UK Georgian Period 1714–1837

GEORGIANS

The Georgian period saw Britain – with England dominant – establish itself as an international power, at the centre of an expanding empire. Accelerating change from the 1770s onwards also made it the world’s first industrialised nation.

Kenwood House, an 18th-century villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath, London

BRITAIN AND ENGLAND

The union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland in 1707 created Great Britain. A new British identity was celebrated by the anthem ‘Rule Britannia’ (1740), the foundation of the British Museum (1753), and the publication of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768).

Yet England retained its own distinctive – and contradictory – character during the early Georgian period. Its refined manners and fashions, and its Classical and ‘Augustan’ art, literature and architecture, were counterpointed by casual brutality, barbarous sports, squalor and epidemic-level gin-drinking. Handel’s oratorios flourished alongside the debauchery and low life depicted by his friend William Hogarth.

A portrait of George II from Marble Hill House, Twickenham, London. The last British monarch to be born outside Great Britain, George was brought up in Germany. During his reign Britain’s overseas colonies expanded, transforming the country into a great international power.

HANOVERIANS AND JACOBITES

The property-owning elite controlled politics. But when Queen Anne died in 1714 with no surviving children, not everyone was content with the elite’s choice of monarchs – the German Hanoverians, distant but Protestant relations of the exiled Stuarts. George I (r.1714–27), who scarcely spoke English, faced an almost immediate though largely ineffective rebellion (1715–16) by the Jacobites, who supported the restoration of the Stuarts.

The more serious Scots Jacobite invasion of 1745, which had strongly support in north-west England, reached Derby, but succeeded only in rallying widespread English support for George II (r.1727–60), and inspiring ‘God Save the King’, the world’s first national anthem.

The Battle of Culloden (1746) finally extinguished the Jacobite threat, freeing British forces and their allies to wrest Canada and India from France during the Seven Years War (1756–63). Captain James Cook claimed Australia for Britain in 1770, and though America was lost in 1775–83, an expanding empire enriched Britain, providing both markets for its manufactured goods and a source of raw materials.

The Atlantic slave trade which helped to underpin this was not outlawed until 1807, despite swelling domestic disapproval.

GEORGIANS: COMMERCE

The Georgian period witnessed the transformation of England from a largely rural country into the world’s first industrial nation.

The world’s first iron bridge, built over the Severn in 1779

REVOLUTION

Industry in England was nothing new: small local industries had existed since before the Norman Conquest. But until the 18th century it had largely been focused on workshops and home production.

What caused industry to accelerate so spectacularly from the 1760s onwards was a combination of factors: new technologies, better power sources, centralised factory production in some sectors (especially textiles) and improved transport – as well as ingenious entrepreneurs and profit-seekers, and a rapidly growing population.

Saxtead Green Post Mill, Suffolk, was built in 1796, on the site of an earlier medieval windmill. It produced flour up until the First World War, when it was re-purposed for grinding animal feed. It is still in working order today.

IRON AND COAL

The twin cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution were iron and coal. Abraham Darby I’s improved process of smelting with coke, begun at Coalbrookdale in 1709, produced pig iron (iron cast into blocks, or pigs) far more cheaply and easily than had been possible before. Furnaces like Derwentcote Steel Furnace then converted it into high-grade steel.

Abraham Darby III’s Iron Bridge over the river Severn (1779) in Shropshire pioneered the use of cast iron for bridges, aqueducts and buildings. From 1780 iron production – stimulated by the Napoleonic Wars – doubled every eight years.

Derwentcote Steel Furnace, county Durham, is the earliest steel-making furnace in Britain. Built in the 1730s, it was used for cementation, the process that converts wrought iron into steel.

POWER AND TRANSPORT

Water, as well as coal and iron, continued to power industrial production, but now more often water and coal were combined to produce steam. Multitudes of steam engines developed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton powered the many new inventions – flying shuttles, multiple looms, spinning mules – that hastened the pace of change.

The expanding canal network solved the problem of transporting ever-increasing quantities of raw materials (especially coal) as well as finished products to market. It also helped to foster successful regional economies: iron and steel in Yorkshire, ceramics in the Potteries, and cotton and woollen textiles in the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

FACTORIES

Concentrating power, machinery and transportation in one place, the factory system made sound economic sense. It also attracted workers and their families. After remaining almost static for a century, England’s population rose from about 5.8 million in 1751 to 8.7 million in 1801, but in industrial areas it tripled.

Not everyone was a willing recruit. Skilled men did well, but less skilled workers resented the strict discipline and petty tyrannies of factories. The early Lancashire spinning mills were mainly staffed by women and pauper children, some conscripted from workhouses.

A portrait of Josiah Wedgwood, who is credited with the industrialisation of pottery manufacture. His new methods revolutionised the quality of his pottery, and it became world famous, with buyers including Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. The portrait, by Joshua Reynolds, is at Down House, Kent.
© English Heritage (by kind permission of Darwin Heirlooms Trust)

RURAL WINNERS AND LOSERS

Advances in farming greatly increased food production to feed the expanding population, and enriched landowners. But the enclosure of common land and open fields benefited large commercial tenant farmers at the expense of customary tenants and cottagers, who often became landless wage labourers. Some left for industrial areas where they could earn more, but many remained, relying on casual work and poor relief for their income.

By 1800, 40% of English people worked on the land, compared with 60% in 1700. In the rural south the standard of living of the labouring classes was declining catastrophically.