Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906, by David Cannadine

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 by David Cannadine Christopher Ferguson (bio) Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906, by David Cannadine; pp. xxi + 601. New York: Viking, 2017, $40.00, $20.00 paper, £32.54, £10.99 paper. For years, I have regularly bemoaned the fact that there was no recent, comprehensive, one-volume history of nineteenth-century Britain. There are excellent textbooks, but these tend to be directed toward undergraduates, and often treat modern Britain, usually defined as 1688 to the present. Then there are the magisterial volumes in the New Oxford History of England, which break the long nineteenth century up into three subperiods: Boyd Hilton's A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (2006), K. Theodore Hoppen's The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (1998), and G. R. Searle's A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (2004), with each individual volume running to over seven hundred pages in length. Between these two historiographic poles there were few options available until now. David Cannadine's Victorious Century: The United [End Page 328] Kingdom, 1800–1906 significantly alters this historiographic landscape, offering a thorough and elegantly written one-volume history of nineteenth-century Britain that is well argued and deeply informed, offering a compelling thesis about what was unique about the British past between the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland and the General Election of 1906. How should we explain this previous dearth of single-volume histories of Britain's nineteenth century? Cannadine offers two diagnoses. First, British historians' recent interests have been drawn either backward to the eighteenth century or forward to the twentieth, leaving the nineteenth a comparatively neglected period that now requires "historical resurrection" (xx). Second, since the 1970s, the "study of the past has become a much more varied, complex, multi-layered enterprise," discouraging attempts to write a single "history" of nineteenth-century Britain (or any other place and time, for that matter) (xix). To Cannadine's two explanations I offer a third: writing this kind of broadly encompassing history requires a significant commitment to scholarly synthesis—an underrated skill in the eyes of many contemporary historians, too often viewed as lacking the originality of arguments based on archival research. This is a professional tendency to be lamented. Well-executed historical synthesis requires careful, time-consuming research and is equally capable of making arguments both useful and unique. Cannadine has long been an acknowledged master of historical synthesis, and Victorious Century confirms that he remains so. At first glance, Cannadine's choice of title invites the cynical rejoinder, "Victorious for whom?" Surely not for distressed needlewomen and tailors, child laborers, rebellious Sepoys, the pre-colonial population of Tasmania, or the pre-industrial ecosystem of the British Isles. Yet such criticism seems disingenuous, as Cannadine acknowledges that, "for good and ill, British history took place in more parts of the world … than ever before" (5). This included the British Isles, where much of life was characterized by "unexampled domestic misery, urban squalor and environmental degradation" (6). Cannadine forcefully contends that the victor to whom his title alludes was the British state, arguing that nineteenth-century Britain's parliamentary system of government was notable for its "extraordinary dominance and unique continuity in the political culture and public life of the United Kingdom and the British Empire" (2). He adds that this was the case despite the fact that this imperfect state continued to be dominated by the landed aristocracy, was often led by men both "ignorant" and anxious, and was never truly a republican democracy (528). Though frequently reformed, the British state still denied women and a considerable minority of men the right to vote in national elections at the beginning of the twentieth century. While Cannadine does not justify the importance of the history of nineteenth-century Britain according to many of the so-called exceptional claims of prior histories (Britain as the world's first industrial nation, first modern society, or first global superpower, for example), he nevertheless provides a powerful argument for British exceptionalism. British industrialization, urbanization, demographic growth, the rise of nationalism, and imperial expansion, "far from being unusual and unique," simply represented "one...