However, this decentralized state combined considerable strength with considerable flexibility; indeed, these two characteristics were mutually reinforcing. Even in the 18th century, central government showed sensitivity to the dangers of trespassing upon the limits of consent. Although in no sense a democratic state, this combination of strength and liberality was made possible by the close link between central government and the decentralized channels through which it ruled. If ruling at a distance often, this rule was all the stronger for being experienced as a kind of freedom. This experience in turn strengthened central government, enabling it all the more firmly to coordinate decentralized rule.
Nonetheless, if liberal, the late 18th- and early 19th-century state was marked by a strong sense of rights, enforceable by law and enjoyed by all members of the community, however unequally, including rights of subsistence by means of the poor-relief system. However limited, the propertied and the powerful felt it their responsibility to uphold these rights, rights that they and the poor and unpropertied regarded as the birthright of the “Free-Born Englishman.” Those with governmental responsibility did not generally try to exclude the mass of the population from at least some participation in the regulation of their own lives. In the courts, by the means of petition, and through attendance at parish meetings, for example, the less powerful could exert some influence. This influence, among both the high and the low in society, was felt to operate at the level of the representation of communities, rather than the individual, and was reflected in the system of parliamentary representation itself. This sense of rights also took the form of strong attachments to customary observances and regulations—for instance, those associated with particular trades and localities, such as the parish. The country was governed through a process of negotiation and reciprocity, albeit between unequal sides, in which what has been called a “rebellious but traditional popular culture” set limits on the power of the governors, while at the same time respecting this power when justly implemented.
This was to change in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The moves of William Pitt, the Younger, toward more professional, economically liberal, politically authoritarian government were carried forward by the “liberal Tory” governments of the years after 1815. This new understanding of government built upon the old liberality of the 18th-century state but divested it of many of the rights intrinsic to it. This involved a reconstruction of the roles of Parliament, the executive, and the party, with the purpose of reducing these to the provision of a framework within which individuals and institutions could operate with maximum safety and freedom. While retaining and modernizing its basic public order and foreign policy functions—thereby retaining at the centre a strong directive power—this new notion of government involved stripping away what were perceived to be the great premodern accretions of intrusive legislation, regulation, and custom, particularly in relation to economic activity and the “Old Corruption” of the ancien régime.
Instead, what would be constructed were mechanisms that would facilitate the automatic operations of the “natural order” believed to lie beneath and to be prevented from its beneficial operation by the unnecessary weight of custom and regulation created over the centuries. Liberated in this way, it was thought, individuals and the economy would be set free to achieve their full potential. This understanding of government was supported by particular appropriations of political economy, utilitarian thought, and evangelical religion, whereby the workings of the political system could be equated with the workings of Providence. This understanding of government conflicted with older notions of rights and responsibilities, so that arguments about the role of a strong central state and institutional and personal freedom, as well as the question of what was public and what was private, were at the heart of political discussion throughout the century and, indeed, through the course of the 20th century too. These arguments were reflected in the uneven movement toward the liberalization of society and the economy in the first two decades of the century, though of the direction of this movement there could be no doubt. The political situation
The end of the long wars against Napoleon did not usher in a period of peace and contentment in Britain. Instead, the postwar period was marked by open social conflicts, most of them exacerbated by an economic slump. As the long-run process of industrialization continued, with a rising population and a cyclic pattern of relative prosperity and depression, many social conflicts centred on questions of what contemporaries called “corn and currency”—that is, agriculture and credit. Others were directly related to the growth of factories and towns and to the parallel development of middle-class and working-class consciousness.
The agriculturalists, who were predominant in Parliament, attempted to safeguard their wartime economic position by securing, in 1815, a new Corn Law designed to keep up grain prices and rents by taxing imported grain. Their political power enabled them to maintain economic protection. Many of the industrialists, an increasingly vociferous group outside Parliament, resented the passing of the Corn Law because it favoured the landed interests. Others objected to the return in 1819 of the gold standard, which was put into effect in 1821. Whatever their outlook, industrialists were beginning to demand a voice in Parliament.
The term middle classes began to be used more frequently in social and political debate. So too were working class and classes. Recent historical research indicates that the awareness of class identity was not simply the direct outcome of economic and social experience but was articulated in terms of public discourse, particularly in the political sphere. For example, claims to be middle-class were actively contested in the political life of the time, and different groups, for different purposes, sought to appropriate or stigmatize the term. In the same manner, working-class identity was formed differently by different political and social movements, and the poorer sections of society were politically mobilized around collective identities that were not only about class but also about the poor (versus the propertied) and especially “the people” (versus the privileged and the powerful). This understanding of how collective identity was politically shaped according to the cultural contexts of the time has marked the formation of collective identities more broadly in British history down to the present.
Town and village labourers were also unrepresented in Parliament, and they bore the main brunt of the postwar difficulties. Bad harvests and high food prices left them hungry and discontented, but it was as much their political as their economic situation that served as the basis of their mobilization. However, new forms of industrial production, as well as the growth of towns with structures of communication that were quite different from those of villages or preindustrial urban communities, enabled new kinds of political appeal and of collective identity to take root. There were radical riots in 1816, in 1817, and particularly in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre, when there was a clash in Manchester between workers and troops of the yeomanry, or local citizenry.