I think "basically weak" is a little harsh, as is "close to defeat by the Boers" - but still. Britain had very real limits on its actual power, even at its height.
Was Britains rise as a superpower inevitable?
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I think "basically weak" is a little harsh, as is "close to defeat by the Boers" - but still. Britain had very real limits on its actual power, even at its height.
BlondieBC
Banned
Merchant fleet numbers I have seen is nearer to 50% of world tonnage, with Germany at 10% in 1914. I suspect is it was a higher % in 1880, but don't have the figures. If I had to guess, it probably peaked out at 60% or so. Even if you don't like the British, there are advantages to being flagged with the strongest Navy at the time.
That sounds much more reasonable (the percentage), and yeah.
Although it is interesting that Britain had The Best Fleet Afloat for only maybe a century plus.
Wins of consequence before that, but both before the French Revolution and after the German naval buildup, it was hardly unchallenged.
I wouldn't say any nation's rise to superpower status is inevitable. However Britain's rise was certainly likely. Here's why:
Natural advantages
1. The island of Britain is blessed with some of the most fertile farmland in the world combined with a climate that is about as amenable for arable farming as you can get. This is why the island can support so many people
2. Mineral resources. Britain has a lot of easily accessible mineral resources. The presence of these helped kick start the industrial revolution
3. Seismically Stable. Britain is about as seismically stable as anywhere on the planet. We don't get any major quakes, have no active volcanoes and are about as far from an active plate boundary as you can get. This means that Britain never had to deal with these sort of natural disasters
4. while we're at it, Britain very rarely gets any natural disaster save the occasional bad storm. The worst we get regularly is bad flooding but this is arguably down to human activity in the last few hundred years (I'm not talking about climate change)
Political Advantages
1. after the union of the crowns we had no land borders with other powers. This meant that Britain could concentrate resources on the Navy rather than the Army
2. England and Scotland consolidated as nations very early on. This gave them centralised power structures that other nations lacked
3. Development of parliamentarism ensured that the colonial project was one for the entire nation, not just a matter of a King's prestige
Natural advantages
1. The island of Britain is blessed with some of the most fertile farmland in the world combined with a climate that is about as amenable for arable farming as you can get. This is why the island can support so many people
2. Mineral resources. Britain has a lot of easily accessible mineral resources. The presence of these helped kick start the industrial revolution
3. Seismically Stable. Britain is about as seismically stable as anywhere on the planet. We don't get any major quakes, have no active volcanoes and are about as far from an active plate boundary as you can get. This means that Britain never had to deal with these sort of natural disasters
4. while we're at it, Britain very rarely gets any natural disaster save the occasional bad storm. The worst we get regularly is bad flooding but this is arguably down to human activity in the last few hundred years (I'm not talking about climate change)
Political Advantages
1. after the union of the crowns we had no land borders with other powers. This meant that Britain could concentrate resources on the Navy rather than the Army
2. England and Scotland consolidated as nations very early on. This gave them centralised power structures that other nations lacked
3. Development of parliamentarism ensured that the colonial project was one for the entire nation, not just a matter of a King's prestige
Inevitable from when?
I note you say was Britain's rise as a superpower inevitable- to that question I would say yes, as far as anything can be said to be inevitable. By the time the union was formed the pieces were all ready to fall into place .
And to the other question- it was a bit of both but it was more of a case of Britain controlled a quarter of the planet because it was powerful, than vice-versa.
Its not sitting on huge tracts of land that made a pre 20th century nation powerful, that is quite a modern post-war development. Its economics. British industry and business led the world, British military and diplomatic power was just to support this.
The British navy was the most powerful in the world since.....the seven years war or so? Perhaps even earlier with the Dutch decline. It didn't cease being such until around WW2 when the US took over.
Its lead was nowhere near as big then but it was certainly first among equals.
The small British army was by design, not lack of capability. Though the modern government is rather disturbingly changing this and pushing us the way of America's bad side, Britain has traditionally been pretty anti-army. We didn't like having too many soldiers hanging around the country just in case.
If there was going to be a war then we were more than capable of putting together an army.
Or as in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, subsidising somebody who was also an enemy of our enemy to do all the dirty work for us.
There were no land borders ,the government always kept on top of the diplomatic situation and Britain had the navy so there was no need for a big standing army. The lack of such an army contributed to making Britain more powerful, not less- armies are expensive and that we had a good enough navy to not need one really helped add to its myth.
I note you say was Britain's rise as a superpower inevitable- to that question I would say yes, as far as anything can be said to be inevitable. By the time the union was formed the pieces were all ready to fall into place .
And to the other question- it was a bit of both but it was more of a case of Britain controlled a quarter of the planet because it was powerful, than vice-versa.
Its not sitting on huge tracts of land that made a pre 20th century nation powerful, that is quite a modern post-war development. Its economics. British industry and business led the world, British military and diplomatic power was just to support this.
Sure, it wasn't the undisputed, could beat any two countries navies before tea time, behemoth it was in the 19th century at those times, but it was still the most powerful.
The British navy was the most powerful in the world since.....the seven years war or so? Perhaps even earlier with the Dutch decline. It didn't cease being such until around WW2 when the US took over.
Its lead was nowhere near as big then but it was certainly first among equals.
The whole army scattered across the world holding down the empire thing is a bit of a myth. The empire wasn't constantly chomping at the bit looking for any chance to rebel and local troops largely defended the colonies with British troop numbers being rather low outside of the officers.
The small British army was by design, not lack of capability. Though the modern government is rather disturbingly changing this and pushing us the way of America's bad side, Britain has traditionally been pretty anti-army. We didn't like having too many soldiers hanging around the country just in case.
If there was going to be a war then we were more than capable of putting together an army.
Or as in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, subsidising somebody who was also an enemy of our enemy to do all the dirty work for us.
There were no land borders ,the government always kept on top of the diplomatic situation and Britain had the navy so there was no need for a big standing army. The lack of such an army contributed to making Britain more powerful, not less- armies are expensive and that we had a good enough navy to not need one really helped add to its myth.
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I agree, nothing is inevitable, but Britain certainly is placed in a somewhat favorable position with enough land resources and eventually it didn't share a land border with a neighboring state. This latter element was a handicap for Spain, France, the Austrian Habsburgs and certainly for another nation focused on trade like the Dutch Republic. Which brings me to another point, it also had a sufficiently large population; which applies to most of the (at one point) important European nations, except the Dutch Republic.
Finally they initially also adopted good ideas from others (like from the Dutch Republic during the Dutch Golden Age), which is a quality too
.Furthermore kaiser Wilhelm did have some personality issues, though partly he acted in a way the German public demanded and he was an Anglophile.
American Revolution? Just picking an example.
I'd say Britain was the most powerful (for the most part) by a considerable enough margin to do some good from around 1760 to around 1920-ish (WWII its not, WWI it was never fully tested).
It's a bit of a strategic reality - most of the troops are scattered over the empire holding the empire. I don't know how much rebellion was an issue, but it seems to have been a concern more than having a continental-scale army with any concentration was.
Sure. But saying Britain had a large army is just plain not true - being able to pull something together in wartime is not the same thing as a standing military force plus anything raised for the war.
It certainly helped the navy, but if we're looking at raw military might, I would not say that having a great navy and a so-so army balances out as even more so than the US (and?) the USSR in their day.
Britain was an economic giant more than a military giant (very much but intent, but that's still a limit on its actions), that was the main point I was aiming at.
Which I'm reasonably sure we don't disagree on, though we do appear to differ on a few details.
I think you are developing a bit of a straw man here - by 1880 Britain was very much on the slide economically but 20 years earlier they were much more dominant. Plus the financial web that spread from London meant that much of the world was run according to London's rules.
I'll give you figures later (my degree included in depth review of British and other Empires) but the direct and indirect control of world trade by the British in the middle of the 19th century (1830-1880) was impressive and more than the US or USSR
I picked 1880 because I have more figures to compare Britain relative to others to in that year than 1860, but let's see how the two years compare.
Going by Kennedy:
Percentage of world manufacturing output in 1860: 19.9%.
Per capita levels of industrialization: 64 (vs. 87 in 1880)
Some facts we don't have 1880 figures for:
"Around 1860, which is probably when the country reached its zenith in relative terms, the United Kingdom produced 53% percent of the world's iron and 50% of its coal and and lignite. . . It alone was responsible for one-fifth the world's commerce, but for two-fifths of the trade in manufafctured goods. Over one third of the world's merchant marine flew under the British flag, and that share was steadily increasing."
GNP: (at market prices, in 1960 US dollars and prices, in) 16.0 (1860) and 23.5 (1880)
Per capita: 558 and 680 respectively.
Britain is certainly an enormous economic power, but saying that the world economy depended on Britain is going too far.
Impressive, undoubtedly. More than the US a century later, allowing for the differences between the world economy of 1930-1980 vs. a century earlier, not sure.
And "indirect" control? Meaning what?
I'm a military historian more than an economic one, so forgive my lack of understanding of what that means exactly.
BlondieBC
Banned
Yes, I would call it a half century of being unrivaled, basically 1840-1890. The Napoleonic wars left the UK deeply in debt (260% of GDP) which for comparison would be about 40 trillion for the USA today. It was not until we about 1840 that they start paying down the the debt. If there had been another challenge to the UK before then (say a US/UK war, UK/Russia), the UK would have been hard pressed to field an army of any size without absolutely wrecking their economy and debasing the currency. By 1870, we see the unification of Germany and Italy which creates two more great powers to deal. By 1880 or so we see the USA and Germany overtaking the UK in key economic statistics. The USA and Germany basically had no navy at this point, but this would change within a generation. The race for Africa saw the UK actually lose influence in Africa. So in many way, Victoria grand jubilee can be see as marking the end of the unipolar dominance. By 1900 or so, we see the USA has recovered from the ACW, has a navy and is in an expansionistic mode. Germany is building a navy. The Boer war revealed what had long been a weakness of the UK - to pay for the oversized navy, they had an undersized army. And economically speaking, the UK could not afford a Navy twice the size of the nearest rival and an army/reserves that can quickly go to multiple millions of men during a war. An age had closed, and a new one began.
BlondieBC
Banned
I agree, nothing is inevitable, but Britain certainly is placed in a somewhat favorable position with enough land resources and eventually it didn't share a land border with a neighboring state. This latter element was a handicap for Spain, France, the Austrian Habsburgs and certainly for another nation focused on trade like the Dutch Republic. Which brings me to another point, it also had a sufficiently large population; which applies to most of the (at one point) important European nations, except the Dutch Republic.
Finally they initially also adopted good ideas from others (like from the Dutch Republic during the Dutch Golden Age), which is a quality too
Furthermore kaiser Wilhelm did have some personality issues, though partly he acted in a way the German public demanded and he was an Anglophile.
I use Kaiser Willie as an example of how just one odd personality that makes no more than 10 or so blunders, can change history. A lot of what he did was not so much harm the other guy, but just piss him off. Like the letter supporting the Boer after the Boers had already lost. Or him boasting of German "ruthlessness" which set the stage for WW1 PR by the UK. And he had someother that made it easier to get military spending bills through the House of Commons and French parliament. Many people see history as predestined, when in reality such small/dumb things can change history. If say the Monarch of England from 1850-1860 had made a series of statements about how the UK would reconquer the USA (at least when printed in the USA press), we can both butterfly away the ACW and have the USA become permanently hostile to the UK. If you get the USA to enter the alliance system opposite the UK whenever the UK does and if the UK has to keep say a 300K additional standing army in Canada, then we have largely crippled the height of British power. The Kaiser is just so well known he makes a good counter point to the argument on how dumb a leader can be.
I think the Dutch can easily be made a large power. If they keep thinking of themselves as German, the can easily end up in Prussia role as the unifier of Protestant Germany. It is only because the Dutch decide to see themselves as non-German that they lose the manpower needed to be a lasting Great Power. Just imagine the Dutch holding on to South Africa in the Anglo-Dutch wars, and then at some point have the huge German immigration that went to the USA/Brazil focused on Southern Africa and Dutch East Indies. Dutch could still easily be the language of commerce, even if the Dutch had the occasional setback.
BlondieBC
Banned
Well, yes their navy is best, but let us test them against a weaker nation, the USA on land as well. The USA had about 3 million soldiers in the ACW, and call it a max effort. The UK had about 8 million in WW1, but lets us prorate down for population changes (28/42), so we get about 5 million. this sounds a bit high since I only used the change in England, where place like Austrialia are closer to 1 to 4 change. So lets call it 4 million for the UK. The numbers are close enough that either side could win. The UK has the numbers, but the USA has the advantage of defense and easier logistics. Both the ACW for the USA and WW1 for the UK financially crippled these countries. The USA took 30 years or so to recover, and in some ways it was selling to the UK in WW1 that finally paid off the ACW debt. The UK never did recover because they were fighting another major war in 20 years.
Or take the Crimean War. If it was just the UK versus Russia, it probably is a draw. The UK takes the Baltic Islands, but will be too weak to take the Crimean. So we should keep a realistic perspective. The UK at its peak is much like the USA post cold war if their were no nuclear weapons. Dominant at Sea. Likely in a full mobilization to be able to take any single power, but only at a crippling costs. The UK could easily have lost the land war to the USA or at least draw. Just like the USA today could easily find China too hard to conquer. Or for that matter Russia. I don't have to worry about the Chinese building a fleet and landing in California, but I do question what the USA looks like after we draft 30-50 million people and have spent several years on occupying/fighting in China.
One of my professors like the story of the glass club. He said many things in life are like a glass club that will inflict a crippling wound to any one opponent but break after one use. It is best used as a deterrent in negotiations than as a weapon. The British Empire military at its peak and the USA military today are much like that. An incredibly useful weapon that if used are likely too expensive to replace.
Who are the derps who keep saying Britain has lots of fertile land? I mean its alright in certain place of England, but even as Europe goes its no France/Low Countries/Northern European plains. There was a reason Britain had a quarter of the population of France in 1800 and was importing food from the 1700s on.
Britain's first premier export - wool, arose in part because so much of the land wasn't worth doing proper agriculture on.
As for Britain's coal resources that is a recipe for being well off (since remember its easier in early industrial times to bring the goods to the coal rather than the other way round, so its not like Britain could easily be exploited by a foreign power for them), but Belgium isn't a superpower and Britain wouldn't be on its resources alone either.
Britain's first premier export - wool, arose in part because so much of the land wasn't worth doing proper agriculture on.
As for Britain's coal resources that is a recipe for being well off (since remember its easier in early industrial times to bring the goods to the coal rather than the other way round, so its not like Britain could easily be exploited by a foreign power for them), but Belgium isn't a superpower and Britain wouldn't be on its resources alone either.
I know this is a little off topic, but would this actually be possible? If so, would Dutch just become the official German language? Or would they adopt the actual German language?
I would like to see a source for that (the debt part) and why Britain seems to have borne it so easily.
Yes, easily. Britain shows no signs of being nearly broke or exhausted in this period, quite the contrary.
I know (source: Kennedy) that Britain spend 1.6 billion on the Napelonic wars - and "total income" covered 73.4% of that, despite the amount spent in total being two and a half times the amount spent on the other major wars between 1688 and 1783, which means the amount raised by loans was not quite twice the amount having to be rasied for the other five wars in question where as total income is three times the amount in question.
In short, Britain had an easier time funding the war outside of loans than ever before, even if the figure in question looks enormous.
Nugax: Yeah. Britain was the power it was by playing a good hand extremely well, and when it started losing that (its percentage of the world's economic muscle in the 1920s and 1930s is far too small for the tasks of maintaining empire - looking at in this in terms of Great Power struggle) . . . it slipped to second rate.
I don't know much about Britain in regards to fertile land, but it seems more a matter of having enough to support the population (small as it was) rather than an abundance - by the point Britain is a major food importer, Britain is also economically doing well, instead of never able to get there by being too marginal (Russia, were it not for the most strenuous efforts, would probably be an example).
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That part is not so much Britain performing especial miracles, but France underperforming terribly (partly because it wasted all its efforts on fighting all of Europe at the same time for centuries on end).
The coal itself isn't decisive, it's the coal being easily available (flat flat flat and lots of it, just dig a little), easily exploitable (wool displaced farmers, farmers became workers), easily transportable (flat, small, dense, and convenient rivers), combined with other industrial resources.
It is true that there are parts of Northwestern continental Europe that have some of that combination, but the political instability and the frequent wars really retard the investment. Notably the Rheinlands, but you know what kept on happening there.
By comparison with other superpowers: Russia is huge, has marginal agricultural potential almost everywhere, has awful neighbours that don't require a navy to invade, and it's iron sources (relatively good ones) are in the Urals, while its coal sources (rather less accessible than the English ones) are on the Don. That's several Englands away from each other.
America has a great combination of everything, but at the time that Britain was gearing up for its first boom, America was just getting ready to settle the Ohio valley. So to expect it to be a direct rival early is not feasible just because of population. Once the population was there, America easily took first spot.
Britain was uniquely positioned, not only because of the social situation, but because of the resource and geographic situation as well. I'm not saying the social situation didn't matter, but I wouldn't pretend that the other stuff was somehow less important.
If we disregard the question on whether it's likely for the Netherlands to take over Northern Germany (I think it's unlikely that they'd go for that - trading and colonies were much more interesting and lucrative projects), if they'd manage, it's probable that Dutch would have become the literary language. In the 17th/18th century, Low German, which in many ways is nearer to Dutch than to High (Standard) German, was still used as a literary and comerce language in many parts of Northern Germany. In some border areas, like East Frisia, even Dutch was used as literary language. As the Netherlands would have to start taking over Northern Germany right after kicking out the Spanish in order to manage, the window of opportunity would still be there for Dutch to replace Low German as literary language of Northern Germany, instead of High German. An important condition would be that the Dutch also would bring in their Calvinist form of Protestantism, instead of Lutheranism - the Lutheran church was one of the big influences that spread High German.
Wasn't it merchant companies that pursued those interests though, leaving the possible conquest to the Dutch government if they had pursued that possibility?
The merchants had the money. Where they were going, the government was going. If, say, the Stadholder would have wanted to raise an army to, say, participate in the Thirty Years War and etablish supremacy in Northern Germany, who would have financed that?
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