The domestic history of Britain over the last millennium
has
increasingly displayed a number of features that, if seen against the
background of the history of the world as a whole, are notably benign.
One is the fact that the inhabitants of the island have come to live
their lives in conditions of considerable security. Although invasion
from the Continent posed an acute danger to the country as late as the
Second World War, the last time it actually happened was in 1066. The
last civil war was in the mid-seventeenth century, the last major
rebellion in 1745. Since then there have been no significant military
operations on British soil, though during the Second World War
civilians were exposed to sustained bombing from the air. In recent
decades there have been race riots but no genocide, small-scale
terrorism but as yet no mass murder. Nor do people who live in Britain
have very much to fear from lawlessness; in contrast to the way things
were as late as the eighteenth century, Britain is an effectively
policed society. If we set this experience against the background of
widespread and recurrent mayhem that has characterized so much of world
history, the degree of security enjoyed by the British has been highly
unusual.
Another benign feature of Britain in recent times has
been its
politics. There has been no break in the legitimacy of government in
Britain since the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. That revolution
expelled the last British ruler whose policies raised the specter of
absolute monarchy; thus a full-blooded, if syphilitic, king like Henry
VIII (1509-47), who put his country through a major religious upheaval
to solve his marital problems, has been hard to imagine in British
politics for a good three hundred years. Nor have more recent forms of
authoritarian rule achieved any success in Britain. There have been no
episodes of military dictatorship, no bouts of one- party rule.
Instead, forms of limited monarchy and political representation have
existed more or less continuously since the Middle Ages. With a series
of extensions of the franchise in the later nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Britain eventually became a democracy—albeit one
that still retained some archaic trappings of monarchic and
aristocratic power.
A more diffuse accompaniment of this political pattern
is the increase
in what has come to be called "civility." During the English civil war
of the mid- seventeenth century, Englishmen killed each other for God
with some abandon. Since then they have stopped doing this. Catholics,
long automatically stigmatized as traitors, have been allowed to vote
and hold most public offices in Britain since 1829. In Pakistan an
incident took place in October 2001 in which three gunmen, doubtless
Sunni Muslims, killed sixteen Protestant Christians in a church; the
only thing that was unusual in the Pakistani context was the targeting
of Christians, since previously the victims of such attacks had been
Shiite Muslims. In Britain, by contrast, no one shows much interest in
killing people because of their religious beliefs. Ethnicity is more
disruptive: there are race riots, and occasional murders inspired by
lower-class hatred of immigrants. But the numbers who get killed as a
result of ethnic tensions are again minuscule by South Asian standards;
although the Welsh, the Scots, and the English do not always see eye to
eye, they are not a lethal mixture. Overall, agreement to disagree is
pretty much ingrained in the mass of the British population.
These three features of recent British life have their
roots in a
variety of aspects of the British past, but they can hardly be seen as
its inevitable culmination. For example, the fact that Britain has been
an island since the early Holocene has clearly worked to its advantage.
It helps to explain the relative immunity of the country to foreign
invasion; Japan, which is farther removed from the Eurasian coast, has
on average done even better over the last two or three thousand years.
Yet the dearth of successful foreign invasions has also been a matter
of luck—something the world is full of, good and bad. It was the
weather that averted a Spanish invasion in 1588, just as it played a
major role in defeating the Mongol invasions of Japan. In the same vein
we can argue that the continued limitation of the English monarchy in
early modern times had something to do with insularity: the lack of
acute military threats from outside the island made possible a
precocious demilitarization of English society within it. But
possibilities do not have to be realized. And even in the unusually
civilian environment of sixteenth-century England, the failure of royal
absolutism was touch and go: the windfall of ecclesiastical wealth that
Henry VIII came into as a result of his Reformation could have rendered
the monarchy fiscally independent of Parliament, had the king not
proceeded to squander it on the luxury of hostilities with France. So
there was nothing foreordained about the trajectory taken by the modern
history of Britain. Yet there is one thing that has undoubtedly played
a central role in giving the whole syndrome a certain robustness (just
how robust only time will tell). This is an economic transformation
that started around 1760 and, in a sense, has never stopped:
industrialization.
A number of factors were clearly of great importance
in making the
industrial revolution possible in Britain. They include a rich and
varied suite of natural resources, including large amounts of coal; a
state that protected the economy more than it crushed it, and supported
British trade and settlement overseas; and the replacement of the
traditional peasantry by a class of agricultural wage labourers. But
given this favorable environment, what actually drove the process was
technological innovation in the hands of entrepreneurs. For example,
new types of spinning machine drastically reduced the cost of spun
cotton, leading to a large expansion of the market for it, which in
turn encouraged entrepreneurs to exploit the new technology by
reorganizing production in a factory system. The result of such
sequences, and of their interactions, was an unprecedented growth of
industrial production, at least in certain sectors of the economy and
in certain regions of the country. This development was associated with
a high level of investment in the transport system (first canals and
later railways). Significantly, this too was the work of entrepreneurs.
By 1850 the industrialization of Britain, though still
patchy, had made
the country far wealthier than it had ever been before. The
distribution of the new wealth was markedly unequal, but a wide sector
of the population was by now experiencing rising real incomes.
Meanwhile, the state had begun to reinvest some of its share of the new
wealth in the welfare of its citizens, educating and policing them. By
this time Catholics had been emancipated for a generation, and within
the next generation a conservative government was to enact the first of
a series of measures that led to universal suffrage. Eventually this
process of emancipation reached women. With this the basic elements of
the British mociplwere in place, and the British began to regard a
measure of security, democracy, and civility as their birthright. It
would be hard to imagine such a development without the firm foundation
of a viable industrial economy.
