Overview: Empire and Sea Power, 1714 - 1837

House of Hanover

In 1714, George, Elector of Hanover, became king in accordance with the Act of Settlement, 1702. The act stipulated that, after the death of the childless Queen Anne (the last legitimate Stuart monarch) the British monarchy should be Protestant and Hanoverian.

The Hanoverian era continued through four successive Georges and ended with the last representative of the line, William IV, who died in 1837.

The coming of the Hanoverians to the British throne was not unanimously welcomed. George I spoke no English and was as much concerned, if not more so, with fostering the interests of Hanover as with giving full attention to his role and duties in Britain.

The major opposition to the Hanoverians came from the Jacobites, who supported the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne.

Two main Jacobite rebellions occurred, the first in 1715, the second in 1745. Both were marked by poor military organisation, lacklustre leadership and exaggerated hopes of support.

Despite some Jacobite successes in battle, the rebellions were ruthlessly crushed by the British army.

The Battle of Culloden, in March 1746 - the last battle fought on British soil - marked the final blow to the Jacobites' hopes as the duke of Cumberland led the government forces to a decisive victory.

Thereafter the Hanoverians' grip on political power faced no serious challenge.

Political upheaval

Britain was governed under a mixed constitution, achieved through the Glorious Revolution of 1689. The monarch ruled in conjunction with the two houses of parliament. All three parties were closely involved in political decisions.

Gradually, however, the House of Commons and the prime minister assumed more political control than had been the case under the Stuarts.

Parliament existed under an unreformed system until the Great Reform Act of 1832. Thus for virtually all the period from 1714 to 1837, members of the Commons and Lords came from the landed interest.

They were unpaid as politicians and were elected in open ballots. The franchise was limited to a small minority of Protestant adult males. Westminster and Whitehall dominated the British political stage, though vigorous political debates occurred outside their confines.

Ireland was granted legislative independence in 1782, but the chief executive roles in Dublin were British appointees. The Irish parliament was dissolved when the Act of Union (1801) created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Two main parties, the Whigs and Tories, were prominent in politics but there were nearly always over a hundred independent members of parliament who needed to be persuaded on issues and bills.

Radical groups - such as the supporters of John Wilkes in the 1760s; the corresponding societies of the 1790s; and the Hampden clubs founded in 1812 - all pressed for parliamentary reform. But it was not until after the Napoleonic Wars that a fully-fledged reform movement emerged with a mass platform.

The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and the granting of Catholic emancipation (1829) introduced political rights for Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics.

These concessions were followed by the Whig Party introducing, after much struggle, the Great Reform Act. This revised existing parliamentary constituencies and extended the franchise moderately, but it did not introduce a secret ballot or parliamentary democracy.

Enough of the existing political system survived to ensure that wealth and land were the basis of power until at least the mid-Victorian period. The continued exclusion of the working man from the franchise provided the impetus for Chartism in the later 1830s.

Population explosion

During the Hanoverian era, Britain experienced considerable demographic growth, the birth of an industrial economy, and extensive social change.

The British population doubled in the century after 1721, from 7.1 to 14.2 million people. Most of the growth occurred after 1750, and particularly after the 1780s.

Between 1810 and 1820, average family size reached five or six children per family, the highest rate in any decade in modern British history.

This surge in population was to some degree the result of falling mortality, which itself was partly the result of widespread smallpox inoculation in the early 19th century.

But it resulted more from a rise in marital fertility, which came primarily from more people marrying and, moreover, marrying at a younger age, thereby maximising women's childbearing years.

Improved material circumstances in industrialising parts of the nation explain the trend towards earlier and more extensive marriage and larger families.

Britain already had a thriving economy in the early 18th century, with productive agriculture, scientific ingenuity, a strong commercial and middling sector, and extensive manufacturing.

After 1760, a gradual but continuing rise in the rates of industrial and economic growth led to Britain becoming the world's first industrial nation.

Britain built factories and canals, extended agricultural productivity through parliamentary enclosure, experienced rapid urban growth, manufactured and patented new industrial techniques, achieved a breakthrough in fuel sources for energy and traded extensively along its own coasts and with Ireland, Europe and the wider world.

Industrialisation did not affect all parts of the nation equally. It was particularly strong in south Lancashire, Yorkshire, Birmingham and the Black Country, the Edinburgh-Glasgow corridor and London.

Though industrialisation brought disruption to communities, pollution, booms and slumps and unequal gains, it led in the long term to a better standard of living for most workers.

Social upheaval

Detail of Stephenson's 'Rocket', 1829  ©

Industrialisation brought considerable social change to Britain. Factory work depended on labour mobility, the installation of new machinery and the allocation of workers to specialised tasks.

Domestic industrial work changed over the generations. Thus groups such as handloom weavers found their work opportunities eroded in the early 19th century and their wages plummeted after textile weaving entered the factories.

Women were increasingly employed in more menial tasks in industry, while men assumed the role of breadwinners. In the countryside, women were sidelined from their traditional work in dairying and found it difficult to secure well-paid harvest work.

Religious and educational provision for the lower classes underwent considerable change. Protestant nonconformity, especially Methodism, gained adherents and offered more spontaneous, emotional Christian worship than the Church of England provided.

Popular education was heavily influenced by Christian morality. It played a larger role in the lives of working communities after the 1800 than before, largely because of the rise of monitorial schools teaching the so-called three R's - reading, writing and arithmetic.

The parish system of poor relief adapted to changing circumstances. Per capita expenditure on poor relief rose rapidly between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

But after the implementation of the New Poor Law in 1834, relief was more difficult to obtain, workhouses were given a higher priority, and poor law expenditure was pruned.

Sea power

White traders inspect African slaves during a sale, c. 1750  ©

Britain's development between 1714 and 1837 had an important international and military dimension. An empire based on commerce, sea power and naval dominance consolidated British overseas settler societies.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Britain possessed colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, numerous sugar islands in the Caribbean and a foothold in Bengal. Georgia became a British colony in 1732. Britain acquired the Ceded Islands in 1763.

Despite the disastrous loss of the 13 North American colonies in the American War of Independence in 1783, Britain subsequently acquired settlements in New South Wales, Sierra Leone, Trinidad, Demerara, Mauritius and the Cape Colony. She also extended her hold over Bengal and Madras.

British oceanic enterprise provided the shipping, commerce, settlers and entrepreneurs that held these far-flung territories together. In the Indian Ocean, the English India Company dominated trade with India, south east Asia and China.

In the Atlantic Ocean, most trade was carried out by private merchant vessels.

The triangular slave trade was an important feature of British transatlantic commerce, taking over three million black slaves as workers for the plantations in America and the West Indies until the trade was abolished in 1807.

Trade was backed by naval power and by efficient handling of private and public credit, including substantial public borrowing via the Bank of England.

Britain at war

For over a third of the Hanoverian period, Britain was involved in international wars. In the War of the Austrian Succession (1740 - 1748) Britain moved against French expansionism in the Low Countries and the Caribbean.

In the Seven Years' War (1756 - 1763), Britain clashed with France, later allied with Spain, for dominance in North America and India, and supported Prussia in the European campaigns against Austria and Russia.

Britain fought the Americans in their War of Independence (1776 - 1783). In the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793 - 1801 and 1802 - 1815), the British army and navy locked horns with France in Europe, the Caribbean, Egypt and India.

The War of the Austrian Succession had no decisive outcome. Britain famously lost the American War of Independence, but triumphed in the Seven Years' War and in the wars against France that culminated in Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo.

The financial means to wage war extensively after 1793 permitted Britain to forge a global empire by 1815 that was impressive in its scope and stronger in both the Atlantic and Indian oceans and around their shores than any other European state had achieved.

Find out more

Books

The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century edited by PJ Marshall (Oxford University Press, 1998)

The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Eighteenth Century edited by Paul Langford (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Poverty and Progress: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700 - 1850 by MJ Daunton (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 - 1837 by Linda Colley (Yale University Press, 1992)

The New Oxford History of England: A Land of Liberty? England 1689 - 1727 by Julian Hoppit (Oxford University Press, 2000)

The New Oxford History of England: A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727 - 1783 by Paul Langford (Oxford University Press, 1989)

The Scottish Nation, 1700 - 2000 by TM Devine (Penguin, 2000)

Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords by Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers (Oxford University Press, 1997)

English Society in the Eighteenth Century by Roy Porter (Penguin, 1982)

Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 by WA Speck (Arnold, 1977)

About the author

Kenneth Morgan is Professor of History at Brunel University. He specialises in the social and economic history of Britain and her colonies, primarily in the 18th century, and in music history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has been a British Academy Research Reader. His books include Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1993), The Birth of Industrial Britain: Economic Change, 1750-1850 (Pearson, 1999), Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet (University of Illinois Press, 2005) and Slavery and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2007).