33.3 Europe: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 19/27)

Actually England recovered from Napoleon's blockaded ports by establishing a naval blockade of her own and carried it to the extent of searching neutral ships, a feature which led to the War of 1812 with the United States

After 1870, European alignments began to shape up in preparation for the great World War of 1912. In England, Gladstone was pursuing a foreign policy later carried on by Disraeli, which was designed to antagonize the European continent. In the last decade of the century even the British public was made aware that the country was being flooded with German goods and by 1900 the armaments race made it obvious that the real threat lay in Berlin. Britain had occupied Egyptian soil in 1882 and the unseated French retaliated by concluding an alliance with Russia, which was already growing rapidly, with French investment capital. After Britain was firmly established in the Mediterranean (she also occupied Cyprus in 1877) the old need to prop up Turkey was gone and that country was left open for German penetration. In the Boer War of 1899-1902 Britain gained additional territory in South Africa.

In spite of the apparent political advancements in this century, the common people of Britain had many problems. Education in England was poor, overall, with an estimated 2,000,000 children in England and Wales receiving no education at all in 1806. Women were used to carry coal up from the mines as much as 100 feet. In Scotland the coal and salt miners were still legally serfs, bound to the mines for life and even wearing collars as visible signs of their slavery. (Ref. 213 ) Other strange things were occurring in that far northern country. With the idea of clearing the inland valleys for the raising of sheep, the inhabitants of those areas were forcibly evicted and sent to the coast where they were supposed to work in fisheries, but the latter had not yet been built. There was much brutality among the frightened and weeping people and a few died. The fisheries were never very successful and again many people left for Canada. A large number of impoverished highlanders joined the British army. There were frequent famines, with the worst following the potato blight in 1846. There were also epidemics of cholera and food riots. Eventually economic recovery and the Industrial Revolution arrived in Scotland with the establishment of new coke-fired blast furnaces in some of the desolate regions of the country. The short-barreled, extra large gun used on Nelson's ships at Trafalgar, the "carronade", was named for the Carron works in Scotland. (Ref. 170 , 279 )