The course of prosperity, power and policy

The thirty-six years from Waterloo to the Great Exhibition of 1851 saw the industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain accelerate and extend. But the trend was neither simple nor consistent. It took something not far short of a decade for the effects of war against France to be assimilated. In a crowd skirmish at Peterloo near Manchester in August 1819 eleven people were killed, largely by the undisciplined action of the amateur soldiers of the yeomanry. Government was obliged in November to contain unrest by a partial suspension of civil liberties by the Six Acts under the authority of parliament and the Home Office, using the police and the yeomanry. There followed in the later 1820s and 1830s a time of impressive progress in output and of gains in real wages for the more skilled. But there was little betterment for the labouring classes generally, and retrogression for some. The economy and society showed renewed stress in the later thirties and early forties, producing a new range of protests and challenges for the state. Thereafter there was improvement, so that the Great Exhibition could be something of an assertion of new confidence.

The political dominance of the landed classes, confirmed by the Corn Law of 1815, received its first great challenge in the Reform Act of 1832. By the Act the new business world gained its first effective footing in the House of Commons, though men of commerce and industry were to remain a minority there for a generation more.