great britain economy essay

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

The uk economy in the 1960s.

Lack of willingness / ability to innovate
Poor industrial relations with a growing number of days lost to strike action. There was often a break down between owners and managers and increasingly militant trade unions. Some argue this was exacerbated by Britain's class system. Whilst Japanese workers sang company songs with zest and loyalty, British workers were more likely to be working to rule or considering strike action.
Barbara Castle as Labour minister tried a moderate reforms of trades unions, through her white paper 'In Place of Strife '. However, the unions effectively lobbied Labour ministers and the reform bill was blocked.
Complacency. Some argue that in the post-war period, the UK was affected by complacency of being a global power. This complacency was in stark contrast to the defeated countries of Germany and Japan, who put greater energy into business. The UK was also hampered by coming to terms with letting go its Empire and trying to join Europe. In the 1960s, two applications to join the EEC were vetoed by the French.
Lack of public sector infrastructure. Burdened by high post-war debt, the UK struggled to invest in new transport and technologies. For example, the UK was still relying on steam trains until the mid 1960s - later than many other countries who made switch to cheaper and more efficient electricity and diesel.

"It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued." ( BBC )

"Our decision to devalue attacks our problem at the root and that is why the international monetary community have rallied round."

Previous decades of1940s and 1950s
History of UK housing
UK economy in 1970s

Yay, welcome back. Some stuff on Trump's economic plans would be good too! Also the EU exit!

British Economic and Social History, 1700-1880

This paper covers the economic, social and cultural history of Britain from 1700 to 1880. This period saw more dramatic and fundamental changes in the lives of the population than any previous period of similar, or indeed much longer length. At the heart of economic change was the Industrial Revolution, generally seen by economic historians as the world’s first transition to sustained economic growth. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a new world, in which both technological change and economic growth were, for the first time, continuous and sustained long-term. Industrialisation soon spread to parts of Europe, North America and Japan. The extraordinary inequalities in average incomes and political power which characterise the modern world are overwhelmingly the product of differences in when or whether industrialisation began. Industrialisation created a world in which mass poverty was no longer inevitable, but an outcome of political choices. But how did it all begin and why? What were the roles of: ideas, institutional or political reforms, imperialism, capitalism, geography, culture, and of female and child workers? You will explore the revolutionary changes in industry, technology, energy use and transport, as well as changes in consumption, the transition to the world’s first urban society, rising life expectancies, the unprecedented population explosion, the evolution of poverty, welfare provision, child labour, and much more.

Economic changes were accompanied by – and both caused and shaped – social and cultural continuities and changes, whose exploration is also central to Paper 10. What changes were there in: the manners and sensibilities of affluent or upwardly mobile classes, the gap between elite and popular culture, the literacy and education of the poor, or in national and ethnic identities, gender roles and sexual relationships? How did art and literature comment on the dynamism and perils of this rapidly transforming society? How were the conflicts between 'haves' and 'have-nots' accommodated or contained? The histories of class consciousness, riot, and crime are on offer here.

This paper will also introduce you to the profound disagreements amongst historians about both what actually happened and why it happened, and the fragile and incomplete evidential material upon which historians draw when they write economic, social and cultural history, trying to reconstruct the lives and experiences of millions of men, women and children across a stratified social hierarchy, living and working in hamlets, villages, towns and cities in different regions. In conjunction with the paper British political history 1688-1886 you will get a richly patterned view of the period.

For further information please follow the link below.

This material is intended for current students but will be interesting to prospective students. It is indicative only.

Essay: Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth

Essay: Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth!

Industrial Revolution is an unpredictable and unprecedented transformation of socio-economic life of Great Britain during the last few decades of 18th century. The Industrial Revolution is a process of quite substantial structural changes which eventually ushered in accelerated economic growth. These changes are not simple economic changes in the social dynamics, culture and political functions of the government.

In fact, the mutual interplay among these changes shaped the process of industrialisation and technological revolution. However these changes cannot be analysed without any reference to the class composition of the British society and the associated social tensions. Actually, historically speaking, industrial revolution produced what we call modern industrial capitalism.

When economists in the mid-1950s began to dispute the traditional thesis that capital deepening had been, historically, the major source of increases in productivity per head, there began the search for important factors—other than physical inputs of capital and labour—which had caused gains in per capita product.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Thus population increases and technological change, which for so long were assumed to have been determined exogenously, made their way back into the economist’s bag of variables. The historian, fortunately, had never been imprisoned within the restrictive framework of neo-classical production function and had always recognised the importance of both population and technology for the process of historic growth; on the other hand, they had no conceptual framework in which to relate the variables of growth they had identified.

We will now attempt to identify the broad factors causing Industrial Revolution:

(1) Capital Accumulation:

The accumulation of capital has been a major interest of economists since Adam Smith (1723-1790), and of economic historians since economic history emerged in the second half of 19th century as an academic discipline. Industrial Revolution; it has been argued recently, was no more than an acceleration in the rate of capital formation.

The tendency of recent literature on Industrial Revolution has been to look for factors that raised the profitability of investment (i.e. its demand) rather than those which increases the flow of saving (its supply). Aston argued that fall in the interest rate was an important stimulant of investment—a difficult hypothesis to test in the absence of statistics on investment expenditure.

The more usual notion stresses the role of increased demand for final goods, reacting back on the demand for capital (profitability of investment). In this context we may refer to the theory of profit inflation as a major determinant of capital accumulation.

According to this theory, the steady price rise between 1750 and 1790 inflated profits, increased savings and accelerated capital accumulation. E. H. Hamilton has provided historical backing for this particular hypothesis and has argued that the profit inflation after 1750 caused Industrial Revolution.

However, empirical evidence about capital formation—at various times and in various economies over the last hundred years—has produced a series of generalisations which can be usefully grouped, for the purpose of considering their relevance for historic growth in three broad categories:

First, concerning the size and composition of capital accumulation:

(a) The diversion of resources to capital formation in advanced economies is ‘modest’—20 to 25 percent of GNP, and is less in underdeveloped countries;

(b) The proportion of total investment in machinery, tools and equipment and hence, embodying technical progress, is relatively small—usually less than half of that on construction.

Second, concerning the relationship between capital formation and growth of output:

(a) The capital-output ratio has been 3 for some time, with a possible falling tendencies in the advanced economies;

(b) Differences in the rate of capital formation cannot explain differences in growth rates between economies.

Third, concerning the role of capital formation in the growth of underdeveloped economies compared with developed economies:

(a) The capital-output ratio is relatively higher;

(b) The proportion of social infrastructure capital formation to total capital formation is relatively higher;

The historians now question, not so much the basic importance of capital formation in the making of the Industrial Revolution, as the size and composition of necessary diversion of resources for capital formation. Historians cling to the classical economists’ theory of growth through accumulation, but argue whether a modest or large capital accumulation was necessary to begin and to sustain the 18th century growth. This problem of determining the necessary size of accumulation cuts across other historical problems of capital formation and partly determines the outcome of other arguments.

(2) Technical Change:

The character of a society is conditional and its production possibilities as assumed by historians are determined by its technology. Many economists now believe that the rate of growth is a function of the rate of technical change and its application to industry. Historically, however, it is difficult to separate technological progress and capital accumulation.

Most new technology during the Industrial Revolution for example was embodied in new or improved capital goods. Thus there was a close relationship between investment, capital formation, technical progress and increase in output.

Sharp increase in productivity is one of the most important factors contributing to economic growth. Increase in productivity was primarily a function of innovations. Innovations are simple technological developments that could only be responsive to socio-economic conditions. Two important economic factors were fuel shortage and demand growth.

The growth of output and capital stock was tending to outrun the growth of labour supply and natural resources (wood): expensive wood led to exploiting cheap coal and, then, to steam. Thus the energy crisis generated its own solution—the resultant changes in relative prices which were powerful incentives to innovation and vital to Industrial Revolution.

Growth in Demand:

Growth increased demand along a wide front, putting pressures on sources of supply and eliciting vigorous innovative responses; more particularly, Cole has argued that faster population growth from 1740 onward ultimately stimulated growth of income per head—in sharp contrast with the Malthusian prediction—because greater demand pressure led to induced innovations—more than sufficient to offset diminishing returns.

Characteristics of Technological Progress :

In the 18th century a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode of production-the factory system. During these years, other branches of industry affected comparable advances and, all these taken together, mutually reinforcing one another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening front. The abundant and variety of these innovations almost defy compilations.

But they may be subsumed under five principles:

(1) The substitution of machines-rapid, regular, precise-for human skill and effort;

(2) The substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular the introduction of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost unlimited supply of energy;

(3) The use of new and far more abundant raw materials—in particular, the substitution of minerals for vegetable or animal substances.

(4) The rapid growth associated with the technological progress was self-sustaining. Where, previously, on amelioration of the condition of existence—hence of survival—and an increasing economic opportunity, had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumes the gain achieved; now, for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a containing flow of investment and technological innovations; a flow that lifted beyond visible limits the ceiling of Malthus’s positive checks. The Industrial Revolution thereby opened a new age of promise.

(5) An economic historian, Malthias, speaks of a continuum of technological improvement; of the kind of technological Darwinism sustained over a long period of time. Much of this technological changes was product innovation rather than process innovation, or, when it was process innovation, it would be accommodating a standard process to a new range of uses.

As a result substantial changes in processing costs tended to occur discontinuously; e.g. when patent right expired. Nevertheless, the underlying technological Darwinism was an important reason for an accelerated British economic growth during the last few decades of the 18th century.

Social Change:

Crucial change in the 18th century was dependent not only on more productive equipment, not only on more entrepreneurs, but also on the changing values in society; in particular, it was necessary to cross a threshold level of acceptance of level methods.

The changing values were reflected in changed social action that was economically significant, for example, at the top of the income structure, more capital went into factories and less into country-houses, while, at the bottom, more into new customer goods and less in idleness, gin and customary subsistence living standard.

These switches in demand were the result partly of a rational economic reaction to price changes, but partly of a radical revision of those traditional attitudes which discouraged the fuller use of human material resources.

Men’s minds turned generally from traditionalism to risk-taking and profit-making, from the acceptance of customary way of life to striving for extra income and extra consumption. It is important to note that pursuit of wealth dominated the minds of a much larger segment of English society than before and the acceptance of change was general and quite pervasive.

Population:

Population, its growth, stability or decline, and its relationship to economic growth, has been an absorbing interest of economists and historians since Malthus (1766-1834). It was the Industrial Revolution which marked ‘the great divide’ between a world in which population and output per capita were increasing slowly, or not at all; and a world of much faster growth of output per capita, in which population had increased at an almost frightening rate.

If the limits to population growth and living standards seemed rigidly determined at low levels in pre- industrialised England, the limits to both since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1750s) have been flexible and, it would seem, almost infinitely so.

The historical data suggests a close association between population growth and economic growth. With increase in per capita income widely accepted as the objective of development or as the best available approximation of it, population is firmly relegated to the denominator of the expression which we want to maximise and any increase in numbers can only be considered a setback on the road to development. There has been clear realisation by the historians that population can conflict with growth, but little development of the theme.

S. Pollard and D.W. Crossly have suggested that the population growth of England during the Industrial Revolution put great strain on the economy, with food supplies failing to keep up with population.

Much effort and ingenuity have gone into estimating rates of growth of England’s population in the 18th century. A regional breakdown of population growth shows that the countries which were later the centres of industrial change were already growing faster than the rest of the country in the first half of the century.

What happened in the 18th century is that population probably increased 75% over the I6th and 17th centuries; but it is growth in the 18th century which is the most important in considering the relationship between population growth and the Industrial Revolution. And about this we cannot be certain. This uncertainty means that the chronology of population growth and the chronology of economic growth are difficult to associate.

There remains the final and important question as to whether or not the increase in population helped or hindered the English growth. If we believe Malthus, then, as population grew, diminishing returns set in agriculture, resulting in increasing labour costs (man-hour food costs) and decreasing profits and, eventually, in a stationary state.

But, as Ricardo pointed out, improvements in agriculture and in machinery could offset diminishing returns. Indeed, strongly increasing returns in industry seem to have been a characteristic of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a tendency towards increasing returns in agriculture.

Therefore the conclusion, however, that England avoided a Malthusian trap is no proof that the increase in population during the Industrial Revolution actually helped growth. And, over the course of history before the Industrial Revolution, population growth was obviously the major source of general expansion of output as the world had experienced.

Population growth without industrialisation was certainly disastrous for Ireland in the period before the Great Polato Famine of 1842 there. And, in trying to explain Britain’s slowing rate of growth in the years between 1880 and 1930, it is significant that one of the main ways in which Britain’s situation after 1900 differed from that in the 19th century was in the fall in its rate of population growth.

Obviously the Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs existed in sufficient numbers and had the requisite skills to overcome obstacles and to effect a transformation of the economy. Obviously also, both economic incentives and factor elasticities enabled the entrepreneurs to respond purposefully and react successfully; institutional arrangements, factor supplies, technical skills, etc. were appropriate.

Effects of Industrial Revolution :

Let us stop and take a different sort of look round Britain at the highpoint of its capitalist career after the Industrial Revolution. It was first and foremost a country of workers. The net result of the galaxy of revolutions in the way men organised their economic life was that continuous economic change came to be part of the natural order of things and the scale of economy began to expand perceptibly and without limit. It was within the century 1750-1850 that the crucial transformation took place that led, eventually, to a sustained growth in incomes per head.

When workers lost their employment-which they might do at the end of the job of the week, of the day or even of the hour- they had nothing to fall back upon except their savings, their friendly society or trade union etc., which was still the only public provision for what we now call social security.

When they grew old or infirm, they were lost, unless helped by their children for effective insurance schemes covered only a few of them. Nothing is more characteristic of Victorian-working class life than this virtually total absence of social security

After a period of stagnation in output, prices, population, incomes and standards of living in the first part of the 18th century, there was a noticeable upward trend in total national output dating from somewhere about or just before 1750.

A considerably sharper upward trend appears in the 1780s and 1790s when total national output may have been growing at a rate of 1.8 percent per annum (approximately twice the rate of growth in the middle of the century) and output per head at a rate of about 0.9 percent/annum.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the growth in total national output was proceeding at a rate which implied its doubling in not much more than 40 years and the growth in income per head at a rate which implied its doubling in 70-80 years.

A significant feature of this end-of-century acceleration in the rate of growth of income per head is that it was accompanied by acceleration in the rate of growth of population. It seems to have been the period within which the rate of growth in national product effectively outstripped the rate of growth of population and the spectre of Malthusian stagnation was banished.

The fact is that the economic growth was not a process of steady improvement in standards of living for the mass of the population. It was a process of economic and social change which often left certain sections of the population very much poorer in every sense than they had been in pre-industrial times, and which made larger and larger sections of the population acutely vulnerable to depressions in trade or industry or to variations in the state of the harvest. Even those whose standard of living were on balance, improving, were subject to unpredictable periods of unemployment or short-time which would bring them face to face with destitution again.

The Great Depression brought important changes. Probably the most rapid general improvement in the conditions of life of the 19th century worker took place in the years 1880-1895 mitigated only by the somewhat higher unemployment of this period.

This is because falling- living-costs benefit the poorest as well as the rest, indeed proportionately more than the rest, and the depression was primarily a period of falling prices — but they fell largely because an entire new world of cheap imported foodstuffs opened before the British people.

By 1850 Britain was certainly industrialised in that more of its people were engaged in manufacturing industry than in agriculture. Moreover, the agricultural industry was distinguished at this stage by the fact that its landless labourers constituted a relatively large proportion of its labour force.

It had moved a long way, that is to say, from the peasant economy. But probably the most significant difference in the labour force of 1850 as compared with the mid-18th century was that it was a more specialised labour force.

What had happened, however, by 1850, as compared with, say, 1750, was that the range of goods regularly available to the average purchaser had widened and that the chain of intermediaries between producer and consumer had lengthened. To a large extent this was a consequence of the improved system to communications.

Before the middle of the 19th century, however, the process of industrialisation had gone far enough to give the British economy a built-in tendency to continuous economic growth. The volume of capital at the disposal of the labour force was growing rather faster than the labour- force itself and the long term trend was definitely set towards a continuous increase in the productivity of the worker.

Finally, another distinctive and significant dimension of the growth record of the British economy over the period of the Industrial Revolution is worth noticing: the extent to which it was dependent on the international economy both for material inputs and for final demand. Between 1750 and 1800 both real GNP and the volume of domestic exports roughly doubled, while the volume of retained imports roughly trebled.

The link with the international economy largely explained why at first Industrial Revolution first occurred spontaneously in a country with a relatively small population and a relatively narrow natural resources base. The growing strength of that link may also have contributed to the characteristically low propensity to invest and to innovate which seems to have distinguished British industrial entrepreneurs in the late 19th century from their rivals in the other industrialising countries.

Ultimately, the Industrial Revolution subjected a low-income community to a fluctuating type of economic growth in which the down-savings were prolonged and painful for the proletarian sectors of the population. Of course it was not only the working classes who suffered from the growing instability of the economic system.

In sum then, endowed as it was with abundant labour, a limited and exhaustible heritage of land and other natural resources, a modest propensity to save and invest and a government which preferred to leave economic development to the free play of private enterprise, the British economy came through its Industrial Revolution with a relatively low growth potential by comparison with most of the countries which industrialised later. The faster-growing rivals threatened her virtual monopoly in world markets. The ends of British industrial supremacy was definitely in sight.

Galenson and Leibenstein push their argument one step further and identify the most profitable project as the one with the highest capital-labour ratio. This result leads them to the paradoxical conclusion that the factor-intensity rule should be reversed: countries should prefer the most capital-intensive rather than the least capital-intensive techniques in order to promote savings and faster growth.

Role of Industrial Development in Economic Growth
Determining Economic Growth Using Total Factor Productivity
Solow’s Neoclassical Growth Model | Economic Growth | Economics
Relationship between Economic Growth and Economic Development

Find anything you save across the site in your account

What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

By Sam Knight

My life divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. I was born in 1980, a year after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on her lips: “Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” The Conservative-run Britain of the eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. The news was always showing police on horseback. There were strikes, protests, the I.R.A., and George Michael on the radio. My father, who was a lawyer in the City, travelled to Germany to buy a Mercedes and drove it back, elated. Until Thatcher resigned, when I was ten, her steeply back-combed hair and deep, impossible voice played an outsized role in my imagination—a more interesting, more dangerous version of the Queen.

I was nearly seventeen when the Tories finally lost power, to Tony Blair and “New Labour,” an updated, market-friendly version of the Party. Before he moved to Downing Street, Blair lived in Islington, the gentrifying borough I was from. Boris Johnson, an amusing right-wing columnist, who was getting his start on television, also lived nearby. Our local Member of Parliament was an out-of-touch leftist named Jeremy Corbyn.

New Labour believed in the responsibility of the state to look after its citizens, and in capitalism to make them prosper. Blair was convincing, even when he was wrong. He won three general elections in ten years and walked out of the House of Commons to a standing ovation, undefeated in his eyes. I was turning thirty when Labour eventually ran out of road, undone by the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, and the grim temper of Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor. He was caught in a hot-mike moment describing an ordinary voter, who was complaining about taxes and immigration, as a bigot.

Since then, it’s been the Conservatives again. In 2010, the Party returned to government in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Since 2015, it has held power alone. Last May, the Tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that New Labour had held office. But the third political era of my lifetime has been nothing like the previous two. There has been no dominant figure or overt political project, no Thatcherism, no Blairism. Instead, there has been a quickening, lowering churn: five Prime Ministers, three general elections, two financial emergencies, a once-in-a-century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of tired, almost constant drama.

The period is bisected by the United Kingdom’s decision, in 2016, to leave the European Union, a Conservative fantasy, or nightmare, depending on whom you talk to. Brexit catalyzed some of the worst tendencies in British politics—its superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play—and exhausted the country’s political class, leaving it ill prepared for the pandemic and the twin economic shocks of the war in Ukraine and the forty-nine-day experimental premiership of Liz Truss. Covering British politics during this period has been like trying to remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. If you really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead you closer to any meaning.

Last year, I started interviewing Conservatives to try to make sense of these years. “One always starts with disclaimers now—I didn’t start this car crash,” Julian Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, the longest-serving Prime Minister of the period, told me. I spoke to M.P.s and former Cabinet ministers; political advisers who helped to make major decisions; and civil servants, local-government officials, and frontline workers hundreds of miles from London who had to deal with the consequences.

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum , as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

Link copied

High levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.”

With stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”

Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”

And that is the second, all too obvious, fact of British life throughout this period: a single party has been responsible. You cannot say that the country has been ruled against its will. Since 2010, the Tories have emerged as the winner of the popular vote and as the largest party in Parliament in three elections. In December, 2019, Boris Johnson won an eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, the Conservatives’ biggest electoral success since the heyday of Thatcherism.

How is this possible? The opposition has been underwhelming. For years, Labour drifted and squabbled under two unconvincing leaders: Ed Miliband and Corbyn, my old Islington M.P. It is telling that, since Labour elected Keir Starmer, an unimaginative former prosecutor with a rigidly centrist program, the Party is competitive again. But the Conservatives have not survived by default. Their party has excelled at diminishing Britain’s political landscape and shrinking the sense of what is possible. It has governed and skirmished, never settling for long. “It’s all about constantly drawing dividing lines,” a former Party strategist told me. “That’s all you need. It’s not about big ideological debates or policies or anything.” In many ways, the two momentous decisions of this period—what came to be known as austerity and Brexit—are now widely accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made. Starmer’s Labour Party does not seek to reverse them.

If you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. The state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will come to an end. It will. Rishi Sunak, the fifth, and presumably final, Conservative Prime Minister of the era, faces an election later this year, which he will almost certainly lose. But Britain cannot move on from the Tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused.

The Conservative Party manifesto for the 2010 election was a plain blue hardback book titled “Invitation to Join the British Government.” After the Party’s longest spell out of power in more than a century, its pitch to voters was “the Big Society,” a call for civic volunteering and private enterprise after the statism of Labour. “There was a feeling that it must be possible to be positive about a better future in a way that wasn’t socialist,” Glover, the former speechwriter, said. “And that wasn’t an ignoble thing to try.”

Beginning in 2005, Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, had modernized the Tories. The duo represented a new generation of Conservatives: deft and urbane, easy in their privilege. Osborne was the heir to a baronetcy; Cameron’s family descended from a mistress of William IV. Cameron embraced centrist causes, including the environment and prison reform. There was talk of a “post-bureaucratic age.” But the main aim was simpler. “Above all, it was trying to win,” Osborne told me recently.

In the spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” The speech was part of a successful campaign to associate Labour’s public spending with the global financial crash, to which Britain had been badly exposed. “The word ‘austerity’ was deliberately introduced into the lexicon by myself and David Cameron,” Osborne said. “Austerity” evoked the country’s sober rebuilding after the Second World War. “The word didn’t have the connotations then that it does now,” Osborne recalled. “It was, you know, a bit like prudence.”

In 2010, the Conservatives fell short of a majority in the House of Commons and formed, with the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s first coalition government in almost seventy years. The state was running a deficit of a hundred and fifty-seven billion pounds—about one and a half times the budget of the National Health Service. Any incoming administration would have had to find ways to balance the books, but, under Cameron and Osborne’s leadership, austerity was a moral as well as an economic mission. “We allowed it to become the defining thing,” the former senior adviser reflected.

“Austerity” is now a contested term. Plenty of Conservatives question whether it really happened. So it is worth being clear: between 2010 and 2019, British public spending fell from about forty-one per cent of G.D.P. to thirty-five per cent. The Office of Budget Responsibility, the equivalent of the American Congressional Budget Office, describes what came to be known as Plan A as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since World War II.” Governments across Europe pursued fiscal consolidation, but the British version was distinct for its emphasis on shrinking the state rather than raising taxes.

Like the choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. Huge areas of public spending—on the N.H.S. and education—were nominally maintained. Pensions and international aid became more generous, to show that British compassion was not dead. But protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest: the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses, care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the diplomatic corps.

Plan A spooked economists because of the risk to economic growth. But, in 2013, the British economy grew by 1.8 per cent. The government claimed victory. Around that time, Osborne declared that the nation could win “the global race” and become the richest major economy in the world by 2030. “We were in complete command of the political landscape,” he recalled. “The U.K. is the country that is seen to have got its act together after the crash. London has become the kind of global capital. So it has worked—there’s a bit of a dénouement coming—but it had worked.” At the general election in 2015, the Conservatives won a majority in the House of Commons, with proposals to make a further thirty-seven billion pounds’ worth of cuts.

“It was devastatingly politically effective,” Osborne told me, of austerity. It’s just that the effects were so horrendous. Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter. Officers stopped investigating burglaries. Only four per cent now end in prosecution. In 2021, the median time between a rape offense and the completion of a trial reached more than two and a half years. Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by forty-six per cent between 2009 and 2022.

In October, I talked with Tony Durcan, a retired local-government employee who was responsible for libraries and other cultural programs in the city of Newcastle during the twenty-tens. Durcan told me that he’d had “a good war,” all things considered. There were moments, he said, when the sheer extremity of the crisis was exciting. Between 2010 and 2020, central-government funding for local authorities fell by forty per cent. At one point, it looked as if sixteen of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. The city’s parks budget was cut by ninety-one per cent. The situation forced some creative reforms: Newcastle City Library now hosts the Citizens Advice bureau, where residents can apply for benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (The library is featured in “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach’s anti-austerity film of 2016.) But other parts of the city government fell apart. “Youth services and a lot of community-support services, they just disappeared completely,” Durcan said. Child poverty rose sharply. (About forty per cent of children in Newcastle currently live below the poverty line.) But after a while Durcan and his colleagues stopped talking about the cuts, even though their budgets continued to fall. “There was a view—was it helpful? Were you risking losing confidence in the city?”

Over time, Durcan came to question the official reasoning for the savings. “You can make a mistake, even when you’re acting for the best,” he explained. “I don’t think that’s what happened in austerity.” Newcastle was a Labour stronghold, as was the rest of the northeast. Until 2019, the Tories held only three out of twenty-nine parliamentary seats in the region. A similar pattern was repeated across England. Poorer communities, particularly in urban areas, which tended to vote Labour, suffered disproportionately.

In Liverpool, where the Conservatives have not won a Parliamentary seat for forty years, spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories. Durcan and his colleagues noted the discrepancies between Labour- and Conservative-supporting regions. “And so there was cynicism,” he said, “and also great disappointment, a sense of injustice.”

Osborne denies that austerity was ever targeted in this way. “It’s not like we ministers just sit there and go, We’re not going to cut Kensington Council. We’re going to cut Liverpool Council. That is a lampoonish way of thinking about British politics,” he said. But some of his colleagues were more willing to acknowledge that electoral thinking was at play. One former Cabinet minister conceded that there were “big strategic moves” to favor older voters, who were more likely to vote Conservative, in the form of pension increases and interventions to raise property prices. David Gauke, a Treasury minister from 2010 to 2017, agreed that the parts of the country that had benefitted most under Labour had seen their budgets cut under the Conservatives. “There was a rebalancing that went on,” he said. “Did it go too far? Maybe it did.”

What was less forgivable, in the end, was the cuts’ unthinking nature, their lack of reason. In the fall of 2013, a staffer named Giles Wilkes, who worked for a senior Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition, became alarmed by projections that showed ever-reducing government budgets. “I don’t wish to paint the picture of the British state as too chaotic and heedless and amateur. But I was wandering around in 2013 and 2014, saying to people, Does anyone know what this means for the Home Office or the court system, for local authorities and the social-care budget?” Wilkes said. “Nobody was curious .” Wilkes is now a fellow at the Institute for Government, a nonpartisan think tank. “It was very obvious in real time,” he told me. “There wasn’t a central function going, Hold on a mo. Have we made sure that we can provide a decent prison estate, a decent sort of police system?”

And so stupid things happened. Since 2010, forty-three per cent of the courts in England and Wales have closed. No one thinks that this was a good idea. For years, the Conservatives cut prison funding and staffing while encouraging longer jail times. “You kind of had a mismatch,” Gauke, who later served as the Justice Secretary, admitted. The number of adults sentenced to more than ten years in prison more than doubled—until the system caved in, overrun by violence, self-harm, drug use, and staff shortages. In 2023, the government activated what it called Operation Safeguard, in which hundreds of jail cells in police stations were requisitioned to hold convicted offenders, because the prisons were full. In September, a terrorism suspect escaped from Wandsworth Prison, in South London, by clinging to the underside of a food-delivery truck. Eighty of the prison’s two hundred and five officers had not shown up for work that day.

The long-term effects of austerity are still playing out. A 2019 paper by Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick, asked, “Did Austerity Cause Brexit?” Fetzer found that, beginning in 2010, the parts of the country most affected by welfare cuts were more likely to support Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party, which campaigned against immigration and the E.U. The withdrawal of the social safety net in communities already negatively hit by globalization exacerbated the sense of a nation going awry. Public-health experts, including Marmot, argue that a decade of frozen health-care spending undermined the country’s response to the pandemic. More broadly, austerity has contributed to an atmosphere of fatalism, an aversion to thinking about the future. “It is a mood,” Johnna Montgomerie, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies debt and inequality, has written. “A depression, a chronic case of financial melancholia.”

Since leaving politics, in 2017, Osborne has enjoyed a lucrative career, serving simultaneously as an adviser at BlackRock, the asset-management firm, and as the editor of the Evening Standard newspaper; more recently, he has been a partner at an investment bank and a podcaster. He insists that the cuts, ultimately, enabled the U.K.’s public finances to withstand the pandemic and the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no counterfactual,” he told me. Osborne likes to accuse his critics of living in a parallel reality, in which the financial crisis and Britain’s deficit never existed: “It’s, like, Apart from the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”

But that does not mean the Tories made good choices. British social-security payments are at their lowest levels, relative to wages, in half a century. Under a steady downward ratchet, started by Osborne and continued by his successors, household payments have been capped and income thresholds effectively lowered. In 2017, a “two child” limit was placed on benefits for poor families. In November, 2018, Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty, toured the U.K. When we spoke, he recalled a strong sense of denial, or ignorance, among British politicians about the consequences of their decisions. “There was a disconnect between the world and what senior ministers wanted to believe,” he said.

The fall in Britain’s living standards isn’t easy for anyone to talk about, least of all Conservatives. The Resolution Foundation, which studies the lives of people with low and middle incomes, is chaired by David Willetts, a former minister in Cameron’s government. Willetts is a tall, genial man, who worked for Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in the eighties. His nickname in the Party was Two Brains. “What I say to Tories now is, Look, we are behind for various reasons,” Willetts said, carefully. “You can argue about it. But our household incomes are clearly lower than France or Germany or the Netherlands.” Part of the problem, Willetts explained, was that Britain’s richest twenty per cent had largely been spared the effects of the past fourteen years—and that made it genuinely difficult for them to comprehend the damage. “We are all O.K.,” he said. “The burden of adjustment has almost entirely been borne by the less affluent half of the British population.”

In late November, I took a train to Worcester, a cathedral city south of Birmingham, on the River Severn. It was a raw, washed-out morning. Floodwater shone in the meadows. The city is famous as the home of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce—a dark, sweet yet sour, almost indescribably English condiment, first sold by a pair of chemists in 1837—which has been doused on two centuries’ worth of shepherd’s pie and other stodgy lunches. Worcester used to be a den of political corruption: in 1906, men willing to sell their votes to the Tories could collect payment in the rest rooms of the Duke of York, a pub in the middle of town. More recently, it has been a bellwether. In the nineties, Conservative strategists described “Worcester Woman,” a median female voter—politically aware, married, with two children. (Since 1979, the city’s M.P.s have belonged to the party in power.) I was on my way to Citizens Advice Worcester—part of a charitable network that offers free counselling on debt relief and legal matters—behind a restored Victorian hotel.

Shakira was playing on the radio in the reception and a sign read “If You Are Frightened of Your Partner, Call Us.” Geraint Thomas, a Welsh lawyer who runs the center, was in his office, worrying about a heating bill. A few years ago, it was some four thousand pounds a year, but after recent price hikes it was now about fourteen thousand. In 2017, the charity had started running services in Herefordshire as well. Now funding was tight, and various Covid emergency funds were coming to an end. “Next year, we have got a bit of a hole,” Thomas said. The clock on his wall had stopped.

Since 2019, the number of people seeking help at the center had risen by thirty per cent. Two years of high inflation and rising interest rates meant that the caseworkers were now seeing homeowners and people working two jobs, along with the unemployed and families on benefits. “It’s like a black hole, dragging more and more people in,” Colin Stuart, who manages volunteers, said. Anne Limbert, who oversees the advice team, explained that, until a few years ago, it was usually possible to make a recovery plan for clients. “It used to be that we could help people, you know, and make a difference,” she said. “Now it’s just kind of depressing.” Increasingly, Limbert was sending clients to food banks.

The caseworkers said that they had mostly tuned out politics. Gwen Fraser, a volunteer manager in Herefordshire, which has some of England’s most deprived rural communities, had met a visiting M.P. a few months earlier. “I thought, You’re not in the real world, mate,” she said. Not long ago, a seventy-seven-year-old man, behind on his mortgage, had told Fraser that he was suicidal. The proportion of people coming to the center with a long-term health condition had risen by twenty per cent since 2019. (N.H.S. prescriptions for antidepressants in England almost doubled between 2011 and 2023.) Fraser had recently settled on a phrase that she found useful in her paperwork: “Overwhelming distress.”

Worcester Woman voted for Brexit. In 2016, the city chose to leave the European Union by a margin of fifty-four per cent to forty-six per cent. The perception of the Brexit vote as a cry of anguish from deindustrialized northern towns or from faded seaside resorts isn’t wrong—it just leaves out the rest of England. Two weeks after the referendum, Danny Dorling, a geography professor at the University of Oxford, published an article in the British Medical Journal showing that Leave voters weren’t defined neatly either by geography or by income. Fifty-nine per cent identified as middle class, and most lived in the South. “People wouldn’t believe me for years,” Dorling told me. “This was Hampshire voted to leave.”

Dorling’s politics are on the left. He opposed Brexit and often describes Britain as a failing state. During the summer of 2018, Dorling gave dozens of public talks across the country reflecting on the referendum. He noticed that places that had voted Remain invariably had better rail connections than those that voted Leave. A lot of Brexit supporters were older and economically secure but had a keen sense of the country going downhill. “Something was falling apart,” Dorling said. “They had got a house in their twenties. They’d had full employment. Their children were in their forties and they might be renting. . . . It was an almost entirely unselfish vote by the old for their grandchildren—let’s try it, or let’s at least show we’re angry.”

How you interpret the Brexit vote informs, to a great extent, how you make sense of the past fourteen years of British politics. It is not just a watershed—a before and after. It is also a prism that clarifies or scrambles the picture entirely. One perspective sees the whole saga as a woeful mistake. In this view, Cameron decided to settle, once and for all, an internal Tory argument about Britain’s place in an integrating E.U., a question that had haunted the Party since the last days of Thatcher. In the process, he turned what was an abstruse obsession on the right wing of British politics into a much simpler, terrifyingly binary choice for the population on how they felt their life was going.

In the accident theory of Brexit, leaving the E.U. has turned out to be a puncture rather than a catastrophe: a falloff in trade; a return of forgotten bureaucracy with our near neighbors; an exodus of financial jobs from London; a misalignment in the world. “There is a sort of problem for the British state, including Labour as well as all these Tory governments since 2016, which is that they are having to live a lie,” as Osborne, who voted Remain, said. “It’s a bit like tractor-production figures in the Soviet Union. You have to sort of pretend that this thing is working, and everyone in the system knows it isn’t.”

The other view sees Brexit as an unfinished revolution. Regardless of its origins, the vote in 2016 was a repudiation of how Britain had been governed for a generation or more. In the B . M . J . article, Dorling observed that younger voters—who chose overwhelmingly to remain in the E.U.—were angry with their elders. “They will feel newly betrayed . . . but their real betrayal has been a long time in the making,” he wrote. For a highly centralized country that is smaller than Wyoming, the U.K. is lopsided beyond belief. It contains regional inequalities greater than those between the east and the west of Germany, or the north and the south of Italy—inequalities that have been allowed by successive governments to grow to shameful extremes. On average, people in Nottingham earn about a quarter of what people make in Kensington and Chelsea, in West London, which is some two hours away by train.

During the Brexit campaign, the E.U. came to represent not just a supranational monolith across the English Channel but profound distances within the U.K. itself. And the politicians who defended the E.U. looked and sounded, for the most part, as if they spent more time in Tuscany each summer than they had spent on Teesside in their lives. “The kind of globalism, the internationalism, the liberal élite view, was seized on by people who thought that they’d been spoken down to for decades,” John Hayes, a Tory M.P. and a Brexiteer, told me. “And the more they wheeled out the establishment figures, the more it was, Yeah, that’s them. Those are the ones who don’t get it. They don’t understand us.”

Almost eight years after the vote, what stays with me is how unimagined Brexit was. Overnight, and against the will of its leaders, the country abandoned its economic model—as the Anglo-Saxon gateway to the world’s largest trading bloc—and replaced it with nothing at all. “I can’t think of another occasion when a party has so radically changed direction while in office,” Willetts said. Thatcher was an architect of the E.U.’s single market, which in time became a heresy.

You can marvel at the recklessness of Brexiteers such as Farage, or of Johnson, who spearheaded the Vote Leave campaign. (“He is not a Brexiteer,” Osborne said. “I really would go to my grave saying, deep down, Boris Johnson did not want to leave the E.U.”) But the real dereliction ran deeper. Sensible Britain failed. The Civil Service did not plan for Brexit. Ivan Rogers was the U.K.’s permanent representative to the E.U. from 2013 to 2017. He started warning about the likelihood of Brexit about five years before the vote. “It was difficult to get the attention of the system,” he said. Beyond a briefing paper, demanded by the House of Lords, there was only some “confidential thinking,” in the words of Jeremy Heywood, the former head of the Civil Service. (Heywood died in 2018.) “The mandarins have a lot to answer for on this,” Rogers said. “We were very badly prepared in 2016.”

“I didn’t think it was very wise,” Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, said, of the official refusal to consider the referendum going wrong. “We did a ton of planning.” After the vote, the Bank stabilized the markets while British politics imploded. Cameron resigned and was replaced by Theresa May, a former Home Secretary with limited experience of the economy or of international affairs. In the second half of 2016, May worked with a small group of advisers to formulate a Brexit strategy that ultimately satisfied nobody. “It was incredibly poor statecraft,” a former Cabinet colleague said. “Absolute shit. Abominable.” The abiding image of the Brexit talks was a photo of Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator, with his colleagues and their neat piles of paper on one side of a table, while their British counterparts, led by David Davis, a bluff former special-forces reservist, sat on the other side with a single notebook among them.

One Friday lunchtime, a couple of months ago, I met Dominic Cummings at a pub not far from his house in London. A light snow was in the air. Cummings, who is fifty-two, worked on education policy in the coalition government before becoming the campaign director of Vote Leave. (He coined its notorious slogan, “Take Back Control.”) Cummings is a Savonarola figure in British politics, an ascetic and a technocrat, who wants to save the state by burning it down. He refers to Elon Musk by his first name and writes Substack essays with titles such as “On Complexity, ‘fog and moonlight,’ prediction, and politics VII: why social science is so bad at prediction & what is to be done.”

Police officer and investigator look at a crime scene within a crime scene.

Cummings reveres the Apollo space program and takes a dim view of almost all Britain’s elected officials. “Where they are not malicious they are moronic,” he told me once. He talks rapidly, with a slight Northern rasp. (He is from Durham, near Newcastle.) Next to our table in the pub, a woodstove emitted a sudden, enveloping cloud of smoke, which dissipated while we talked. Cummings appeared to be wearing two hats, against the cold. He apologized if it seemed as if he were staring at me. He had recently undergone retinal surgery.

Cummings, unsurprisingly, saw Brexit in revolutionary terms—as a chance to break with the country’s ruling orthodoxy. “The Vote Leave campaign was not of the Tory Party,” he said. “It was not a conservative—big ‘C’ or little ‘c’—effort. But none of them wanted to confront the reasons why we did it in the first place. . . . For us, this was an attempt to wrench us off the Cameron, establishment, Blairite line.” Cummings believes that Britain must rediscover its ability to build things—roads, railways, houses, research institutes, products that people want to buy—in order to prosper again. He argues that it is America’s ecosystem of universities, entrepreneurs, and government procurement departments that have helped maintain its economic and technological edge, not just lower taxes or a freer form of capitalism. “When you start talking about this to Tories, they go, Oh, Dominic, you sound like a terrible central planner,” Cummings said. “And you go, That’s America. This is not weird left-wing shit.”

No one would accuse Cummings of having a popular platform. His jam is A.I. and Nietzsche. But, after the Brexit vote, he kept waiting for May’s government to act on what was, to him, its obvious implications: to restrict immigration, reform the state, and explore dramatic economic policies, in order to diverge from the E.U. and to boost the country’s productivity. “I kept thinking, month after month, God, like, it’s weird the way they are just thrashing around and not facing it,” Cummings said. In his view, the election of Trump, that November, provided a perfect excuse for Remainers not to take the Brexit vote seriously. “They just lumped it all in with, Oh, it’s a global tide of populism. It’s mad, irrational, evil. It’s partly funded by Putin,” he said. “They didn’t have to reëvaluate and go, Maybe the establishment in general has been, like, fucking up for twenty-plus years. ”

In July, 2019, May resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Johnson, who hired Cummings as a senior adviser. Cummings thought that Johnson would probably screw it up. At the same time, he saw an opportunity to advance what he considered the true Vote Leave agenda. “In some sense,” he said, “the risk was worth taking.”

That fall was the most kinetic, breathtaking period of Britain’s fourteen years of Tory rule. With Cummings at his side, along with Lee Cain, another former Vote Leave official, who became his director of communications, Johnson broke the deadlock that had existed since the referendum. He asked the Queen to prorogue, or suspend, Parliament. He expelled twenty-one Conservative M.P.s—including eight former Cabinet ministers and Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill—for attempting to stop the country from leaving the E.U. with no deal at all.

On a Tuesday in late September, the Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s suspension of Parliament had been unlawful. “The effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme,” the Justices found. I stood outside the court in the rain, and it felt as though the thousand-year-old timbers of the state were moving beneath our feet. Someone in the crowd was wearing a prison jumpsuit and an enlarged Johnson head. A woman was dressed as a suffragist. Anna Soubry, a former Tory M.P. who quit the party to fight for a second referendum, shook her head in wonder. “Astonishing,” she said. But Johnson prevailed. Before the year was out, he had cobbled together a new, hard-line Brexit deal and thumped Corbyn at a general election on another three-word Cummings-approved slogan: “Get Brexit Done.”

Johnson was, briefly, unassailable. In the election that December, the Conservatives won seats in places such as Bishop Auckland, in Cummings’s home county of Durham, which they had not held for more than a hundred years. The Party gathered a new, loose coalition of pro-Brexit voters—many of whom were from formerly Labour-voting English towns—to go with its traditionally older, fiscally conservative base. Johnson’s celebrity (the hair, the mess, the faux Churchillian vibes, the ridiculous Latin) was the glue that held it all together. He sensed the public mood. (With Johnson, that was not the same as doing something about it.) He disavowed austerity—promising more money for the N.H.S., new hospitals, and more police—and described a mighty program to redress the country’s economic imbalances, which he called Levelling Up.

Johnson’s premiership collapsed under the pressure of the pandemic and of his own proclivities. According to Cummings, the alignment between the goals of Vote Leave and Johnson’s ambitions as Prime Minister decoupled in January, 2020, just a few weeks after the election. Cummings wanted to overhaul the civil service and Britain’s planning laws. Johnson, for his part, wanted a rest. “He was, like, What the fuck are you talking about? Why would I want to do that?” Cummings recalled. (Johnson did not reply to a request for comment.) “It’s basically cake-ism, right?,” Cummings said, referring to Johnson’s political lodestar: having his cake and eating it, too. “I want to do all the things you want to do, and I want everyone to love me,” Cummings recalled. “I was, like, Yeah, that’s not happening.”

Britain’s first cases of the coronavirus were announced on January 31, 2020, the day the country left the European Union. In March, Johnson ordered the first national lockdown, caught COVID , and later spent three nights in the I.C.U. For months, the country staggered from one set of restrictions to the next—a reflection of Johnson’s inconstant attitude toward the virus. In texts, Cummings used a shopping-cart emoji to indicate the Prime Minister veering from one half-formed idea to the next. Levelling Up became a pork-barrel exercise: of seven hundred and twenty-five million pounds earmarked in June, 2021, about eighty per cent was for Conservative constituencies.

Johnson’s Downing Street was operatically dysfunctional. A rift opened between Cummings and his team and a faction centered on Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s then fiancée, a former Conservative Party communications director. In November, 2020, Cummings accused the Prime Minister of betraying the Vote Leave program and resigned. “I said, Listen, we had a deal. And if you end up breaking our deal there is going to be hell to pay,” Cummings recalled. Cain left as well. A little more than a year later, the Daily Mirror , a left-wing tabloid, broke the news that Johnson and his staff had organized parties while the rest of the country was under lockdown—beginning with the party for Cain’s departure, the previous November. Johnson resigned six months later.

The pandemic bore out truths about the British state. There were bright spots: the vaccines and their rollout by the N.H.S.; the intervention of the Treasury, under Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, whose furlough plan protected millions of jobs. More generally, though, the virus revealed tired public services, a population in poor health, and a government that was less competent than it thought it was. “It’s very convenient for everyone to blame Boris,” Cummings said. “But the truth is, in January, February, of 2020, it was the civil service saying‚ We’re the best-prepared country in the world. We’re brilliant at pandemics. The reality is, everything was crumbling.”

In October, 2023, Cummings testified at the U.K.’s Covid inquiry, an investigation of the government’s handling of the pandemic led by a retired judge. His written evidence was a hundred and fifteen pages long and began with an epigraph from “War and Peace”: “Nothing was ready for the war which everybody expected.”

The hearings took place in an office building around the corner from Paddington Station. I sat next to a row of bereaved family members, who were holding photographs of their loved ones. Cummings wore a white linen shirt, which came untucked, a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and black boots. He is such a contentious figure—an agent of these disordered times—that people often don’t really listen to what he says. A great deal of the media coverage of Cummings’s testimony focussed on his texting style. In messages during the pandemic, he referred to ministers as “useless fuckpigs,” “morons,” and “cunts.” The inquiry’s lawyer asked Cummings if he thought his language had been too strong. “I would say, if anything, it understated the position,” he replied.

In written testimony, Cummings implored the Covid inquiry to address a wider crisis in Britain’s political class. “Our political parties and the civil service are extremely closed institutions with little place for people who can think and build,” he wrote. Cummings believes that the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, the pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine all, in their ways, exposed serious shortcomings in the British state that have yet to be addressed.

Brexit, too. When we met, Cummings observed that the country has still failed to confront the full implications of the vote, either domestically or abroad: “You can just treat it as, like, a weird thing, like a witch trial in a medieval village. Now the witch has been burnt, and now the community is getting back to normal. Or you can think of it as part of big structural changes in Western politics, society, and the economy. And if the establishment thinks that you can treat it like a sort of episode of witchcraft mania, then they’re just going to walk straight into recurring shocks.”

I was at Heathrow Airport, refreshing the BBC’s Web site on my phone, when the screen changed to a black-and-white commemorative portrait of the Queen. On February 6, 1952, when Elizabeth’s father, George VI, died, the Prime Minister was Winston Churchill. “We cannot at this moment do more than record a spontaneous expression of our grief,” he told the House of Commons that afternoon. Seventy years later, in September, 2022, Britain was seized again by deference, tenderness, and other, more inchoate, emotions. You could not escape the ritual. Hats, horses, artillery in London’s parks. In her later years, the Queen’s aura of permanence had been enhanced by the recklessness at work in other parts of Britain’s public life. Her survival helped to contain a sense of crisis.

The Queen died on Liz Truss’s second full day in office. When the country’s brand-new Prime Minister and her husband, Hugh O’Leary, arrived at Westminster Abbey for the state funeral, Australian television identified them as “maybe minor royals.” Four days later, Truss launched the Growth Plan 2022, a Thatcher-inspired, forty-five-billion-pound package of tax cuts intended to reignite the British economy. The bond markets didn’t like it. The pound fell to a record low against the dollar. The International Monetary Fund asked Truss to “re-evaluate.” Her approval rating dropped by almost thirty points in a week. Ashen, Truss fired her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, then left office herself, on October 25th, serving seventy-one days fewer than Britain’s previous shortest-serving Prime Minister, George Canning, who died suddenly of pneumonia in 1827.

It made sense to pretend that Truss and her Growth Plan had been a rogue mission, inflicted on an unsuspecting nation. Truss was depicted as mad, or ideologically unreliable, or both. She had been a Liberal Democrat at Oxford who once opposed the monarchy. She was strangely besotted with mental arithmetic. But the truth is that Truss was neither an outlier nor a secret radical, but a representative spirit of the Conservative Party and its years in power. She was one of the first M.P.s of her intake to be promoted to the Cabinet, brought on by Cameron, before serving both May and Johnson in a hectic and haphazard series of important jobs: running departments for the environment, justice, international trade, and a large part of the Treasury.

In all these positions, Truss was the same: spiky, dynamic, considered skillful on TV. In 2012, she and Kwarteng contributed to “Britannia Unchained,” an ode to tax cutting and deregulation that described the British as “among the worst idlers in the world.” I asked one of Truss’s contemporaries, the former Cabinet minister, if anyone took the ideas seriously at the time. It was hard to catch the attention of the Party’s base under the coalition, he complained. “The easiest way was to show a bit of leg,” he said. “It used to be hanging.” Truss campaigned for Remain before becoming a Brexiteer. As Foreign Secretary, she posed on top of a tank—pure Thatcher cosplay—and dominated the government’s Flickr account, with pictures of herself jogging across the Brooklyn Bridge and standing, ruminatively, in Red Square, in Moscow.

Dachshund and another dog walk together.

“It’s silliness,” Rory Stewart told me. Stewart became a Conservative M.P. on the same day as Truss, in 2010, after working for the British government in Iraq, running an N.G.O. in Afghanistan, and teaching at Harvard. He was ejected from the Party during the Johnson purge of 2019. Last year, he published “How Not to Be a Politician,” a compulsive, depressing memoir of his career during this period. “It’s clever, silly people. It’s a lack of seriousness,” he said, of Truss and many of his peers.

In 2015, Stewart was sent to work under Truss at Britain’s department for the environment. Truss challenged him to come up with a strategy for England’s national parks in three days. “She said, Come on, Rory, how difficult can this be?” he recalled. Truss started firing off suggestions. “Get young people into nature. Blah blah blah blah.” (The plan was announced on time; Truss declined to speak to me.) “I felt with Liz Truss slight affection but above all profound pity,” Stewart said. “Because she’s approaching these big conversations as though she’s sort of performing as an underprepared undergraduate at a seminar.”

On a cloudless summer’s morning, in the dog days of Theresa May’s government, I travelled to Scunthorpe, in North Lincolnshire. In the sixties, Scunthorpe was a growing steel town with four blast furnaces named after English queens. In 2016, the population voted overwhelmingly for Brexit; three years later, the steelworks was at risk of closure, in part because of trade uncertainties caused by the vote. British Steel, which ran the plant, had been sold to private-equity investors for a pound. Four thousand jobs were on the line.

In the afternoon, I sat down with Simon Green, the deputy chief executive of the local council. Green was in his early fifties, angular and forthright. He grew up in Grimsby, a fishing town on the coast, and spent his career in local government—in Boston and New York, as well as in Nottingham and Sheffield—before taking the job in North Lincolnshire, in 2017. Green was sick of reporters, like me, coming up to Scunthorpe from London for the day, to gawk at its predicament and wonder why people could have believed that Brexit would improve their situation. “No disrespect, but we do get a level of poverty porn,” he said. “A lot of doom and gloom.”

Green assured me that the Brexit-related anxiety around the steelworks was a blip. “We’re actually on a bit of a comeback roll,” he said. He was excited about the region’s potential for green technology and the construction of HS2, a new Y-shaped high-speed railway that was going to transform connections between London and cities in the northeast and the northwest. “Rail track, ballast, concrete, cement—you name anything to do with trains, infrastructure, it’s an engineering, Midlands, Northern thing,” he said. Green ascribed the Brexit vote in Scunthorpe to “values and culture” rather than to economics—a sense of dislocation and of feeling disdained by politicians in London.

Recently, I wondered how Green was getting on. In 2019, Scunthorpe was part of the “Red Wall” of Labour constituencies that flipped for the Tories. British Steel had changed hands once more. Now Chinese investors were planning to install new furnaces, which required fewer workers and were fed with scrap metal. For the first time since 1890, the plant would no longer produce virgin steel from ore. I met Green a couple of weeks before Christmas. He had left his job a few days before. He seemed relieved to be done. Seven local authorities in England have gone bust since 2020, including the one serving Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city. In North Lincolnshire, the council now spends about three-quarters of its budget on services for vulnerable children and adults—roughly double the proportion of a decade ago. “We’re still here,” Green said, ruefully. The saga of the steelworks continued. “It’s endless,” he went on. “Is it closing? Isn’t it closing?” Britain has had eleven different economic programs in the past thirteen years.

We were in a teaching room at the University Campus North Lincolnshire, which opened a few years ago in the former local-authority offices. The old council chamber, built in the shape of a blast furnace, was now a lecture hall. The average student age was twenty-nine. Green was proud of the project. It reminded him of mechanics’ institutes in the nineteenth century. “People are using their own judgment to better themselves,” he said. “If you want a job in this area, you can get a job. We need more quality opportunity.” Green had had a clear strategy for Scunthorpe and the nearby Humber estuary, built around green technology and education. “I asked a question to my colleagues and politicians as well,” he said. “What sort of town do you want this to be in ten, fifteen, twenty years?”

Britain has no equivalent strategy for itself. In September, Sunak weakened several of the country’s key climate-change targets. A few weeks later, he cancelled what was left of HS2, the new rail network. Only the stem of the Y will now be built, from London to Birmingham, at a cost of some four hundred and seventy million pounds per mile , with little or no benefit to the North. “I can get quite excited, agitated by that,” Green said. “It makes us look a laughingstock.” Green was studiously apolitical when we talked. I had no sense of which way he voted. But he despaired of the shallowness and contingency now at the heart of British politics, and the lack of narrative coherence—or shared purpose—about what these years of struggle had been intended to achieve. I asked if he ever worried that the country was in a permanent state of decline. “I think, at the moment, we are at the crossroads,” he replied.

When will it end? Sunak says that he will call a general election in the second half of the year. The gossip in Westminster says that probably that means mid-November: a British encore, to follow the main event in the U.S. But it could come as soon as May. The Prime Minister began preparing the ground last fall, after his first year in office, by presenting himself as a change candidate—a big claim, considering the circumstances.

In October, I went to Manchester to watch Sunak address the Conservative Party’s annual conference. He was introduced onstage by his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, a founder of Infosys, the Indian I.T. conglomerate. (According to the London Sunday Times , Sunak and Murty have an estimated net worth of about five hundred million pounds.) Murty wore an orange pants suit, and she addressed Britain’s most successful political organization as if it were a local gardening society. “Please know that Rishi is working hard,” she said. “He shares your values and he knows how much you care about the future of the U.K.”

Sunak has a quietly imploring tone. British politics was in a bad way, he explained. People were fed up. “It isn’t anger,” Sunak said. “It’s an exhaustion with politics, in particular politicians saying things and then nothing ever changing.” Sunak dated the rot back thirty years without explaining why, but, presumably, to indicate the fall of Thatcher. (Thatcher was everywhere in Manchester; she is the modern Party’s only ghost.) Having positioned himself as the country’s next, truly transformative, leader, Sunak offered his party a weirdly pallid program: the dismantling of HS2, plus two long-range, complex policies, to abolish smoking and to reform the A-levels—England’s standard end-of-school exams. “We will be bold. We will be radical,” Sunak promised. “We will face resistance and we will meet it.”

Increasingly, Sunak has been pulled between the Party’s diverging instincts: to retreat to the dry, liberal competence of the Cameron-Osborne regime or to head off in a more explicitly protectionist, anti-immigrant, anti-woke direction. In Manchester, the energy was unmistakably on the Party’s right. Suella Braverman, then the Home Secretary, magnetized delegates with a speech warning of a “hurricane” of mass migration. Truss staged a growth rally, and Nigel Farage cruised the conference hall, posing for selfies. (There is talk of Farage standing as a Conservative M.P.) Back in London, I had lunch with David Frost, an influential Conservative peer. “Rishi, I feel for him, in a way,” Frost said. “He’s just trying to keep the show on the road and not upset all these different wings of the Party. But the consequence of that is you end up with a sort of agenda which is not politically meaningful at all.”

On January 14th, a poll of fourteen thousand people, which Frost facilitated, suggested that the Party is on course for a huge defeat later this year. The question is what kind of haunted political realm it will leave behind. Under Starmer, Labour has been tactical in the extreme, exorcising Corbyn’s left-wing policies (Corbyn has been blocked from standing for the Party at the election), while making vague noises about everything else. It has nothing new to say about Brexit and equivocates about its own tax and spending plans, if it wins power. The Party recently scaled back a plan to invest twenty-eight billion pounds a year in green projects. There is no rescue on the way for Britain’s welfare state.

Osborne noted all this with satisfaction. “The underlying economic arguments have basically been accepted,” he said, of austerity. “It’s rather like the Thatcher period. Everyone complained that Thatcher did deindustrialization, and yet no one wants to unpick it.” By contrast, Cummings sees the two cautious, hedging leaders in charge of Britain’s main political parties—and the relief among some centrists that the candidates are not so different from each other—in rather darker terms. “They are deluded when they think it’s great that Sunak and Starmer are in. It’s just like they’re arguing over trivia,” he said. “The politics of it are insane.”

I am afraid that I agree. It is unnerving to be heading into an election year in Britain with the political conversation so small, next to questions that can feel immeasurable. I put this to Hayes, the Tory M.P., when I went to see him in the House of Commons. “You’re arguing we have very vanilla-flavor politics, in a richly colored world. There’s something in that,” he said. Then he surprised me. “I think the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more conservative,” he said. We were sitting in a bay window, overlooking the Thames. A waiter poured tea. Hayes seemed to relish the coming election. It was as if, after almost fourteen years of tortuous experiment, real conservatism might finally be at hand. “Outside metropolitan Britain and the university towns, it’s all up for grabs,” Hayes assured me. “Toryism must have its day again.” ♦

New Yorker Favorites

A Harvard undergrad took her roommate’s life, then her own. She left behind her diary.

Ricky Jay’s magical secrets .

A thirty-one-year-old who still goes on spring break .

How the greatest American actor lost his way .

What should happen when patients reject their diagnosis ?

The reason an Addams Family painting wound up hidden in a university library .

Fiction by Kristen Roupenian: “Cat Person”

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Anna Wiener

Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court Majority: You’re Doing It Wrong

By Louis Menand

Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religious Studies

By Amanda Petrusich

How Andy Kim Took On New Jersey’s Political Machine

By E. Tammy Kim

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

Essay Database >
Essay Examples >
Essays Topics >
Essay on Education

Great Britain Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Education , Politics , Family , Students , Crime , Vehicles , Infrastructure , England

Words: 3000

Published: 01/25/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

This essay explores the following cultural aspects of Great Britain: the political system and government, the economy, education, transportation, policing and crime. Under the first sub-heading “Political System and Government the essay explains that the fundamental principle of the government of Great Britain is that of a parliamentary democracy, but with Queen Elizabeth II ruling overall as the titular Head of State, then continues to summarize the make-up of the government, the roles of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and more. The second section discusses Britain’s economy, its global ranking, its relationship with the European Union and Britain’s retention of the Pound Sterling as its currency. That section also describes how Britain’s economy has evolved from a predominantly manufacturing base into one where services are the major sector by percentage. Next comes the Education system in Britain, which is summarized from pre-school facilities through to university, placing some emphasis on U.S. / UK differences and on a small number of regional differences within the UK. Then comes Transportation – a section covering all Britain’s transport networks, including road, rail, air and sea – the latter including the undersea tunnel linking England with France. The final section is about the Police and crime. That covers the structure of the various UK police forces, which included dedicated British Transport Police (for the rail network) and covers some regional differences.

Introduction

Great Britain comprises three principal regions or parts on its mainland: England, Wales and Scotland. It is the major part of the United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland. The rest (southern part) of Ireland is a separate country called Eire – the Republic of Ireland (“What is the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England?”, n.d.). This essay explores the following cultural aspects of Great Britain: the political system and government, the economy, education, transportation, policing and crime.

Political System and Government

“How government works” (n.d.) explains that the fundamental principle of the government of Great Britain is that of a parliamentary democracy, but with Queen Elizabeth II ruling overall as the titular Head of State. In the British parliamentary system the government is headed by a Prime Minister who has ultimate responsibility for the government’s policies and decisions. He has the power to appoint other members of the government as well as overseeing the running of Britain’s Civil Service and the various government agencies. He is based at a well-known London address: Number 10 Downing Street. Currently, as described in the article, Britain’s coalition government since May 2010 is made up of members of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party – two of the three main political parties, the third being the Labour Party. It has a Deputy Prime Minister (from the Liberal Party), who assists the Prime Minister, is consulted on policy decisions, and has his own specific areas of responsibility. The same article also describes how senior members of the government form the Cabinet, who meet weekly while Parliament is in session, to discuss the major issues. In addition to the Prime Minister, there are 21 ministers in the Cabinet, plus a further 99 ministers who work outside of that body. Administratively, the government comprises 24 ministerial departments, a further 20 departments that are not designated as ministerial, plus over 300 peripheral government agencies and related public bodies. The British Parliament comprises the House of Commons – which has 650 elected representatives called Members of Parliament (MPs) – and the House of Lords. As described in “How Parliament works” (n.d.), the House of Commons is “the supreme legal authority in the UK” which the article states “is the most important part of the UK constitution.” The separate and independent House of Lords functions as a check on the House of Commons, and can challenge actions of the government. All new laws have to pass through both of these institutions.

The Economy

“The Economy of the UK, GB, British Isles” (2010) describes the UK economy as between the world’s sixth or eighth largest, depending on the criteria used. Noting that it encompasses the economies of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the article also mentioned that though the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are included in the British Isles, they have their own statuses as offshore banking centers. Because the United Kingdom is a European Union (EU) member state, it is part of a system known as a single market, which allows free movement between member states of its peoples, goods (trade), services and – importantly – finance (capital). However, as the article reports, the UK controls and maintains independence of its economy and continues to use as its currency the Pound (Sterling), whereas the remainder of the EU uses the Euro. The article notes that although the UK was “the birthplace of the first industrial revolution”, other countries have since caught up and Britain has been affected negatively by two World Wars in the last century, so that it is unlikely to return to the once-held position of the world’s number one economic power. The present economic climate is one of austerity and slow or zero economic growth, with a very large trade deficit, second only to the U.S. Interestingly, for a country that was once a major center of manufacturing industry, the article reports that by far the largest sector now is that of services, representing some 77 percent, most importantly in finance and banking, where London is one of the three world centers of finance, along with New York and Tokyo. Services are followed by manufacturing at just 22 percent, with agriculture trailing way behind at between one and two percent, although it still produces circa 60 percent of the country’s food requirements. Although UK agriculture is “highly mechanised and efficient”, it does benefit from considerable subsidies – both from the British government and from the European Union. Similarly, although manufacturing as a sector has shrunk dramatically from former times, the article reports that based on output values, the UK is still “the sixth-largest manufacturer of goods in the world.” The manufacturing industries include aerospace, which the article reports as “the second largest in the world.”

The Education System

The education system in England is usefully and quite comprehensively described in an article by Dunn & Collyer (2011) entitled “Understanding the British School System.” It was produced and published under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force 422nd Air Base Group, for the information of U.S. military personnel or civilian support personnel who might need to place children in the schools system (free for families based in the UK). For that reason it included mention of some UK / U.S. differences, which are noted where applicable in the following paragraphs. Note that there are also detail differences from the “England and Wales” system, especially in Scotland, but also in Northern Ireland. Those differences – as summarized in a British Council article entitled “The Education Systems of England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland” (n.d.) – are covered where appropriate in the text. Dunn & Collyer reported that in England all children between the ages of five and 16 attend free but compulsory schooling. (Also available to qualifying U.S. personnel and families). There are also pre-schools available for younger children, though most of those are fee-paying. The school year begins in September and ends in the following July and comprises three terms (or semesters). Autumn (Fall) term begins in September and ends at the Christmas break. The Spring Term is January through to the Easter holiday, then the Summer Term follows into July. There are short holidays (about a week) in the middle of each 12-week term. The Christmas and Easter breaks last approximately two weeks, and the Summer holiday is the longest – usually extending to around six weeks. As explained by Dunn & Collyer, the schooling is divided into Primary and Secondary education. Primary schools educate children between the ages of four and 11, moving each child up to the next class each year. The article noted that ages four to seven equate to Key Stage 1, and ages seven to 11 equate to Key Stage 2. Subjects taught at Primary Schools are determined by and in accordance with the National Curriculum. Secondary schools teach children between the ages of 11 and 16, in most cases in schools called Comprehensive schools, which cater for children of all abilities. Again the National Curriculum is followed, and the children are assessed at ages 14 (Key Stage 3) and at 16 (Key Stage 4). At that stage children sit the General Certificate of Education (GCSE) exams, which may be supplemented by course work assessments in various subjects. As further described by Dunn & Collyer, many children stay on at school for a further two years after the age of 16, enrolling in what is referred to as the Sixth Form. In this period they study for Advanced Level exams (“A” levels) in a smaller number of subjects, often as the principal route to qualify for university. Dunn & Collyer reported that there are fee-paying schools available in Britain for those parents who prefer that option for their children. Those can be either day schools or boarding establishments. All schools tend to follow a similar daily timetable, running from approximately 8:45 in the morning to 3:00 or later in the afternoon with a midday lunch break of about one hour. Religious education is compulsory for the schools, though parents may opt out for their children if they wish. Many schools in Britain have a mandatory school uniform policy, which is distinctive school-to-school. Assessments of the child’s performance and progress are made regularly in the form of school reports. At Primary school level these are usually once each year, but at Secondary school are more likely to be at the end of each term. In Secondary schools, children at the age of 13-14 (end year 9) select about 10 of the subjects for continuing, and drop the remainder. Dunn & Collyer noted that this is earlier then the practice in the U.S. At the age of 16 children are permitted to leave school, or can stay on to study for a further two years to qualify for university entrance, which – if attended – is usually a four year course. Dunn & Collyer provided – especially for American parents – the following information regarding differences between the UK and U.S. systems. The first and quite important difference is that transport to/from school is not an automatically available facility in the UK. Though there may be a service for some Secondary schools, it is the individual’s responsibility. British schools will not recognize U.S. holidays such as Independence Day and Thanksgiving, so U.S. parents need to obtain special permission if planning family celebrations on those days. Regarding differences between the school systems in different parts of the British Isles, the article by the British Council noted that in Scotland the curriculum is slightly different, and that Scottish Secondary educations begins at age 12. It also noted that the exams have different names in Scotland. The school year in Scotland begins in mid-August and ends in June, whereas in Northern Ireland the corresponding dates are begin-September and end-June. In Scotland the teaching of a foreign language begins in Primary school. In Northern Ireland religion is a more sensitive issue and many schools indicate their religious allegiance by part of the name of the school, e.g. RC for Roman Catholic.

British Transportation Systems

Barrow (2012) published an article on a school’s website, entitled “Types of Transport in Britain”, that provided a good overview of British transportation systems, and cited the nation’s road and motorway system as the primary component of the routes for domestic transport. Barrow claimed that there are circa 225,000 miles of roads/motorways in total, accounting for around 85 percent of all passenger miles travelled in Britain. Most of the roads are free to use, although there are a few roads that charge toll fees, including the central area of London, which calls the fees “congestion charges”. Barrow listed the average miles travelled by individuals within Britain by various means per year (averaged over 1999 to 2001) as follows: Walking – 189; By bicycle – 39; On the bus – 342; By train – 368, In the car – 5354. Not only did car travel account for by far the greatest distance travelled, but all the methods other than the car showed shorter distances than a similar analysis undertaken some 15 years earlier, showing that Britain had become much more car-orientated in that time. Barrow also noted that about three quarters of all households own at least one car. Motorcycles are also a popular means of private transport, totalling circa one million on Britain’s roads. Mopeds (engine size up to 50cc) are especially popular with young people as they can be ridden at age 16 using a “provisional” licence. Full licences for driving cars or motorcycles can be obtained from the age of 17 after passing an official Driving Test. Barrow noted that whereas most of Britain’s freight was formerly transported around the country by either train or canal barge, about two thirds of it is now carried by lorries (trucks). There is also an extensive network of public bus services throughout Britain, including the world-famous “double-decker” red buses used throughout London. In just a few towns, perhaps most famously in the Northern seaside resort of Blackpool, there are also tram systems – electric vehicles running in rail tracks embedded in the street, and powered from overhead wires. Britain’s train network is extensive – one of Europe’s largest – with in excess of 11,000 miles of track, carrying about 1,500 trains daily through as many as 2,500 stations. Britain boasted the first ever of the world’s public railways, when the Stockton and Darlington line opened in 1825. The so-called “main line” trains terminate on the outskirts of the capital, London, at a series of major stations. From those stations, passengers are able to travel anywhere in London on the London Underground or “Tube” network, which started in 1890 – another world first. That network has over 250 miles of track and encompasses a greater area than any other comparable system. Britain has direct rail links with continental Europe via trains running through tunnels bored between England and France 50 metres below the seabed of the English Channel. Britain’s air transport system includes no less than 470 airports, with five major airports serving London. Figures for 2004 showed that London’s airports jointly handled more than 120 million passengers, with London Heathrow – the busiest in the world – handling 67 million of them. In terms of international cargo transport, Barrow reported that although the Channel Tunnel also carries a certain amount of freight, shipping carries most freight, with Dover being the busiest of Britain’s ports.

Policing and Crime

“Policing in the UK: A Brief Guide” (2012), published by the Association of Chief Police Officers, states there are 44 separate police forces distributed throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each is headed by a Chief Constable who reports to the Home Secretary, a government minister. Beginning in November 2012, most of those police forces – other than the City of London force and the police in Northern Ireland – have an elected Police and Crime Commissioner providing local direction and other functions. In addition to those “regular” police forces, there is also a separate force called the British Transport police that polices Britain’s railway systems, and other specialist police such as those associated with the Ministry of Defence and nuclear establishments. Scotland has its own police forces (presently integrating into one unified force), although the British Transport Police also cover the rail network in Scotland. Regarding crime in the UK, Burn-Murdoch & Chalabi (January 2013) published an article in the Guardian newspaper, summarizing current statistics and trends. Essentially, the article showed that crime in general had fallen in the period (Sept 2011-Sept 2012), and total numbers of crimes were 29 percent fewer than 10 years earlier. Only two individual crime categories showed increases over the 12-month period. They were thefts of bicycles and other household items, although the increases were very small. Homicide – a major crime category – has shown a drop to half of the figures for 2001-2002.

Barrow, M. “Types of Transport in Britain.” (2012). Project Britain: British Life & Culture. Retrieved from http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/transport.html Burn-Murdoch, J., & Chalabi, M. “Crime statistics for England & Wales: what's happening to each offence?” (January 2013). The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/14/crime-statistics-england-wales Dunn, L. & Collyer, J. “Understanding the British School System. (2011). U.S. Air Force 422nd Air Base Group. Retrieved from http://www.422abs.com/rafc/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=Rw8YrHUPTTw%3D&tabid=82&mid=467 “How government works.” (n.d.). GOV.UK. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works “How Parliament works.” (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/ “Policing in the UK: A Brief Guide.” (2012). The Association of Chief Police Officers. Retrieved from http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/reports/2012/201210PolicingintheUKFinal.pdf “The Economy of the UK, GB, British Isles.” (2010). Economy Watch. Retrieved from http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/united-kingdom/?page=full “The Education Systems of England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland” (n.d.). The British Council. Retrieved from http://www.britishcouncil.org/flasonline-uk-education-system.pdf “What is the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England?” (n.d.). About.com Geography. Retrieved from http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzuk.htm

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 1489

This paper is created by writer with

ID 262830900

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Information technology literature reviews, tear argumentative essays, menopause argumentative essays, twilight argumentative essays, slide argumentative essays, valuation argumentative essays, sailing argumentative essays, volatility argumentative essays, saline argumentative essays, pencil argumentative essays, shower argumentative essays, dilution argumentative essays, admiral argumentative essays, concave essays, coumaphos essays, contractile essays, crunching essays, eluting essays, eliciting essays, gardasil essays, free research paper on challenges facing romania, example of reaction paper 2 essay, free essay on what counts as educational policy, race and illegal status critical thinking, free essay on fostering creativity, example of essay on a dolls house, example of political science defining globalization research paper, critical thinking on air freight security, good essay about focus on body image dissatisfaction among children and intervention measures, good essay about prose to prose the storm and story of an hour, nursing ltc 450 nursing home administration essay, good example of the global financial crisis is it the fault of the global system essay, free essay about readmission, free course work about the importance of gender awareness in international development policies, good example of technical complexity critical thinking, one poem one play one fiction these needs to be used richard corey fence essays examples, hyundai essay example, how do you plan to use your engineering degree to benefit society essay examples, example of essay on some people categorize engineers as geeks or nerds are you a geek nerd or, good example of research paper on famous thinkers paper, a governer 039 s to the island with analysing the international law and trade issues term paper samples, example of rabea ali admission essay, paper addressed to the national peoples congress term paper sample.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Chapter 3 Introductory Essay: 1763-1789

Written by: Jonathan Den Hartog, Samford University

By the end of this section, you will:.

Explain the context in which America gained independence and developed a sense of national identity

Introduction

The American Revolution remains an important milestone in American history. More than just a political and military event, the movement for independence and the founding of the United States also established the young nation’s political ideals and defined new governing structures to sustain them. These structures continue to shape a country based on political, religious, and economic liberty, and the principle of self-government under law. The “shot heard round the world” (as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described the battles of Lexington and Concord) created a nation that came to inspire the democratic pursuit of liberty in other lands, bringing a “new order of the ages”.

President Reagan and mujahideen leaders sit on couches and chairs in the White House.

This engraving of the 1775 battle of Lexington—detailed by American printmaker Amos Doolittle who volunteered to fight against the British—is the only contemporary American visual record of this event.

From Resistance to Revolution

As British subjects, the colonists felt flush with patriotism after the Anglo-American victory in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). They were proud of their king, George III, and of the “rights of Englishmen” that made them part of a free and prosperous world empire. Although Britain’s policies after the French and Indian War caused disputes and tensions between the crown and its North American colonies, independence for the colonies was not a foregone conclusion. Instead, the desire for independence emerged as a result of individual decisions and large-scale events that intensified the conflict with Great Britain and helped unite the diverse colonies.

As early as 1763, British responses to the end of the French and Indian War were arousing anger in the colonies. An immediate question concerned Britain’s relationship with American Indians in the interior. Many French-allied American Indians formed a confederation and continued to fight the British, especially under the leadership of the Odawa chief Pontiac and the Delaware prophet Neolin. Together, they hoped to reclaim lands exclusively for their tribes and to entice the French to return and once again challenge the English. Pontiac’s War led to American Indian seizure of western settlements such as Detroit and Fort Niagara. Rather than ending the dispute quickly, unsuccessful British attempts at diplomacy with France’s Indian allies dragged the war into 1766. (See the Pontiac’s Rebellion Narrative.)

Meanwhile, the British issued the Proclamation of 1763, which attempted to separate American Indian and white settlements by forbidding American colonists to cross the Appalachian Mountains. The hope was to prevent another costly war and crushing war debt. The British stationed troops and built forts on the American frontier to enforce the proclamation, but they were ignoring reality. Many colonists had already settled west of the Appalachians in search of new opportunities, and those who had fought the war specifically to acquire land believed their property rights were being violated by the British standing army.

A map that shows the vertical line drawn from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. On the left of the line is the label

The line drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico left much of the frontier “reserved for the Indians” and led to resentment from many colonists.

In 1764, the British began to raise revenue for the large army stationed on the colonial frontier and tightened their enforcement of trade regulations. This was a change from the relatively hands-off approach to governing they had previously embraced. The new ministry of George Grenville introduced the Sugar Act, which reduced the six-pence tax from the widely ignored Molasses Act (1733) by three pence per gallon. But British customs officials were ordered to enforce the Sugar Act by collecting the newly lowered tax and prosecuting smugglers in vice-admiralty courts without juries. Colonial merchants bristled against the changes in imperial policy, but worse changes were yet to come.

The introduction of the Stamp Act in 1765 caused the first significant constitutional dispute over Britain’s taxing the colonists without their consent. The Stamp Act was designed to raise revenue from the colonies (to help pay for the cost of troops on the frontier) by taxing legal forms and printed materials including newspapers; a stamp was placed on the document to indicate that the duty had been paid. Because the colonists had long raised money for the crown through their own elected legislatures, to which they gave their consent, and because they did not have direct representation in Parliament, they cried, “No taxation without representation,” claiming their rights as Englishmen. Although the colonists accepted the British Parliament’s right to use tariffs as a means to regulate their commerce within the imperial system, they asserted that the new taxes were aimed solely to raise revenue. In other words, the Stamp Act imposed a direct tax on the colonists, taking their property without their consent, and, as such, amounted to a new power being claimed by the British Parliament. (See the Stamp Act Resistance Narrative.)

Early voices of protest and resistance came from attorney and farmer Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses and lawyer John Adams outside Boston. A group of clubs organized in Boston. Members ransacked the houses of Andrew Oliver, the appointed collector of the Stamp Tax, and Thomas Hutchinson, the colony’s lieutenant governor. Calls for active resistance came from the Sons of Liberty, a group of artisans, laborers, and sailors led by Samuel Adams (cousin of John and a business owner quickly emerging as a leader of the opposition). Petitions, protests, boycotts of articles bearing the stamp, and even violence spread to other cities, including New York, and demonstrated that the colonists’ resolve could keep the Stamp Tax from being collected.

An engraving shows a crowd of people holding a pole with a man in effigy at the top of it.

This 1765 engraving entitled “Stamp Master in Effigy” depicts an angry mob in Portsmouth New Hampshire hanging a Crown-appointed stamp master in effigy. (credit: “New Hampshire—Stamp Master in Effigy ” courtesy of the New Hampshire Historical Society)

Meanwhile, delegates from nine colonies met in New York as the Stamp Act Congress to register a formal complaint in October 1765. The Congress was a show of increasing unity; it declared colonial rights and petitioned the British Parliament for relief.

The colonial boycott of British goods in response to the Stamp Act had its desired effect: British merchants affected by it petitioned the crown to revoke the taxes. In the face of this colonial resistance, a new government took leadership in Parliament and in 1766 repealed the Stamp Act. The colonists celebrated and thought the crisis was resolved. However, the British Parliament simultaneously passed the Declaratory Act, asserting its authority with the power to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” including taxing without consent. The stage was set to continue the conflict.

Like their British counterparts, many Americans adopted the custom of drinking tea. How does this teapot c. 1770 show the politicization of the cultural habit of tea drinking? (credit: “No Stamp Act Teapot ” Division of Cultural and Community Life National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution)

Just one year later, Parliament began to pass the so-called Townshend Acts. The first of these was the Revenue Act, which taxed many goods imported by the colonies, including paint, glass, lead, paper, and tea. Despite the stationing of British troops in Boston to quell resistance, artisans and laborers protested the taxes, while in nonimportation agreements (boycotts), merchants and planters pledged not to import taxed goods. Women resisted the tax by rejecting the consumer goods of Great Britain, producing homespun clothing and brewing homemade concoctions rather than buying imported British cloth and tea. They organized into groups called the Daughters of Liberty to play their part in resisting what they viewed as British tyranny, and they formed the backbone of the nonconsumption movement not to use British goods. John Dickinson, a wealthy lawyer, penned the most significant protest, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. The tax “appears to me to be unconstitutional,” he wrote, and “destructive to the liberty of these colonies.” The key question was whether “the parliament can legally take money out of our pockets, without our consent.” The colonists’ boycott significantly hurt British trade and few taxes were collected, so Parliament revoked the Townshend Acts in 1770, leaving only the tax on tea. (See the John Dickinson Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania 1767-1768 Primary Source.)

British officials had stationed troops in urban areas, especially New York and Boston, to quell the growing opposition movements. Their presence led to numerous smaller incidents and eventually to the eruption of violence in Boston. In March 1770, soldiers guarding the Boston Customs House were pelted with rocks and ice chunks thrown by angry colonists. Feeling threatened, they fired into the crowd, killing six Bostonians. The soldiers claimed they had fired in self-defense, but colonists called it a cold-blooded slaughter. This was the interpretation put forward by the silversmith Paul Revere in his widely reproduced engraving of the event, now called the “Boston Massacre.” The soldiers soon faced trial, and John Adams—although no friend of British taxation—served as their defense attorney to prove that colonists respected the rule of law. Remarkably, he convinced the Boston jury of the soldiers’ innocence, but tensions continued to simmer. (See The Boston Massacre Narrative.)

Boston was ripe for resistance to British demands when Parliament issued the 1773 Tea Act. The intention was to save the British East India Company from bankruptcy by lowering the price of tea (to increase demand) while assessing a small tax along with it. Colonists saw this as a trap, using low prices to induce them to break their boycott by purchasing taxed tea from the East Indian monopoly. Before the three ships carrying the tea could be unloaded at Boston harbor, the Sons of Liberty organized a mass protest in which thousands participated. Men disguised themselves as American Indians (to symbolize their love of natural freedom), marched to the ships, and threw the tea into Boston Harbor—an event later called “the Boston Tea Party”. (See The Boston Tea Party Narrative.)

An artist’s portrayal of the Boston Tea Party. Colonists are shown dumping tea over the side of a ship into Boston Harbor.

This portrayal of the Boston Tea Party dates from 1789 and reads “Americans throwing Cargoes of the Tea Ships into the River at Boston.” On the basis of the image and the artist’s caption do you think the artist was sympathetic to the Patriot or the British cause?

Parliament could not overlook this defiance of its laws and destruction of a significant amount of private property. In early 1774, it passed what it called the Coercive Acts to compel obedience to British rule. The Boston Port Act closed Boston Harbor, the main source of livelihood for many in the city. Other acts gained tighter control of the judiciary in the colony, dissolved the colonial legislature, shut down town meetings, and allowed Parliament to tear up the Massachusetts charter without due process or redress. The colonists called these laws the “Intolerable Acts.” Meeting in Philadelphia in September and October 1774, representatives of the colonies discussed how to respond. This First Continental Congress was an expression of intercolonial unity. The representatives agreed to send help to Boston, boycott British goods, and affirm their natural and constitutional rights. Few contemplated independence; most hoped to bring about a reconciliation and restoration of colonial rights. The representatives also agreed to meet again, in the spring of 1775. By that time, events had taken a very different course. (See the Acts of Parliament Lesson.)

From Lexington and Concord to Independence

Some Patriots in the colonies sought more radical solutions than reconciliation. Early in 1775, Patrick Henry tried to rouse the Virginia House of Burgesses to action:

The war is inevitable—and let it come! . . . Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me give me liberty or give me death!

Around the same time, Major General Thomas Gage, Britain’s military governor of Massachusetts, planned to seize colonial munitions held at Concord and capture several Patriot leaders, including Samuel Adams and John Hancock, along the way. On April 18, 1775, when it became clear the British were preparing to move, riders were dispatched to alert the countryside, most famously Paul Revere (in a trip immortalized by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). As a result, the following morning, the Lexington militia gathered on Lexington Green to stand in protest. As the British column advanced, its commander ordered the colonists to disperse. A shot rang out—no one knows from where. The British opened fire, and after the skirmish, seven Lexington men lay dead.

The British advanced to Concord, where by now the supplies had been safely hidden away. After witnessing British destruction in the town, the Concord militia counterattacked at the North Bridge. This was Emerson’s “shot heard round the world.” Militia units converged from all over eastern Massachusetts, pursued the British back to Boston, and besieged the city. One militiaman who survived was young Levi Preston. Years afterward, he reported that “what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we had always governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

On June 17, 1775, the Battle of Bunker Hill erupted when the colonial troops seized and fortified Breed’s Hill and repulsed three British attacks. Running low on ammunition, the colonists held their fire until the last moment under the command, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” The British captured their position—and suffered unexpectedly high casualties—but the battle galvanized the colonists. Although they were still divided, many came to believe that King George, instead of merely having bad advisors or making bad policies, was openly going to war with them. Arguments for independence began to gain traction. The build-up to the call for independence had been long, but now there seemed no other recourse. (See The Path to Independence Lesson.)

One key voice urging independence was that of Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant from England. In early 1776, Paine published Common Sense, a bestseller in which he attacked monarchy generally before suggesting the folly of an island (Britain) ruling a continent (America). Paine called on the colonists “to begin the world over again” and was one of the clearest voices pushing them toward independence. (See the Thomas Paine Common Sense 1776 Primary Source.)

Image (a) shows the first page of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. A portrait of Thomas Paine is shown in image (b); he is seated at a writing desk and holding a piece of paper.

(a) Thomas Paine’s Common Sense helped convince many colonists of the need for independence from Great Britain. (b) Paine shown here in a portrait by Laurent Dabos was a political activist and revolutionary best known for his writings on both the American and French Revolutions.

The Second Continental Congress debated the question of independence in 1776. The commander of the Continental Army, George Washington of Virginia, agreed with Henry Knox’s audacious plan to bring massive cannons three hundred miles through the winter snows from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. When Knox succeeded, Washington used the guns to end the siege of Boston. At the congress, cousins Samuel and John Adams argued for independence and convinced a Virginia ally, Richard Henry Lee to offer this motion on June 7:

That these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent States that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved.

Confronting its choices Congress also appointed a committee to prepare a Declaration of Independence. The committee consisted of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson a 33-year-old Virginian who accepted the task of drafting the important document. (See Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence Narrative.)

A painting depicts Congress voting on the Declaration of Independence. Men are shown sitting and standing in a room and one appears to be signing a piece of paper.

No contemporary images of the Constitutional Congress survive. Robert Edge Pine worked on his painting Congress Voting Independence from 1784 to 1788. How has this artist conveyed the seriousness of the task the delegates faced?

When the votes were tallied for Lee’s resolution about a month later on July 2, twelve states had voted for independence; New York abstained until it received instructions from its legislature. John Adams later wrote that it was as if “thirteen clocks were made to strike together.” The next two days were spent revising the language of the official Declaration, which Congress approved on July 4, 1776.

The Declaration of Independence laid down several principles for the independent nation. The document made a universal assertion that all humans were created equal. According to the ideas of John Locke and the Enlightenment, people were equal in their natural rights, which included life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. The document also stated that legitimate governments derived their power from the consent of the governed and existed to protect those inalienable rights. According to this “social compact,” the people had the right to overthrow a tyrannical government that violated their rights and to establish a new government. The Declaration of Independence, which also included a list of specific instances in which the crown had violated Americans’ rights, laid down the principles of republican government dedicated to the protection of individual political, religious, and economic liberties. (See the Signing the Declaration of Independence Decision Point.)

Congress had made and approved the Declaration, but whether the country could sustain the claim of independence was another matter. The struggle would have to be won on the battlefield.

War and Peace

For independence to be secured, the war had to be fought and won. British generals aimed to secure the port cities, expand British influence, and gradually win the population back to a position of loyalty. They commanded a professional army but had to subdue the entire eastern seaboard. General Washington, on the other hand, learned how to keep the Continental Army in the field and take calculated risks in the face of a British force superior in number, training, and supplies. The support of the individual states, and the congressional effort to secure allies, were essential to the war effort, but they were not guaranteed. The British sent an army of nearly thirty-two thousand redcoats and German mercenaries. They also enjoyed naval supremacy and expected that their more-experienced generals would win an easy victory over the provincials. The campaigns of 1776, thus, were about survival.

After securing Boston, Washington moved his army to New York City, the likely target of the next British attack. In the summer of 1776, the British fleet arrived under the command of Admiral Richard Howe. It carried an army led by his brother, General William Howe, and consisted not only of British troops but also of German mercenaries from Hesse (the Hessians). The first blow came on Long Island, where British attacks easily threw Washington’s army into disarray. Washington led his army in retreat to Manhattan, and then from New Jersey all the way into Pennsylvania. By the end of the year, his situation looked bleak. Many of Washington’s soldiers, about to come to the end of their enlistments, would be free to depart. If Washington could not keep his army in the field or show some success, the claim of independence might seem like an empty promise.

It was critical, therefore, to rally the troops to a decisive victory. Washington and his officers decided on the bold stroke of attacking Trenton. On Christmas evening, they crossed the Delaware River and marched through the night to arrive in Trenton at dawn on December 26. There, they surprised the Hessian outpost and captured the city. Washington then launched a quick strike on nearby Princeton. The success of this campaign gave the Americans enough hope to keep fighting. (See the Washington Crossing the Delaware Narrative and the Art Analysis: Washington Crossing the Delaware Primary Source.)

The campaigns of 1777 brought highs and lows for supporters of independence. On the positive side, the Continental Army successfully countered a British invasion from Canada. Searching for a new strategy after the New Jersey campaign, the British attacked southward from Canada with an army under the leadership of General John Burgoyne. Burgoyne’s goal was to cut through upstate New York and link up with British forces coming north along the Hudson River from New York City. A revolutionary force under Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold swung north to meet the slow-moving Burgoyne, clashing at Saratoga, near Albany, in September and October. There, the Americans forced Burgoyne to surrender his entire army. (See The Battle of Saratoga and the French Alliance Narrative.)

The victory at Saratoga proved especially significant because it helped persuade the French to form an alliance with the United States. The treaty of alliance, brokered by Franklin and signed in early 1778, brought much-needed financial help from France to the war effort, along with the promise of military aid. But despite the important victory won by General Gates to the north, Washington continued to struggle against the main British army.

A painting shows George Washington standing on a promontory above the Hudson River wearing a military coat and holding a tricorner hat and sword in his hand. Just behind Washington his slave William

John Trumbull painted this wartime image of Washington on a promontory above the Hudson River. Washington’s enslaved valet William “Billy” Lee stands behind him and British warships fire on a U.S. fort in the background. Lee rode alongside Washington for the duration of the Revolutionary War.

For Washington, 1777 was dispiriting in that he failed to win any grand successes. The major battles came in the fall, when the British army sailed from New York and worked its way up the Chesapeake Bay, aiming to capture Philadelphia, the seat of American power where the Continental Congress met. Washington tried to stop the British, fighting at Brandywine Bridge and Germantown in September and October. He lost both battles, and the defeat at Germantown was especially severe. The British easily seized Philadelphia—a victory, even though Congress had long since left the capital and reconvened in nearby Lancaster and York. The demoralized Continentals straggled to a winter camp at Valley Forge, where few supplies reached them, and Washington grew frustrated that the states were not meeting congressional requisitions of provisions for the troops. Sickness incapacitated the undernourished soldiers. Many walked through the snow barefoot, leaving bloody footprints behind. (See the Joseph Plumb Martin The Adventures of a Revolutionary Soldier 1777 Primary Source.)

Here again, Washington provided significant leadership, keeping the army together through strength of character and his example in the face of numerous hardships. Warmer weather energized the army. So did Baron Friedrich von Steuben, newly arrived from Prussia, whom Washington had placed in charge of drilling the soldiers and preparing them for more combat. In June 1778, a more professional, better disciplined Continental Army battled the British to a draw at the Battle of Monmouth, as the imperial army withdrew from Philadelphia and returned to New York.

As the war raged, it affected different groups of Americans differently. Many Loyalists (also known as Tories) were shunned by their communities or forced to resettle under British protection. Women who sympathized with the revolution supported the war effort by creating homespun clothing, often working in groups at events in their homes called “spinning bees.” When men went to war, the women kept family farms, businesses, and artisan shops operating, producing supplies the army could use. While her husband, John, held important offices, Abigail Adams took much of the responsibility for the family’s farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. She even collected saltpeter for the making of gunpowder. Some colonial women followed their brothers and husbands to war, to support the Continental Army by cooking for the camp and nursing injured soldiers. Their engagement with the revolutionary cause brought new respect and contributed to the growth of an idea of “Republican Mothers” who raised patriotic and virtuous children for the new nation. Although women did not enjoy widespread equal civil rights, adult women of New Jersey exercised the right to vote in the early nineteenth century if, like their male counterparts, they served as heads of households meeting minimum property requirements. (See the Abigail Adams: “Remember the Ladies” Mini DBQ Lesson and the Judith Sargent Murray “On the Equality of the Sexes ” 1790 Primary Source)

To African American slaves in the South, the British appeared to offer better opportunities. In 1775, Lord Dunmore the royal governor of Virginia, offered men enslaved by Patriots their freedom if they would take up arms against the colonists. Many did, although few had gained their freedom by the conclusion of the war. Meanwhile, Dunmore’s proclamation made southern planters even more determined to oppose British rule. No such offer of freedom was forthcoming from the Patriots.

An image shows Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation of freedom for slaves.

Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation of freedom for slaves who took the loyalists’ side was made for practical reasons more than moral ones: Dunmore hoped to bolster his own forces and scare slave-owning Patriots into abandoning their calls for revolution.

The Continental Congress removed harsh criticism of the slave trade and slavery from Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, because it wrongly blamed the king for the slave trade and ignored American complicity. Later, John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton failed in their efforts to free and arm slaves in South Carolina. Despite some southern opposition, Washington eventually allowed free blacks to enlist in the Continental Army. Free black sailors such as Lemuel Haynes, who became a prominent minister after the war, served in the navy. Largely from the North, these men helped Washington’s army escape from Long Island and cross the Delaware River. In most cases, they served alongside white soldiers in integrated units. Rhode Island and Massachusetts also raised companies entirely of free black soldiers. The natural-rights principles of the Revolution inspired the push to eliminate slavery in the North, either immediately or gradually, during and after the war.

American Indians would have preferred to stay neutral in the Anglo-American conflict, but choices were often forced on them. Some tribes sided with the British, fearing the unchecked expansion of American settlers. Most members of the Iroquois League allied themselves with the British and, led by Joseph Brant, launched raids against Patriot communities in New York and Pennsylvania. Many other tribes along the frontier, including the Shawnee, Delaware, Mohawk, and Cherokee, also fought with the British. The need to deal with Indian raids was one reason for George Rogers Clark’s mission to seize western lands from the British. His victories at Kaskaskia and Vincennes, in present-day Illinois and Indiana, respectively, significantly reduced British strength in the Northwest Territory by 1779.

In contrast, many fewer tribes fought on the side of the Americans. By deciding to do so, the Oneida split the Iroquois League. Other American Indian groups living in long-settled areas also sided with the United States, including the Stockbridge Indians of Massachusetts and the Catawbas in the Carolinas. Many American frontiersmen treated Indian settlements with great violence, including a destructive march through Iroquois lands in New York in 1779 and the massacre of neutral American Indians at the Moravian village of Gnadenhutten in eastern Ohio a few years later. These conflicts deepened hostilities between American Indians and white settlers and helped whites justify the westward expansion of the frontier after the war.

After 1778, the British turned their attention to the South, where they hoped to rally Loyalist support. The major port of Charleston, South Carolina, easily fell to the British general Henry Clinton in May 1780. Pacifying the rest of the South fell to General Charles Cornwallis. He dueled across the Carolinas with the U.S. general Nathanael Greene. Encounters at King’s Mountain and Cowpens were indecisive or narrow American victories, but they effectively neutralized larger British forces in the South. After fighting at Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis decided to head north into Virginia. He settled at Yorktown and built defenses with the expectation that the British navy would arrive to bring his army back to New York. However, in the Battle of the Capes (September 1781), the French navy defeated the British force sent to relieve Cornwallis. As a result, Cornwallis remained stuck at Yorktown.

Recognizing an opportunity, the French Marquis de Lafayette alerted Washington, who brought the main body of his army south with French forces under Rochambeau to confront Cornwallis. As the Americans strengthened their siege with the help of French engineers, command of several actions fell to Washington’s former aide, Alexander Hamilton. After separate forces of American and French troops captured two fortifications in the British outworks with a bayonet charge, Cornwallis realized he had no choice but to surrender.

A painting shows General Benjamin Lincoln mounted on a white horse and a British officer to his right. American troops are to the general’s left and French troops are to his right.

John Trumbull’s 1819-1820 painting Surrender of Lord Cornwallis hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC. American General Benjamin Lincoln appears mounted on a white horse and accepts the sword of the British officer to his right; Cornwallis was not present at the surrender. Note the American troops to General Lincoln’s left and the French troops to his right under the white flag of the French Bourbon monarchy.

The war continued for two more years, but there were no more significant battles. By capturing Cornwallis’s army, the revolutionaries had neutralized the most significant British force in America and cleared the way for American diplomats to broker peace. In Paris, Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay won British recognition of American independence. In the end, which came in 1783, not only was independence recognized, but the new nation gained a western border at the Mississippi River, unleashing a wave of immigration to settle the land west of the Appalachians.

Confederation and Constitution

The 1780s witnessed tensions between those who wished to maintain a decentralized federation and others who believed the United States needed a new constitutional republic with a strengthened national government. The first framework of government, the Articles of Confederation, sufficed for winning the war and resolving states’ disputes over land west of the Appalachians. Yet many believed the government created by the Articles had almost lost the war because it did not adequately support the army, and after the war it had failed to govern the nation adequately. With the nation’s independence recognized, Americans had to build a stable government in the place of the British government they had thrown off. Important debates emerged about the size and shape of the nation, continuities and breaks with the colonial past, and the character of a new governing system for a free people. Debates took place not only in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 but also in public discussions afterward in the states. Throughout the process, Americans considered various constitutional forms, but they agreed on the significance of constitutional government.

As they thought about these questions, they faced many immediate challenges in recovering from the war. Tens of thousands of Loyalists refused to continue living in the new republic and migrated to Great Britain, the Caribbean, and, most often, Canada. Many states allowed their citizens to confiscate Loyalist property and not pay their debts to British merchants, in violation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Economic depression resulted from a shortage of currency and lost British trade connections; businesses worked for several years to recover.

The United States did not even have complete control over its territory. Britain kept troops on the frontier, claiming it needed to ensure compliance with the peace treaty. Spain crippled the western U.S. economy by shutting down American navigation of the Mississippi River and access to the Gulf of Mexico. Individual states failed to fulfill their agreements to creditors and to other states. They passed tariffs on each other and nearly went to war over trade disputes.

In the face of these challenges, the first framework of government to be adopted was the Articles of Confederation. Although Congress began the process of drafting it shortly after independence and adopted the document in 1777, it approved a final version only in 1781. First, the title is significant: The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The Articles set up a Confederation, or a league of friendship, not a nation. The states maintained their separate sovereignties and agreed to work together on foreign affairs but little else. As a result, the central government was intentionally weak and made up of a unicameral Congress that had few powers. It did not have the power to tax, so funds for the Confederation were supposed to come from requests made to the states. There was no independent executive or judiciary. Important decisions required a supermajority of nine of the thirteen states. Significantly, the adoption of amendments or changes to the document had to be unanimous. Several attempts at reforming the Articles, such as granting Congress the power to tax imports, failed by votes of twelve to one. As a result, government was adrift, and many statesmen such as Madison, Hamilton, and Washington began thinking about stronger, more national solutions. (See The Articles of Confederation 1781 Primary Source and the Constitutional Convention Lesson.)

Watch this BRI Homework Help video on the Articles of Confederation to review their weaknesses and why statesmen desired a stronger central government.

Nationalists such as Madison were also concerned about tyrannical majorities’ violations of minority rights in the states. For example, in Virginia, Madison helped promote freedom of conscience or religious liberty. He successfully won passage of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which formally disestablished the official church and protected religious liberty as a natural right. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom later provided a precedent for the First Amendment. Protecting political and religious liberties became key components in the creation of a stronger constitutional government. (See the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom Narrative.)

Even with all its problems, the Confederation Congress did achieve great success with the settlement of the West. It created the Ordinance of 1784, which provided for the entrance of new states on an equal footing with existing ones, and for their republican government. Jefferson’s proposal to forever ban slavery in the West failed by one vote. The Northwest Ordinance, enacted a few years later in 1787, was a thoughtful response to the question of how to treat a territory held by the national government. Each territory, as it gained population, would elect a territorial legislature, draft a republican constitution, and gain the status of a state. Through this process, the Old Northwest eventually became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. At the same time, the Northwest Ordinance’s final articles established the protection of the rights of residents, including the rights of habeas corpus and the right to a trial by jury. It provided for public education to advance knowledge and virtue. Also, very significantly, the ordinance permanently outlawed slavery north of the Ohio River. Not only did this decision keep those future states free, it also demonstrated the principle that the national government could make decisions about slavery in new territories. (See The Northwest Ordinance 1787 Primary Source.)

The first steps leading to a new Constitutional Convention were small. Concerns about trade and the navigation of the Chesapeake led to a 1785 meeting, hosted by Washington at Mount Vernon, between delegates from Virginia and Maryland. That meeting prompted more ambitious designs. Madison, a young Virginia lawyer and landowner, urged Congress to call for a new convention to be held in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1786. Nationally minded leaders from several states attended, including Madison, Hamilton from New York, and Dickinson from Delaware. Because of the late invitation, however, five other states sent delegates who arrived only after the meeting had disbanded, so a quorum was never reached. The one accomplishment of the Annapolis Convention was to ask Congress to call for another convention to be held in 1787 in Philadelphia. This was the Constitutional Convention. (See The Constitutional Convention Narrative and The Annapolis Convention Decision Point.)

As states prepared for the new convention in Philadelphia, word came of a popular uprising in Massachusetts. To pay off its Revolutionary War debts, the Massachusetts legislature had increased taxes. This move was met with active resistance in the western part of the state, where many farmers feared losing their land because they could not make the payments due to a credit crunch, recession, and high taxes. The insurgents wanted to cut taxes, print money, abolish the state senate, and revise the state constitution. Under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a farmer and former revolutionary soldier, they closed the courts in Springfield to prevent property foreclosures and defied the state government. By January 1787, Shays’ Rebellion had dissipated—the state legislature had raised an army to put down the uprising, and its leaders had fled. Still, officials feared disorder would spread if the government were not strengthened. Henry Knox strongly advocated for reform, and the idea was accepted by many revolutionary leaders, including Knox’s friend and fellow nationalist, George Washington. (See the Shays’ Rebellion Narrative.)

As a result, when the delegates assembled in Philadelphia, in the same hall where Congress had declared independence, they did so with a sense of urgency. They opted for secrecy to ensure free deliberation, allow delegates to change their minds, and prevent outside pressures from swaying the debates. They even ordered the windows nailed shut—quite a discomfort through the summer months. One important first step was to name someone to preside over the convention, and this honor fell to Washington. His presence lent moral seriousness and credibility to the whole endeavor. Members of the assembled convention soon concluded that the Articles of Confederation were beyond saving, and a new frame of government would be required, even though this goal surpassed their mandate to revise the Articles. At this point, Edmund Randolph of Virginia stepped forward with the proposal for a new plan of government conceived by fellow Virginian Madison (who was also keeping extensive notes of the convention, despite a rule against doing so).

Madison’s Virginia Plan favored large states by opting for a bicameral Congress with representation in both houses to be determined by population size alone. This irked the smaller states, which responded with the New Jersey Plan, adhering to the existing practice of allowing all states equal representation in an assembly. With two opposing visions, there seemed no clear path forward, and some delegates feared the convention would falter. From this conflict, however, a third plan emerged, shaped by Sherman and other delegates from Connecticut. This Connecticut Compromise or “Great Compromise” delineated the bicameral Congress we have today, with separate houses each offering a different means of representation: proportional to population in the House of Representatives and equal in the Senate, where each state would elect two senators. The crisis had been averted. (See Argumentation: The Process of Compromise Lesson.)

The convention then moved on to other matters. For instance, delegates considered the nature of the executive—a potentially delicate topic given that the presumed first executive was Washington. Hamilton argued for a very strong executive, possibly even one elected for life. However, although the convention created the presidency, it also hemmed it in, to be checked by the other branches. The Electoral College, in which each state’s votes were equal to the sum of its two senators plus its number of representatives in the House, was instituted as another part of the federal system. Significantly, the delegates spent minimal time on the federal judiciary, leaving the responsibility of defining its role to the new government.

The framers also faced the dilemma of how to address the institution of slavery. Delegates from the Deep South threatened to walk out of the convention if a new constitution endangered it. As a result, the convention’s treatment of slavery was ambiguous. The Constitution never mentions “slaves” or “slavery.” Even so, practical considerations made it impossible to ignore. Whereas delegates from the North did not think slaves should count toward the population totals establishing representation in Congress but should count for taxation, southern delegates disagreed, arguing the opposite. The “Three-Fifths Compromise” resolved that, although free people would be counted in full, only three-fifths of the number of “all other Persons” would be applied to state population totals for purposes of congressional apportionment and taxation. A precedent set by the Articles of Confederation also guided the compromise. In addition, after the convention voted down a southern proposal to prevent congressional interference with the international slave trade, the national government gained the power, after 1808, to choose to prohibit the “Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit.” (See the Is the Constitution a Proslavery Document? Point-Counterpoint.)

After most of the debates were finished, the convention’s ideas were put into words by a Committee of Style, including Gouverneur Morris of New York. By September 1787, the proposed constitution was ready to be sent to the Confederation Congress and then to the state legislatures to be submitted to popular ratifying conventions consisting of the people’s representatives. One of the most important provisions at this point stated that only nine of thirteen states had to ratify the document for it to go into effect in the states where it had been approved.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video on the Constitution for a comprehensive review of the philosophies behind the Constitution.

With the Constitution now public, citizens across the country could make it a topic of scrutiny and debate. This was one of the convention’s goals: The Preamble was rooted in popular sovereignty when it claimed to express the will of “We, the People of the United States.” The Constitution was to be considered at special state conventions and not by state legislatures, for instance, because the framers anticipated state politicians would resist the Constitution’s diminishing of the power of the states. In these conventions, nationalists who supported the Constitution seized the name “Federalists,” alluding to federalism or the sharing of powers between the nation’s and states’ governments. Already well organized, Federalists coordinated their efforts in the various states. They could call on many polished writers for support. John Dickinson, for instance, wrote a series of essays called The Letters of Fabius. Even more famously, Hamilton, Jay, and Madison united to write the Federalist Papers, signing their collected efforts with the Latin pseudonym “Publius.”

The Federalist Papers made practical and theoretical arguments in favor of strengthening the nation’s government through the proposed constitution. Although many other voices also supported the Constitution at that time, people still look to The Federalist Papers for important insights into the thoughts of the framers of the Constitution. The people labeled “Anti-Federalists,” however, were suspicious of the Constitution and its grant of power to a national government. Considering themselves defenders of the Articles of Confederation and its own federal system, they worried that, like the British government in the 1760s and 1770s, the distant new authority proposed by the Constitution would usurp the powers of their states and violate citizens’ individual rights. Many of them also wrote pseudonymously, taking names like Brutus—the Roman assassin of power-grasping Caesar—or Federal Farmer. Many also had Revolutionary credentials, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. They worried Americans would relinquish the liberty they had just fought so hard to attain. As their name suggests, the Anti-Federalists came to be identified as an opposition voice, warning about the growth of a strong national government with great powers over taxation and the ability to raise standing armies that would endanger citizens’ rights.

(See the Federalist/Anti-Federalist Debate on Congress’s Powers of Taxation DBQ Lesson.)

As debates raged in newspapers and public houses, state conventions took up the Constitution. On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify it. The next four states—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut—followed quickly. Pennsylvania’s Federalists so accelerated approval that Anti-Federalists had little chance to mount a real opposition. The others were small states that believed the Constitution would help them. Massachusetts came next, and there, because of Shays’ Rebellion, opinion was more divided. Still, Federalists rallied important Revolutionary leaders like Revere, Hancock, and Samuel Adams to achieve ratification. Maryland and South Carolina followed. (See The Ratification Debate on the Constitution Narrative.)

When New Hampshire voted “yes” in June 1788, Federalists rejoiced that nine states had ratified. However, two of the most populous states, Virginia and New York, still had to consider the Constitution. Federalists feared that failing to gain the support of either would threaten the legitimacy of the Constitution and the viability of the nine-state union already established. Madison and other Federalists battled Patrick Henry in an epic debate in Virginia, narrowly winning ratification. Hamilton and Jay similarly faced a powerful contingent of Anti-Federalists in New York, but this state also ratified the Constitution in the end. In both states, as had been the case in Massachusetts, Anti-Federalists gained Madison’s promise that the new government would quickly draft a Bill of Rights for the Constitution. The new government under the Constitution could move forward (temporarily without North Carolina and Rhode Island, which remained outside the new union for more than a year.)

The final result was that American citizens and their representatives, through a public debate, had agreed on a new form of government. They had passed the test Hamilton had set for them in Federalist Paper No. 1, determining that self-government was possible and that citizens could establish a government through “reflection and choice” rather than having it imposed by “accident and force.” Madison kept his word, and in the new Congress, he authored the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights and shepherded them to approval. The Anti-Federalists stayed engaged in politics and kept a wary eye on the new national government. The process, although often improvisational and hinging on the contingency, had been orderly and deliberative. In the American Revolution, statesmen and citizens had avoided military dictatorship and mass civilian bloodshed, creating a lasting system of government in which power was organized for the protection and promotion of liberty.

In the relatively short span of time between 1763 and 1789 the thirteen colonies went from loyal subjects of the British crown to open rebellion to an independent republic guided by the U.S. Constitution.

Additional Chapter Resources

Mercy Otis Warren Narrative
George Washington at Newburgh Decision Point
Loyalist vs. Patriot Decision Point
Were the Anti-Federalists Unduly Suspicious or Insightful Political Thinkers? Point-Counterpoint
Quaker Anti-Slavery Petition 1783 Primary Source
Belinda Sutton Petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1783 Primary Source
Junípero Serra’s Baja California Diary Primary Source
State Constitution Comparison Lesson
Argumentation: Self-Interest or Republicanism? Lesson

Review Questions

1. Which of the following best describes the fiscal consequences of the French and Indian War?

The French and Indian War caused the Northwest Territories to be absorbed into the British colonial government leading to an increase in British resources.
The French and Indian War exploded the British national debt and tax burden leading to Parliament’s decision to tax the colonies to pay the war’s cost.
The French and Indian War caused the colonies to realize their economic self-sufficiency and allowed colonial governments to impose taxes upon their citizens.
The French and Indian War resulted in a British loss which left the British economically indebted to France and forced them to use the colonies to pay this debt.

2. Which act marked the first serious constitutional dispute over Parliament’s taxing the colonists without their consent?

Declaratory Act
Boston Port Act

3. At the conclusion of the French and Indian War what was the political status of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains?

Colonial settlers were forbidden to cross the Appalachian Mountains.
The British government acquired this territory and governed it under the Northwest Ordinance.
Colonial rebels were banished to these territories which were held by the British but very loosely governed.
The French governed this territory as a colony until it was purchased by Jefferson in 1803.

4. What was the main purpose of the Stamp Act Congress?

To declare independence from the British government
To develop a new Constitution to govern the colonies
To establish the Stamp Act and other tax legislation
To formalize the colonial complaints against Parliament

5. What legislation was imposed on Massachusetts as a punishment for rebellious behavior during the “Tea Party” in December 1773?

Coercive Acts
Townshend Acts

6. How did the British use the institution of slavery as a tool against the colonists in the Revolutionary War?

Southern slaveholders forced slaves to fight on their behalf.
By promising freedom, in exchange for slaves’ support, the British encouraged Patriots’ slaves to rebel against their owners.
Slaves were captured and forced to haul goods and supplies for the British army.
The British saw slavery as evil and motivated slaves to fight to abolish the institution in the colonies.

7. Which of the following best describes the role of American Indian tribes in the Revolutionary War?

American Indians mostly moved into the Northwest Territories to escape the conflict.
American Indians often sided with the British although some fought alongside the colonists.
American Indians unanimously supported the British cause in return for protection.
American Indians generally supported the colonists believing that the colonists’ commitment to freedom and independence would make it more likely that Indians’ property rights would be protected.

8. Which of the following best describes the motives of the French military during the Revolutionary War?

The French military supported the British because the French feared for the security of their own colonial holdings.
The French military supported the American patriots against France’s rival the British to raise France’s own global political and economic standing.
The French military was hired by Congress to fight on behalf of the rebels because the colonial population was much too small to successfully overthrow the British.
The French military provided financial support to the Americans but remained physically uninvolved in the conflict.

9. What purpose did the Articles of Confederation serve?

The Articles of Confederation served as the structure for the first government of the new United States.
The Articles of Confederation listed Americans’ grievances against King George III.
The Articles of Confederation were the first ten amendments to the Constitution which limited the federal government’s power.
The Articles of Confederation created a new united nation with an effective national government.

10. Which of the following best describes the evolution of American colonists desiring independence?

Immediately after the French and Indian War American colonists realized they would be better served economically and politically by full independence and advocated for it.
After the British government passed the first direct tax American colonists created a delegation to discuss and legislate independence.
After the Declaration of Independence was agreed upon by committee members all American colonists thoroughly supported the War for Independence.
Incremental shifts toward independence were not complete even during the Revolution because tens of thousands of American colonists remained loyal to Britain.

11. Which of the following did not contribute to the call for a Second Continental Congress in 1776?

The British attacks on Lexington and Concord and the violence at Bunker Hill
The popularity of a pro-independence pamphlet written by Thomas Paine
The need for a central entity to wage the resistance effort
The successful alliance between American colonists and France to wage war against the British

12. Which of the following best describes George Washington’s leadership of the Continental Army?

Fierce fighter who had an iron grip on the infantry units and who would use his war experience to influence the colonial legislature
Long-term strategist willing to use new tactics to gain victories and boost morale
Lackluster commander unable to successfully achieve the task of independence
Extremely competitive personality who betrayed the revolutionary cause by siding with the British

13. Which battle is significant because it resulted in the creation of a successful alliance with the French?

Battle of Lexington and Concord
Battle of Trenton
Battle of Saratoga
Battle of Yorktown

14. A change in perception about American white women was the idea of Republican Motherhood which

articulated that a woman’s ideal role was a mother with as many children as possible
emphasized the importance of raising patriotic children to participate in the newly formed republic
implemented a public education program that taught children how to be Republican
identified women as equal to their male counterparts and entitled to access to the finances of the household

15. The Articles of Confederation were designed to

maintain state sovereignty preventing the usurpation of power by a central government while allowing the states to function as a unit in military and diplomatic matters
create a strong federal government that could unify the states as a nation
mimic the powers of the British Crown without the ability to tax
give a voice to each citizen of the United States regardless of race and gender

16. Which of the following constitutional issues most definitively highlighted the divide between Northern and Southern delegates at the Constitutional Convention?

The Great Compromise
The Electoral College
The Three-Fifths Compromise
An independent judiciary

17. Shays’ Rebellion is most similar to which earlier event in American history?

Bacon’s Rebellion
Pueblo Revolt of 1680
Passage of the Proclamation of 1763
Stono Rebellion

18. Which political faction was suspicious of the new Constitution and wary of the stronger authority of the federal government?

Anti-Federalist

19. After ratification of the Constitution the Bill of Rights was designed to

calm Anti-Federalist fears and protect individual freedoms from a stronger federal government
promote the Federalist idea that the Constitution was an effective defense for inalienable rights
establish the process for western territories to enter the union as states
list the grievances perceived by Americans and share them with the world as a justification for rebellion

Free Response Questions

Explain how a debate over liberty and self-government influenced the Continental Congress’s decision to declare independence in 1776.
Describe the role of women during the American Revolution.
Explain how the debates over individual rights and liberties continued to shape political debates after the American Revolution.
Describe the changes and continuities in North American attitudes toward executive power between 1763 and 1789.

AP Practice Questions

“Their jurisprudence was marked with wisdom and dignity and their simplicity and piety were displayed equally in the regulation of their police the nature of their contracts and the punctuality of observance. The old Plymouth colony remained for some time a distinct government. They chose their own magistrates independent of all foreign control; but a few years involved them with the Massachusetts [colony] of which Boston more recently settled than Plymouth was the capital. From the local situation of a country separated by an ocean of a thousand leagues from the parent state and surrounded by a world of savages an immediate compact with the King of Great Britain was thought necessary. Thus a charter was early granted stipulating on the part of the crown that the Massachusetts [colony] should have a legislative body within itself composed of three branches and subject to no control except his majesty’s negative within a limited term to any laws formed by their assembly that might be thought to militate with the general interest of the realm of England. The governor was appointed by the crown the representative body annually chosen by the people and the council elected by the representatives from the people at large.”

Mercy Otis Warren History of the Rise Progress and Termination of the American Revolution 1805

1. This passage from Mercy Otis Warren’s history of the American Revolution alludes to which factor leading to colonists’ discontent after the French and Indian War?

The relative independence the British granted the North American colonies before the 1760s
The unjust appointment of governors by the king of Great Britain
The right of the British to tax colonists
The population pressures caused by mass migration to cities

2. Which of the following statements best describes how colonists justified their opinion that taxation by Parliament was unfair?

They argued that they had no direct representation in Parliament and thus Parliament had no power to enforce taxes.
They argued that as self-sufficient colonies they wielded more economic power than Parliament.
They argued that they were loyal only to the British Crown not to the British Parliament.
They argued that the monarch traditionally taxed the colonies and was the only one who could issue a tax.

“After an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country by their conduct and example to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Publius Federalist Paper: No. 1 1787

3. On the basis of the information in the excerpt provided the author would agree with all the following statements except

The debate over ratification is a referendum on whether republican self-government is possible.
This new federal constitution was written after considerable careful thought and debate.
The question of ratification is central to the survival of the United States.
The survival of the Union is of secondary concern compared with the safety and welfare of the people.

4. Which of the following best describes the author’s approach to the challenge facing the states after the Constitutional Convention?

George Washington assumed the role of de facto executive and thus changes needed to be made to the Articles of Confederation.
Many political leaders believed the governing structure established by the Articles of Confederation was not strong enough and more structure was needed.
The Revolutionary War had just ended and a document was needed to establish the newly founded government.
British troops had accidentally fired on rebel militia thus forcing the colonies to sever their relationship with the British government.

“I was eleven years of age and my sisters Rachel and Susannah were older. We all heard the alarm and were up and ready to help fit out father and brother who made an early start for Concord. We were set to work making cartridges and assisting mother in cooking for the army. We sent off a large quantity of food for the soldiers who had left home so early that they had but little breakfast. We were frightened by hearing the noise of guns at Concord; our home was near the river and the sound was conducted by the water. I suppose it was a dreadful day in our home and sad indeed; for our brother so dearly loved never came home.”

Alice Stearns Abbott Citizen of Bedford Massachusetts on the Beginning of Fighting Concord 1775

5. In the excerpt provided the violent conflict described in 1775 most directly contributed to which of the following events?

Colonial governments writing a petition for peace with a diplomatic solution to conclude the bloodshed
Immediate Colonial call to arms and declaration of war against the British
Calls for military and political action which resulted in the meeting of the Second Continental Congress
An alliance with the French who would provide needed financial and military support

6. The context surrounding the event in the excerpt provided may best be described as

intercolonial unity in the face of British attack
strategically planned offensive in the wake of British hostilities
incremental buildup of tension throughout Massachusetts over British occupation and legislation
defiance of the Proclamation Line of 1763 and the subsequent conflict over land between American Indians British and colonists

7. Which of the following ideas would be best supported by historians using the excerpt provided as evidence?

That children wrote unbiased accounts during wartime
That women and families supported the troops during the Revolution
That new and advanced technology allowed for more accurate gunfire
That most New England families felt loyalty and support for the British Crown

“To defeat such treasonable purposes and that all such traitors and their abetters may be brought to justice and that the peace and good order of this colony may be again restored which the ordinary course of the civil law is unable to effect I have thought fit to issue this my proclamation hereby declaring that until the aforesaid good purposes can be obtained I do in virtue of the power and authority to me given by his Majesty determine to execute martial law and cause the same to be executed throughout this colony; and to the end that peace and good order may the sooner be restored I do require every person capable of bearing arms to resort to his Majesty’s STANDARD or be looked upon as traitors to his Majesty’s crown and government and thereby become liable to the penalty the law inflicts upon such offences such as forfeiture of life confiscation of lands &c. &c. And I do hereby farther declare all indented servants Negroes or others (appertaining to rebels) free that are able and willing to bear arms they joining his Majesty’s troops as soon as may be for the more speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty to his Majesty’s crown and dignity.”

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation 1775

8. Lord Dunmore’s intent as indicated in the excerpt provided is best described as

a genuine feeling that the abolition of slavery must be accomplished in the empire
a desire to undermine the colonial revolt against the crown and acquire more loyalists to fight in the colonies
a need to prevent imperial rivals from becoming involved in the conflict
the desire to demonstrate a positive alliance with American Indians to ensure their assistance

9. The excerpt from Dunmore’s Proclamation highlights which of the following about the early years of the American Revolution?

The variety of reasons people chose to identify as a loyalist or patriot
The pivotal role of slaves in the winning of most early battles
The early decision of most colonists about which side to take during the revolution
The dynamic actions taken by women to support the troops at war

Primary Sources

Adams John. “Letter to Hezekiah Niles.” February 13 1818. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-hezekiah-niles-on-the-american-revolution/

Declaratory Act. http://www.constitution.org/bcp/decl_act.htm

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre 1770.” https://gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/road-revolution/resources/paul-revere%E2%80%99s-engraving-boston-massacre-1770

Hamilton Alexander John Jay and James Madison. The Federalist Papers . https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/fed.as

Hamilton Alexander. The Federalist Papers : No. 1. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed01.asp

Longfellow Henry Wadsworth. “Paul Revere’s Ride.” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/paul-reveres-ride

United States Constitution. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

Suggested Resources

Bailyn Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution . Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1992.

Beeman Richard. Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution . New York: Random House 2009.

Berkin Carol . A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution . New York: Mariner Books 2002.

Berkin Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence . New York: Vintage 2005.

Brookhiser Richard . Alexander Hamilton: American . New York: Simon and Schuster 2000.

Calloway Colin. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995.

Chernow Ron. Alexander Hamilton . New York: Penguin 2004.

Dowd Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity 1745-1815 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1992.

Ellis Joseph. His Excellency: George Washington . New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2004.

Emerson Ralph Waldo. “Concord Hymn.” 1837. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45870

Fischer David Hackett. Paul Revere’s Ride . New York: Oxford University Press 1994.

Fischer David Hackett. Washington’s Crossing . New York: Oxford University Press 2004.

Kerber Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1980.

Kidd Thomas. God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution . NY: Basic Books 2010.

Maier Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence . New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1997.

Maier Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain 1765-1776 . New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1972.

Maier Pauline. Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . New York: Simon & Schuster 2010.

McCullough David. John Adams . NY: Simon & Schuster 2001.

McDonald Forrest. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution . Lawrence: University of Kansas Press 1985.

Middlekauff Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1789 revised ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2005.

Morgan Edmund and Helen Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1953.

Morgan Edmund. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America . New York: W.W. Norton 1989.

Morgan Edmund. The Birth of the Republic 1763-1789 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2013.

Morris Richard. The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence . New York: Harper & Row 1965.

Norton Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society . New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1996.

Norton Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women 1750-1800 . Boston: Little Brown 1980.

Norton Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women 1750-1800 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1996.

Paine Thomas. Common Sense in Common Sense and Related Writings ed. Thomas Slaughter. Boston: Bedford St. Martins 2001.

Rakove Jack. James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic . New York: Pearson/Longman 2007.

Saillant John. Black Puritan Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes 1753-1833 . New York: Oxford University Press 2003.

Storing Herbert ed. The Anti-Federalist: Writings by the Opponents of the Constitution . Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985.

Storing Herbert. What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution . Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981.

Taylor Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750-1804 . New York: W.W. Norton 2016.

Wood Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1998.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

April 25, 2024 • 40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters
April 24, 2024 • 32:18 Is $60 Billion Enough to Save Ukraine?
April 23, 2024 • 30:30 A Salacious Conspiracy or Just 34 Pieces of Paper?
April 22, 2024 • 24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
April 19, 2024 • 30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
April 18, 2024 • 30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
April 17, 2024 • 24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
April 16, 2024 • 29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
April 15, 2024 • 24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
April 14, 2024 • 46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
April 12, 2024 • 34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
April 11, 2024 • 28:39 The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics

The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Columbia university is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in gaza and the limits of free speech..

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Nicholas Fandos

Produced by Sydney Harper , Asthaa Chaturvedi , Olivia Natt , Nina Feldman and Summer Thomad

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.

Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the intense week at the university. And Isabella Ramírez, the editor in chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, explains what it has all looked like to a student on campus.

On today’s episode

Nicholas Fandos , who covers New York politics and government for The New York Times

Isabella Ramírez , editor in chief of The Columbia Daily Spectator

A university building during the early morning hours. Tents are set up on the front lawn. Banners are displayed on the hedges.

Background reading

Inside the week that shook Columbia University .

The protests at the university continued after more than 100 arrests.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Research help by Susan Lee .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government. More about Nicholas Fandos

What caused Dubai floods? Experts cite climate change, not cloud seeding

Medium Text

DID CLOUD SEEDING CAUSE THE STORM?

Aftermath following floods caused by heavy rains in Dubai

CAN'T CREATE CLOUDS FROM NOTHING

Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; editing by Maha El Dahan and Alexandra Hudson

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

Nigeria's oil regulator on Thursday clarified that recent changes to fuel sulphur content standards for diesel are part of a regional harmonisation effort, not a relaxation of regulations for local refineries.

Emirates operates Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) demonstration flight

World Chevron

Palestinians find bodies buried in a mass grave, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in northern Gaza Strip

Explainer: Mass graves in Gaza: what do we know?

The discovery of mass graves at two Gaza hospitals, said by Palestinian authorities to contain hundreds of bodies, have triggered calls by the U.N. rights chief and others for an international investigation.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution Essay

Introduction, factors that led to britain’s industrialization in the eighteenth century, works cited.

“ Industrial revolution refers to dramatic change in the main sectors of economy such as agriculture, transportation and manufacturing. Industrialization was associated with major benefits such as rise in people’s living standards, increased job opportunities and economic growth, among others.

According to historians, Great Britain was the first nation in the entire globe to industrialize. Industrialization in Britain started in the late eighteenth century. The following essay examines the factors that led to Britain’s industrialization in the late eighteenth century.

By the second part of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was regarded as one of the wealthiest nation across the globe due to industrial revolution. The following factors explain why Industrial revolution occurred in Britain;

Agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century was one of the factors. According to historians, agricultural revolution was characterized by a change in stock breeding and farming methods which in turn enhanced food production in Great Britain. Framers adopted a commercial approach as opposed to the past where they produced food for domestic use.

The large demand of food commodity from London motivated workers to increase their production. Landlordism, which refers to the act of owning large estates, was also a main factor that enhances commercialization of British agriculture. Agricultural revolution helped to lower the food commodity prices in Great Britain.

The cost of labor also lowered as a result of agricultural revolution. British government was therefore in a position to feed its citizens. British families thus, used their disposal incomes to buy manufactured products. Increased food production in Great Britain caused the population to increase. Population growth played a major role in providing the required labor in the new factories.

The other factor which led to Britain’s industrialization in the eighteenth century is the availability of capital for investment. Financial reforms which included introduction of derivatives such as swaps and options also enhanced the industrial revolution in Great Britain. Additionally, the revolution was boosted by the presence of effective central namely Bank of England.

The financial system in the Great Britain was highly effective compared to other European nations like Spain and Italy. The introduction of financial instruments such as bill of exchange made it possible for people to make payments. Political powers in Great Britain were based on economic and technological matters. Thus, the country had a large number of individuals whose main objective was innovation for development (Arnstein 72).

A study which was done by Arnstein (20) suggested that the presence of huge mineral deposits also enhanced industrialization in Great Britain. Britain is a country which is rich in mineral deposits such as iron ore and carbon fuel. Mineral resources played an important role in the manufacturing process. Iron was used in the production of new machineries. The country’s size was relatively smaller and this enhanced transportation of minerals.

The availability of ready market for manufactured goods led to Britain’s industrialization. Availability of ready market ensured that goods from Great Britain were absorbed as fast as they were produced. The country’s exports increased significantly during the late part of the eighteenth century.

During the colonial times, the nation had created an immense colonial empire. The colonial empire made the country to export goods to many parts of the world, compared to its key rivals such as Holland and France. The development of merchant marine made it possible for the country to transport goods throughout the world. Also, Britain’s railroad created a faster and cheaper means of transportation for the manufactured goods.

This had major impacts on the markets as it increased demand for goods and services. Britain’s railroad connected the major towns such as London, Manchester and Liverpool and this helped to spur trade. As a prerequisite to create conducive atmosphere for vibrant economic growth, the British government heavily invested in infrastructural developments.

Among the infrastructural developments that were made include the invention of steam engine. The invention of steam engine also played an important role in enhancing productivity of goods in Great Britain. It facilitated trade in the European region through easier market access by linking Britain with neighboring countries like Spain and Germany. Construction of infrastructural facilities was also enhanced by plenty supply of water from rivers (Arnstein 18).

According to Arnstein (56), Industrialization in Great Britain was also enhanced by the country’s ability to produce goods cheaply. The adoption of machinery in production of goods led to mass production and reduced the cost of production. The invention of flying shuttle led to mass production of yard goods.

In addition, factories were located near rivers and sources of power, which in turn enabled manufacturers to double their output. Great Britain also protected its key industries such as textile by discouraging imports.

The newly created factories provided jobs to thousands of families in Great Britain. In order to ensure that factory machines run at a steady rate, employees were required to work in shifts. Factory managers mainly employed workers from rural areas as they were regarded as hard working. This made people to live near factories and this in turn helped to create new towns.

Arnstein (36) in his study suggested that, the British government made substantial efforts in enhancing industrialization in the late eighteenth century. The government provided investors with a stable business environment. The parliament passed laws which safeguarded private property.

Additionally, Great Britain adopted capitalism form of economy which advocates for private ownership of resources. There were thus, no restrictions on private ownership of resources in England. The government did not intervene with regard to tariffs and taxes. The government also ensured that the credit system was flexible for private investors. The free market economy ensured that individuals’ had rights to own property and dispose off natural resources and man-made resources as they wished.

It also provided the owners of property with the right income, generated from the resources. Workers were also free to enter into any occupation for which they were specialized in. There was the aspect of self interest in pursuit of personal goals. Factories aimed at maximizing production and profits, land owners aimed at achieving maximum rent, workers shifted to occupation which offered the highest rewards and buyers spent their incomes in the way that satisfied the people most.

Industrial revolution in Great Britain in the late part of eighteenth-century was facilitated by factors such as the availability of resources for production, geographical advantages, such as the presence of streams and rivers which provided factories with water, financial reforms which resulted in extra capital for investment, among others. Industrial revolution in Great Britain brought about changes such as technological advancements, mass production, creation of new urban centers and efficient transport systems, among others.

Arnstein, Walter. Britain yesterday and today: 1830 to the present, Edition5 . London: D.C. Health, 1988.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 29). Britain’s Industrial Revolution. https://ivypanda.com/essays/britains-industrial-revolution/

"Britain’s Industrial Revolution." IvyPanda , 29 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/britains-industrial-revolution/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Britain’s Industrial Revolution'. 29 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Britain’s Industrial Revolution." November 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/britains-industrial-revolution/.

1. IvyPanda . "Britain’s Industrial Revolution." November 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/britains-industrial-revolution/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Britain’s Industrial Revolution." November 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/britains-industrial-revolution/.

Industrial Revolution Role in the Britain Development
Logistics: Supply Chain Infrastructural Improvement
The Eighteenth Amendment
Great Britain Industrialization Reasons
Industrial Revolution’ Process and Challenges
Industrialization, Urbanization, and Migration
Atacamite Mineral: Physical and Chemical Structure
British Industrial Revolution and Social Changes
The Eighteenth Century America
Western Experience to the Eighteenth Century
Industrial and French Revolutions
An Analysis of the Impact of British Colonization
Restoration and Nationalism
Christopher Hill “The World Turned Upside Down”
The French Revolution: Romanticism Period

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

IMAGES

Financial institutions and their role within the UK Economy Essay
UK economy as a mixed economy
How the UK economy has changed in the past 70 years (1952-2022
How the UK economy has changed in the past 70 years (1952-2022
State of the Uk economy
Economy of the Great Britain The UK

VIDEO

Британская экономика взяла разгон
UK economy grows: 'We are a long way from recession in the UK' assures Liam Halligan
The Downfall of Britain Economy|From the Flagbearer of Colonialism to Economic Crisis| Stagflation
Indian Economy Essay In English #indianeconomy #mintossmood
UK's Economic Collapse
Britain's Economy is on The Brink of Collapse

COMMENTS

United Kingdom
United Kingdom - Economy, Trade, Manufacturing: The United Kingdom has a fiercely independent, developed, and international trading economy that was at the forefront of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. The country emerged from World War II as a military victor but with a debilitated manufacturing sector. Postwar recovery was relatively slow, and it took nearly 40 years, with additional ...
1
Growth was accompanied by structural change, with the declining share of agriculture matched by the rise of services as well as industry. As a result, Britain improved its position relative to the rest of Europe (the Little Divergence) and also improved its position relative to the leading Asian economies (the Great Divergence).
Economic History of Britain
Economic History of Britain Essay. In the nineteenth century, Britain emerged as the wealthiest and most powerful economy on the map of the world. She became the centre of trade and a leader in foreign investments. The average income of an individual was much higher in comparison to other countries. She was the pioneer of industrialization and ...
Economy of the United Kingdom
The economy of the United Kingdom is a highly developed social market economy. ... Workforce distribution in Great Britain 1841-1911, and in England and Wales 1921-2011. ... According to a series of research papers and reports published in the mid-2010s, ...
PDF The Economic History of Britain since 1870
Lecture 1: Introduction. 1. Crafts (2003) "Long-run growth," Chapter 1 in Floud and Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain: Volume II: Economic Maturity, 1860-1939. Lecture 2: Late nineteenth century globalization. Lecture 3: The rise of Germany and the United States, 1870-1914. 1.
Labour in Great Britain (CHAPTER III)
The Industrial Revolution: Economic Models of the Labour Market. In Britain, the hundred years or so between c. 1750 and c. 1850 saw the competition of what is conventionally called the industrial revolution, and with it the corresponding transformation of the labour force from its traditional structure into a modern industrial working class.These changes constituted a stage in an irreversible ...
Economics Essays: The UK economy in the 1960s
National Debt in post war period. National debt in 1960 106.7% of GDP - By 1970 this had fallen to 64.2% of GDP. After the Second World War, the UK was left with huge debts. National debt as a % of GDP exceeded 200% of GDP in the early 1950s. Britain was reliant on loans from the United States.
Why the Industrial Revolution Started in Britain
The following factors were all present in Britain and explain why it experienced the Industrial Revolution first: efficient agriculture. coal as a cheap fuel. significant urbanisation. high cost of labour. intercontinental trade opportunities. government support of business. innovation and entrepreneurship.
World
In contrast to the way economic history is often presented, our aim is to provide a concise coverage of economic growth in the UK in four short essays that are written for a general audience of non-economists. In this first essay, we explore the drastic change Britain underwent in the mid-18th century, as agriculture and traditional production methods began to mechanise, increasing ...
British Economic and Social History, 1700-1880
Course Material 2021/22. This paper covers the economic, social and cultural history of Britain from 1700 to 1880. This period saw more dramatic and fundamental changes in the lives of the population than any previous period of similar, or indeed much longer length. At the heart of economic change was the Industrial Revolution, generally seen ...
The understanding of what has happened in Great Britain's economy over
This essay, "The understanding of what has happened in Great Britain's economy over the last two years" is published exclusively on IvyPanda's free essay examples database. You can use it for research and reference purposes to write your own paper.
Great Britain's Macroeconomics In Relation To The US Term Paper
The United kingdom is rated number two largest economy in Europe with a Gross Domestic Product of $2.27 trillion. In the year 2008, the GDP growth was rated at 1.1 % but in 2009 it reduced to -3.2% with the raising economic indicators, the GDP is expected to increase by -1.1% in 2010 fiscal year.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has made significant contributions to the world economy, especially in technology and industry. Since World War II, however, the United Kingdom's most prominent exports have been cultural, including literature, theatre, film, television, and popular music that draw on all parts of the country. Perhaps Britain's greatest export has been the English language, now spoken in ...
British Industrial Revolution
The British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) brought innovative mechanisation and deep social change. The process saw the invention of steam-powered machines, which were used in factories in ever-growing urban centres. Agriculture remained important, but cotton textiles became Britain's top export, capital replaced land as an indicator of wealth, and the labour force diversified to include ...
Walking wounded: The British economy in the aftermath of World War I
It is well-known that World War I was expensive for Britain. The indirect economic costs were also huge. This column argues that the adverse implications of the Great War for post-war unemployment and trade - together with the legacy of a greatly increased national debt - significantly reduced the level of real GDP throughout the 1920s. A ballpark calculation suggests the loss of GDP ...
Essay: Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth
Essay: Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth! Industrial Revolution is an unpredictable and unprecedented transformation of socio-economic life of Great Britain during the last few decades of 18th century. The Industrial Revolution is a process of quite substantial structural changes which eventually ushered in accelerated economic growth. These changes are not simple economic changes in ...
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?
The Conservative-run Britain of the eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. The news ...
How Did Great Britain Improve The Economy After Ww2
In 1970, the people of Great Britain elected Edward Heath into office. After two previous failed attempts, during his time in office, Heath gained Great Britain a spot in the EEC or European Economic Community. This helped Great Britain economically, but it also …show more content… In 1964, Harold Wilson began his term promising optimism ...
Essay About Great Britain
Abstract. This essay explores the following cultural aspects of Great Britain: the political system and government, the economy, education, transportation, policing and crime. Under the first sub-heading "Political System and Government the essay explains that the fundamental principle of the government of Great Britain is that of a ...
Chapter 3 Introductory Essay: 1763-1789
Washington's enslaved valet William "Billy" Lee stands behind him and British warships fire on a U.S. fort in the background. Lee rode alongside Washington for the duration of the Revolutionary War. For Washington, 1777 was dispiriting in that he failed to win any grand successes.
The Political Economy of Great Britain
The Political Economy. This paper seeks to discuss the political economy of Great Britain. Great Britain is made up of England, Wales, and Scotland. Great Britain is ranked number four in Europe in terms of population density. A majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain are English making up 80 per cent of the present population.
Inflation in U.K. Slows to 3.2%, Lowest in More Than 2 Years
April 17, 2024. Consumer prices in Britain rose at the slowest rate in two and a half years, the country's Office for National Statistics reported on Wednesday. Inflation was 3.2 percent over ...
UK Exports Fewer Goods After Brexit, Tilting Economy to Services
April 22, 2024 at 9:16 AM PDT. Listen. 2:53. The UK is still exporting fewer goods than before Brexit, as the economy becomes more reliant on selling services to the rest of the world, according ...
What Is the Rwanda Policy? U.K.'s Plan for Asylum Seekers Explained
Although no asylum seekers have yet been sent to Rwanda, Britain's independent public spending watchdog last month found that the government will have paid Rwanda £370 million, or around $457 ...
The Crackdown on Student Protesters
The Crackdown on Student Protesters. Columbia University is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. April 25, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET. Share full article ...
Economic Relationships: the US and the Great Britain
The relationships between the U.S. and the United Kingdom entered a new era where the bitterness of the negative outcomes of the British colonialism would no longer affect the attitudes among the citizens of the U.S. toward Great Britain. Instead, the possibility of further enhancement of economic relationships between the two states was ...
Chaos in Dubai as UAE records heaviest rainfall in 75 years
Chaos ensued in the United Arab Emirates after the country witnessed the heaviest rainfall in 75 years, with some areas recording more than 250 mm of precipitation in fewer than 24 hours, the ...
What caused Dubai floods? Experts cite climate change, not cloud
A storm hit the United Arab Emirates and Oman this week bringing record rainfall that flooded highways, inundated houses, grid-locked traffic and trapped people in their homes.
Britain's Industrial Revolution
Great Britain was the first nation in the globe to industrialize. The following essay examines the factors that led to Britain's industrialization in the late eighteenth century. Clear. ... Political powers in Great Britain were based on economic and technological matters. Thus, the country had a large number of individuals whose main ...
India's Economic Activity Continues to Expand, Flash PMIs Show
India's economy is set to grow more than 7% in the current fiscal year, making it the fastest-expanding major economy in the world. Strong growth has also given the central bank space to focus ...

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

British Economic and Social History, 1700-1880

Essay: Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth

(1) Capital Accumulation:

(2) Technical Change:

Characteristics of Technological Progress :

Social Change:

Population:

Effects of Industrial Revolution :

What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

New Yorker Favorites

Great Britain Essay Examples

Introduction

Political System and Government

The Economy

The Education System

British Transportation Systems

Policing and Crime

Cite this page

Other Pages

Chapter 3 Introductory Essay: 1763-1789

Written by: Jonathan Den Hartog, Samford University

Introduction

From Resistance to Revolution

From Lexington and Concord to Independence

War and Peace

Confederation and Constitution

Additional Chapter Resources

Review Questions

Free Response Questions

AP Practice Questions

Primary Sources

Suggested Resources

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

On today’s episode

Background reading

What caused Dubai floods? Experts cite climate change, not cloud seeding

DID CLOUD SEEDING CAUSE THE STORM?

CAN'T CREATE CLOUDS FROM NOTHING

World Chevron

Explainer: Mass graves in Gaza: what do we know?

Britain’s Industrial Revolution Essay

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

Why did this happen?

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS