1961 to be totally free of British rule and become a republic.
Aftermath[]
Despite their defeat, the Afrikaans-speaking Boers remained a force in South African society; in some ways, indeed, the dominating force.
Britain put the Boer War behind it: with a belligerent Germany arming fast, it had more pressing concerns to attend to. Kitchener was to gain immortality as the face of Britain's recruiting campaign for World War I.
Back in South Africa, defiance of Britain continued. The country became a self-governing dominion from 1910. Afrikaans was given parity with English as an official language in 1925, while full independence was granted in 1931. Racist discrimination against the black majority was enshrined in law with the introduction of apartheid (literally "apartness"; segregation) in 1948. Protests against its injustices marked the student unrest of the 1960s and 1970s.