Britain's Century: A Political and Social History, 1815-1905 (review)

Britain's Century: A Political and Social History, 1815-1905, by W. D. Rubinstein; pp. xv + 352. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, £45.00, $80.00, $19.95 paper.

I don't mean to damn W. D. Rubinstein's textbook by calling it Thatcherite, a deeply opprobrious term for many academics, though perhaps not for the author himself. The current proliferation of British history textbooks is in any case a valuable part of Margaret Thatcher's legacy. She fought hard for history, as she understood it, in the national curriculum: "Factual information [. . .] in a clear chronological framework" was how she understood it. She might well approve of Britain's Century, "a text book about British history," the author declares, "which explains in a clear and hopefully interesting manner, the basic facts of the subject in an assimilable way"--and, he adds, "without the clap-trap of post-modernism" (ix). It is about Thatcher's favorite century, when Britain was top dog, and though he does not rhapsodize openly about Victorian values, Rubinstein is a very sympathetic interpreter of his subject.

The "basic facts" privileged in this textbook are political. Three-quarters of the text is firm and lucid narrative devoted to successive administrations from Liverpool's to Balfour's, the only chronological anomaly being a chapter devoted to the three minority governments between 1852 and 1867, which precedes those on the Aberdeen and Palmerston governments. This arrangement facilitates accounting for the rise of Benjamin Disraeli, who enjoys Rubinstein's preference over William Ewart Gladstone, whom "it is impossible to like" (145). He tracks the balance of political power through successive elections, paying worthwhile attention to the number of uncontested seats which can seriously distort the significance of national voting totals--for instance, in 1906 when seventy-four of the eighty- three Home Rulers elected ran in uncontested elections. He also monitors the peer/ commoner ratio in successive cabinets. Interesting information is worked in via discussion of legislation. Of the 1857 Divorce Act, for instance, he notes that it created the modern detective agency.

Rubinstein's narrative is not anodyne. As befits his scholarly reputation, he has some robust opinions to offer, aimed at certain pieties. He describes the Speenhamland system under the old Poor Law as "incredibly generous" (59). Governor Eyre's defenders were "not motivated by racism or blind imperialism," and he tells us that, as governor of South Australia, Eyre was "known for his humane treatment of the aborigines" (144). Noting the inferior status of women in nineteenth-century Britain, Rubinstein remarks on their far worse situation "throughout most of the non-European world, where the status of women resembled (and resembles) that of animals" (317). Concerning an area in which he has written a notable study, he observes that Britain "had no real tradition of anti-Semitism as either ideology or rooted social belief, and some recent historians who have claimed to identify such a tradition are distorting British reality to more closely resemble the tragic history of Jews on the Continent" (317).

The Britain that emerges from this text is a nation with less to apologize for than most others that have had, or are having, their moment of hegemony. Implicit in Rubinstein's history is a comparison with the twentieth century's top nation. He is attentive to an important theme in British diplomacy, its constant readiness to conciliate the United States in recognition of the economic, cultural, and ethnic bonds that linked them--and perhaps from intimations of the republic's probable future dominance. I am not persuaded, however, by his novel suggestion that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 prepared the climate for parliamentary reform in Britain. But students who believe that Silicon Valley is the cradle of civilization may profit from Rubinstein's tribute to the "extraordinarily efficient" Victorian postal system which provided eight or nine deliveries a day to commercial addresses. He cites the...