Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

Twenty minutes before midnight on 14 April 1912, the largest ship ever built hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. Within hours, the Titanic sank and over 1,500 people perished. The world was shocked by the catastrophe, but not just because of the horrific number of casualties. Built in Belfast, the size, power and opulence of the Titanic symbolized Britain's global pre-eminence as the richest and most powerful country in the world. If Britain's navy had ruled the waves when the song ‘Rule Britannia’ was penned in 1740, its merchant navy and shipping lines now commanded the world's oceans and connected the largest intercontinental empire the world had ever seen. What type of portent was the doomed voyage of the Titanic? If the largest ship in the world could sink, what unseen iceberg lay before Britain to threaten its Empire, wealth and global power?

There were certainly Britons who began to see icebergs on every horizon. The belief that liberalism and its political economy had made possible the progressive improvement of the world – ushering in a new era of prosperity, political reform and the expansion of a civilizing empire – began to erode in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Doubt was not endemic, and many continued to believe that Britain had found the keys to the future. Even so, it was very real for those concerned with the poverty and dreadful social conditions most Britons experienced despite living in the richest country on earth. A growing awareness of these social problems caused some Britons to believe that the nation's progress had given way to degeneration.

Poverty had neither gone away nor been dramatically worsened by the Great Depression, but it had become more visible and widely discussed. Although poverty is always with us, it only becomes visible at specific moments when it is viewed as problematic. This happened in the late nineteenth century for a variety of reasons. New forms of social investigation highlighted and scientifically measured the alarming extent of poverty. The promise of liberal political economy to deliver wealth to the nation was exposed as a fiction.