 Hi, I'm Gene Price. Welcome to 20th century English history. When we look at England at the beginning of the 20th century, we're looking at an era named after the Queen, Victoria, and at England at the height of its empire. And so we'll start this lecture to begin the class. Let's look at early 20th century England. The first thing we need to know about Britain in the 20th century is that for many years, of course, Britain had been represented by and ruled by a monarch. And the British monarchy by the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, was not an absolute ruler as we tend to think of kings and queens, but a representation of the nation. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was a constitutional monarch with limited powers. And at the beginning of the 20th century, the British monarch was Queen Victoria. And you've heard of the age of Victoria or the Victorian era. It's named after her. She was the longest reigning monarch up to Queen Elizabeth. She reigned for almost 60 years. And in 1919, she was born to the, as the granddaughter of King George III. And King George, as you recall from American history, was the king at the time of the American Revolution. So she, Alexandria Victoria, was his granddaughter. And when her uncle died, King William IV, he, she ascended the throne. She was also known as the widow of Windsor. And so, like in the photograph on the right, oftentimes dressed in black in mourning, when her husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861, right around the time of our American Civil War, she began a long period of mourning that lasted until her death. So she went into seclusion, wasn't often seen out in public, but they were very much in love. And so when he passed away, it affected her deeply. In 1876, the height of the British Empire, Victoria was named Empress of India by the Prime Minister at the time, Benjamin Disraeli. And he was really trying to highlight the glory of the British Empire. As we sometimes have heard, the sun never set on the British Empire. Britain was sometimes called a nation of shopkeepers. Adam Smith, in his book, The Wealth of Nations, described Great Britain as a merchant nation, a nation of shopkeepers. And sometimes that's also attributed to Napoleon, but the idea was that trade and merchants kept England going. Here from this print in 1902, it shows the Tower Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge. These three bridges across the Thames River, the River Thames, we would say the River Thames. It's pronounced Thames, however. The bridge is opened in 1894 to promote commerce because they were tall enough, big enough, or you could raise them so that merchant vessels could sail up and down the Thames and shopkeepers could get goods and also exporters could export goods up and down the river, which does lead into the ocean. As I said earlier, there was a saying that the empire on which the sun never sets was Great Britain, the world's largest empire. And you can see from this map, everything in red in 1901 were British territories or Commonwealths, part of the Commonwealth, as it was sometimes called. Everything from Canada in North America, you even have some areas in South America and in the Caribbean, much of Africa, Southeast Asia, on to Australia and even to the Pacific. And so this saying that wherever the sun was around the world at any point in the day, the sun was shining out of British Commonwealth. So the sun never set on the British Empire at the height of the empire in 1900. And that's not to say that things were always good. Between 1815 and 1914, you had 100 years of the Pax Britannia, the peaceful empire, the imperial century. And it was free largely from war. There were some uprisings. This photograph on the right is from an exhibit or actually a piece in the British Museum, Albert and Victoria Museum. It's called Typhus Tiger. And you have this tiger that's pouncing and killing a British soldier. And the tiger was symbolic of pieces of India. And so this was kind of a rebellion against the empire. The British Navy was one of the most powerful navies in the world and it kept the peace and kept conflict down. India is sometimes called the jewel on the crown. And this is one of the reasons why Disraeli wanted to name Victoria the Empress. Great Britain had gotten control in the early 1800s. The British Raj was established by mid-century, by mid-1800s. There were some rebellions, the most famous of which was the Seapoy Rebellion. The British Crown had gained control through the agency of the East India Company. And some areas were controlled locally. But for the most part, Great Britain had control of India, which was the highlight of its empire. There were other colonial possessions sometimes called the White Dominions. And these were largely self-governed areas dominated by White settlers, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, for example. And they were important pressure valves. And by that, they were good places for Great Britain to send excess people and also prisoners. There were other colonies, some were ruled locally, but there were colonies around the world. There were some challenges by the beginning of the 20th century. One of the most important was the Second Boer War. This was in South Africa. South Africa was originally settled by the Dutch. And there were Dutch settlers who were struggling against British control. And the British and colonial armies broke the rebellion. What this did, this battle in South Africa at the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century, it revealed the poor state of British recruits. And it began driving national attention to how Britons were taken care of health-wise and how they were educated. And we'll see that throughout the 20th century. There were also challenges from Japan, Germany, and the United States. There were problems over colonial territories being challenged from Japan. Germany was building up its war machine threatening Great Britain quite often. And so was the United States. And there were also challenges from other European powers in the end of these colonial periods. And there were some treaties like the Entente Cordiale in 1904 with France, where they teamed up Great Britain and France against Germany. And in 1902, this is a photograph of sometimes called the Spittlefield Nippers. These were poor, sometimes orphan children in Great Britain. The Spittlefields were in East London, a notoriously poor area. And these nippers, these young orphan kids, many times the only way they made money was selling newspapers. And here they are with newspapers showing the end of the Second Boer War in June of 1902. Politically, there were two divisions. And you can still see these divisions in Great Britain today. Conservatives versus Liberals. Now, don't get confused by American politics. The Conservatives and the Liberals in Great Britain are different from Conservatives and Liberals in the United States. And you can see here what they stood for. The Conservatives of Great Britain certainly were for patriotism. And so they were pro-empire. They didn't mind sending out the British Army to keep down, to expand and to keep the peace in the Empire. They were closely aligned with the church in England. And they were supported by a lot of rural voters who were very traditionalist. Liberals, on the other hand, was a peace party. They weren't interested in war. They were more concerned about the costs of empire. That there were a lot of economic costs to it. There was oppression of other peoples and of people at home. They were also non-conformists. And by that, that means that they didn't necessarily, members didn't like the Church of England, didn't want to join the Church of England, so they didn't conform to Anglican rules. They did, for the most part, sponsor and support the idea of Ireland home rule, allow Ireland to rule itself. And they supported temperance, the idea of not drinking in excess. So there were some divisions in the parties, and there were some divisions in the country as well, between the Liberals and the Conservatives. Those were the two largest parties, although there were other parties as well. The Labour Party, for example, originated as a committee, the LRC, and it became the Labour Party in 1906, so at the beginning of the period we're looking at. Largely made up of trade unionists. They believed in rugged individualism, that everybody had to be able to work to support themselves. Now they did believe in striking, because they did believe that through their labour they should be able to earn a living, and when they weren't given good enough wages or hours or too long, they should be able to strike in order to bring the company to the table to renegotiate the terms of the labour versus employer agreements. The Marxist Founders left the party to the party, so Marxists really weren't a part of the party, and the Labour Party oftentimes allied itself with the Liberal Party. Political issues at the turn of the century, the beginning of the 20th century, of course, were empire. The problem of empire was often closely aligned with terror reform, the idea of lower taxes. They were concerned that protectionism was being promoted except from within the empire, and what that means is they were protecting themselves against other countries, but within the empire there was oftentimes higher prices. They also were concerned about this idea of national efficiency, and national efficiency essentially meant the condition of people in Great Britain. They looked at the Bohor War, and the Bohor War, as I mentioned earlier, revealed problem with England's education and healthcare system. They looked that 50% of the recruits for the war were unfit for duty, and so this national efficiency movement were efforts to improve the British race, and so they began medical reforms, they began educational reforms, and one of the other issues that was very important at the turn of the century was the House of Lords. These were sometimes called the Peers, and what they mean by the Peers, this were the nobility, the old nobility, and the ruling class, and a lot of people were now not seeing a need for a nobility any longer. They still liked the monarch, but they weren't so keen on the peerage, the lords, in England, and so the lords were conservative on most domestic issues, which did not endure them to the average working class people, and so liberals sought to limit the ability of the lords who were oftentimes blocking legislation which would help the common people of England. Where this really came into clear focus was in the so-called People's Budget. The liberals succeeded in the elections at the turn of the century, and although the House of Lords opposed reforms, for example in education, they opposed the Licensing Act, and this allowed liquor licensing, and there were concerns about public drunkenness, and so David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kind of like our Secretary of the Treasury in the United States, proposed a budget in 1909, 1910, which would have increased taxes on the wealthy, insured social welfare programs, and Winston Churchill was very much behind it, but the conservative House of Lords was against it and threatened to block it, and David Lloyd George made a speech that said that a fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnought ships, and they're just as great a terror and they last longer, so he was very critical of the nobility. He also said the question will be asked whether 500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, should override the judgment, the deliberate judgment of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country, and in the end, the people's budget, the power of the Lords was limited. They opposed the budget, and although they traditionally did not interfere in the budget brought forth by the House of Commons, when they did, it gave the Liberals the opportunity to restrict their power. There was an election called and it forced Liberals and Labor and Irish Nationalist parties to come together to oppose the Lords, and it resulted in the Parliament Bill of 1911, which did limit their power, and although it only passed by a slight majority, it still was effective, and so that's where we're going to close out this first lecture on the beginning. You see some of the problems that were happening politically, ending on the time the power of taking care of the working class, whether or not the working class who saw themselves as their ability to work gave them power and power to negotiate with their employers versus the traditional power of the nobility and the rural working class as well, and so you see these problems and these conflicts, the problems of empire, and it all comes to a head at the beginning of the 20th century.