Course Title:History of England

Professor Name :Dr.Maqbool Ahmad Awan.

Student Name:Muhammad Arslan Hanif
Roll no: 01.
Program: BS History 7th semester.
Topic of Assignment: Benjamin Disraeli and New Imperialism.

Outline

History of England and Benjamin Disraeli.

Benjamin Disraeli,
His life and times.

New Imperialism.
Main characteristics.
Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, Past Prime Ministers of Britian,
Conservative 1868 to 1868, 1874 to 1880.“He has fameouly said that “There are three
kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.

Born
He was born in 21 December 1804, London

Died
He died in 19 April 1881, London

Dates in office
His eras as British Prime Minister are 1868 to 1868 and 1874 to 1880

Political party
His political party was Conservative

Major acts
The most significant acts which came during his reigns were Conspiracy and
Protection of Property Act 1875: decriminalised work of trade unions and allowed
peaceful picketing. Public Health Act 1875: improved sanitation and filthy living
conditions in urban areas.

Interesting facts
He was the first and only Jewish Prime Minister to date.

Biography

Early life

Disraeli was of Italian-Jewish descent, the eldest son and second child of Isaac
D’Israeli and Maria Basevi. The most important event in Disraeli’s boyhood was his
father’s quarrel in 1813 with the synagogue of Bevis Marks, which led to the decision
in 1817 to have his children baptized as Christians. Until 1858, Jews by religion were
excluded from Parliament; except for the father’s decision, Disraeli’s political career
could never have taken the form it did.

Disraeli was educated at small private schools. At the age of 17 he was articled to a
firm of solicitors, but he longed to become notable in a more sensational manner. His
first efforts were disastrous. In 1824 he speculated recklessly in South American
mining shares, and, when he lost all a year later, he was left so badly in debt that he
did not recover until well past middle age. Earlier he had persuaded the
publisher John Murray, his father’s friend, to launch a daily newspaper,
the Representative. It was a complete failure. Disraeli, unable to pay his promised
share of the capital, quarreled with Murray and others. Moreover, in his novel Vivian
Grey (1826–27), published anonymously, he lampooned Murray while telling the
story of the failure. Disraeli was unmasked as the author, and he was widely
criticized.
Disraeli suffered what would later be called a nervous breakdown and did little during
the next four years. He wrote another extravagant novel, The Young Duke (1831), and
in 1830 began 16 months of travel in the Mediterranean countries and the Middle
East. These travels not only furnished him with material for Oriental descriptions he
used in later novels but also influenced his attitude in foreign relations with India,
Egypt, and Turkey in the 1870s.

Back in England, he was active in London social and literary life, where his dandified
dress, conceit and affectation, and exotic good looks made him a striking if not always
popular figure. He was invited to fashionable parties and met most of the celebrities
of the day. His novel Contarini Fleming (1832) has considerable autobiographical
interest, like many of his novels, as well as echoes of his political thought.

Politician, novelist and bon viveur, Benjamin Disraeli was a man with many interests,
but it was as a Conservative politician that Disraeli achieved lasting fame. PM for
almost 7 years, he initiated a wide range of legislation to improve educational
opportunities and the life of working people.Benjamin ‘Dizzy’ Disraeli was the son of
Isaac, a Jewish Italian writer, and had an Anglican upbringing after age 12. With Jews
excluded from Parliament until 1858, this enabled Disraeli to follow a career that
would otherwise have been denied him. He was Britain’s first, and so far only, Jewish
Prime Minister.Aged 20 he lost money by gambling on the Stock Exchange, and
helped to launch The Representative, a newspaper intended to usurp The Times, but it
soon failed.He went on to produce an anonymously-written satirical novel, Vivian
Grey, which caricatured a former business partner. Success, however, turned to
slander when his authorship was revealed. The stress caused by this, and by his
continuing debts, drove him to suffer a nervous breakdown.

Disraeli was elected to represent Maidstone as a Peelite in 1837. Despite being

mocked when he made his maiden speech, he defiantly pronounced “the time will
come when you will hear me”He was then elected to represent Shrewsbury in 1841,
and came to be regarded as witty and able. But Peel failed to offer Disraeli a place in
the Cabinet - and Disraeli never forgot it.After keeping his resentment private for a
time, he attacked Peel bitterly over his decision to repeal the Corn Laws, eventually
forcing the resignation of Peel’s government in June 1846.At last in 1852 the Prime
Minister, Lord Derby, offered Disraeli a place in government as Leader of the
Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The defeat of Disraeli’s December
Budget, though, torn to pieces by Gladstone, caused the government’s downfallAfter
Derby’s resignation in 1868, Queen Victoria invited Disraeli to become Prime
Minister, and they soon struck up a remarkable rapport thanks to Disraeli’s charm and
skilful flattery. He was later to tell a colleague, who had asked for advice on how to
handle the Queen, “first of all, remember she is woman”.On finally achieving his long
ambition, Disraeli declared, “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole”.

After defeat by the Liberals at the next election, his position as Conservative leader
was at risk. His health was poor and his wife died in 1872, prompting him to write: “I
am totally unable to meet the catastrophe”. Yet he carried on. Disraeli now faced
Gladstone across the Dispatch Box, and it became Britain’s most famous
parliamentary rivalry. The contrast in their physical appearances and their styles was
stark, and the hatred was strong.
Disraeli became Prime Minister once again in 1874, aged 70. This was a successful
premiership, though it has been said that the legislation of this time depended much
less upon Dizzy himself than upon his Cabinet colleagues.

The premiership saw the passing of a large amount of social legislation: the 1875
Climbing Boys Act reinforced the ban on employing juvenile chimney sweeps; the
1875 Artisans Dwelling Act allowed local authorities to destroy slums, though this
was voluntary, and provided housing for the poor. In the same year the Public Health
Act provided sanitation such as running water and refuse disposal.

On being made Earl of Beaconsfield by Victoria in 1879, Disraeli governed from the
House of Lords. Foreign policy became increasingly important, especially the Eastern
Question following Turkish atrocities against the Bulgarians.

The 1880 election was lost to the Liberals, a narrow loss in terms of votes cast.
Disraeli threw himself into the job of Opposition, and was active until a month before
his death from bronchitis in April 1881.

On his deathbed, he is reported to have said: “I had rather live but I am not afraid to
die”.

INTRODUCTION
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic increase in
imperial expansion. This contrasts with the earlier period when
colonies had been regarded as an unjustified expense, and formal
political control was seen as an irrelevance when the commercial
benefits could be enjoyed anyway in an epoch of free trade. In 1852,
Benjamin Disraeli had described colonies as 'millstones around our
neck'. Twenty years later, he publicly endorsed a policy of imperial
expansion in the Crystal Palace speech
THE COURSE OF THE NEW IMPERIALISM
The movement towards expansion was associated largely with the
western European maritime nations, but the landward expansion of
the USA and Russia was part of the general pattern. The British
empire was increased in extent by 50 per cent to cover a fifth of the
globe's surface and include 400 million subjects. The French empire
grew from 700,000 to 6 million square miles and from 5 million to 52
million subjects. Germany had a million square miles and 14 million
subjects by 1900. Italy collected 185,000 square miles- although the
soil was 'very light' as Lord Salisbury wryly remarked. On the whole,
the expansion was concentrated in two regions, both largely unsuit
able for white settlement:
(i) Africa. In 1870 a tenth of the continent - mostly coastal
colonies - was under European control. By 1900, only a tenth
was left independent.
(ii) East and south-east Asia. In particular in China and the region
once known generally as Indo-China.

Disraeli

After a period of unprecedented economic development contemporaries

recognized that a new age had emerged by the later i86os. Industrialization
was already locked in a momentum that depended upon ever-widening
markets, yet it was in this decade that Britain first encountered foreign rivals
whose strength and resources constituted a serious challenge to her own
hitherto unquestioned supremacy. Politically the problem was how to reflect
in policies and institutions the alterations already wrought in the social and
economic foundations of the state, a task that called for energy, imagination
and flexibility. Such attributes, though lacking in the Liberal leadership, were
to be found in Disraeli, the moving spirit in the Derby administration which
came to power in mid-i866. Disraeli's contribution in the national crisis was
to take stock of the needs of the day and translate them into acceptable political
actions. His role in the making of the Reform Bill is well known, but his part
in initiating a new phase of imperialism has been obscured, though it took place
at the same time as political reform and was an essential corollary of it.
Empire, war and national expansion gave the decade its distinctive flavour.
Apart from Britain, all the powers of consequence, including the United States,
had fought to enlarge or consolidate their hegemony. Cobden's vision of a
golden age of peace and free trade had vanished by I866. War and nationalism
in Europe were accompanied by the establishment or strengthening of
authoritarian regimes, and even in the United States mass electorates were
beguiled by reports of military exploits and annexations. By the peaceful and
gradual extension of the franchise Britain set herself apart from 'Continental
solutions' to domestic problems. But the idea of enhancing Britain's imperial
status was seized upon by Disraeli in I866 as the obvious, indeed, the only, way
of confirming Britain's position as a great power in a rapidly changing world.
He acted on the belief that the trappings of imperialism might have as wide
an appeal in Britain as they did elsewhere and that such a policy would be
acceptable. In I867 he sensed also that a show of aggression, if free from risk,
would be popular, and that if it were to symbolize a renewal of past imperial
splendour it would serve as a focus for the energies of the whole nation and
provide a foundation for national unity more compelling than any other that
could be devised at the time. The new phase of imperialism he launched was
signalled by the Abyssinian Expedition. Forceful, deliberate and chauvinistic,
it was in such marked contrast to the inertia and hesitancy recently typical
3 See, for example, R. A. Church, The great Victorian boom i85o-i873 (London,
1975).
of attitudes to foreign and imperial affairs that it constituted a decisive break
with the past. It cannot be established that he planned it in precisely these
terms, if at all, but in giving sanction to imperial aggrandizement and in
coupling it with political reform, he was able to set in train the revitalization
of public life and the forward-looking approaches so essential if the first
industrial nation was to harmonize the demands of an expanding industrial
economy with the tradition of liberal political institutions.

The making of the Reform Bill in I 867 was itself part of the general crisis which
gripped the country between I866 and I868. Twenty years of economic
expansion and the absence of large-scale social or political disturbances in
Britain had given rise to political complacency and a negative attitude to
imperial and foreign affairs. By the I 86os the socio-political structure was badly
out of balance with economic realities, producing a situation which demanded
more active policies. Unforeseen dangers from abroad, the severity of the
financial collapse in i866 and the glaring faults in urban society which were
laid bare in its wake produced an extraordinary conjuncture of events.
Cumulative in their impact, all these events had consequences so momentous
that a change of course was obligatory. For this reason, I866-8 may properly
be regarded as constituting a decisive break with the past. Both the government
and the classes had choices of action. The options chosen by the Conservative
government, largely under Disraeli's inspiration, were so much in tune with
what the socio-economic situation demanded that when the crisis had passed
the perils were forgotten. This has been responsible for the belief in a
continuum during the second half of the nineteenth century, a misconception
that is relevant to a review of imperialism. Because the appropriate evidence
has been neglected, it has been taken for granted that Disraeli did not even
adumbrate imperial expansion until I 872 or begin to put his -ideas into practice
until his second ministry,'05 and that Britain did not enter a new phase of
imperial activity until the I88os when external events forced her to do so.106
But the pivot of this discussion has been that he adopted the strategy of
reactivating empire immediately after Sadowa in response to the international
situation, and urged Derby to incorporate this change into national policy.
Once the prospect of some kind of political reform appeared inescapable during
the winter, his strategy was enlarged to include the domestic purpose of class
integration mediated by imperialism. The inauguration of the Imperial Review
in January I867 which for two years accurately reflected his views may be
assumed to have had his approval if not also his prompting. His part in shaping
Stanley's foreign policy, including the launching of the Abyssinian Expedition,
formed another of his tactics which, as always, depended for success upon
shrewd opportunism. The result of this overall strategy was to bring about a
new orientation in imperial and foreign affairs. That this was entirely in
keeping with the basic necessities of Britain's expanding economy and the
Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and social reform
states that even in I872 Disraeli did not specially appreciate the significance of these
references to imperialism. peculiarities of her constitution does not lessen its
importance as a conscious
political decision.
If i866-8 is taken as the starting point of Disraeli's imperialism, it becomes
possible to consider a more general but equally important question about
British imperialism: its causation. The exponents of the 'imperialism of free
trade' school have evaded this issue partly by denying that a break in
continuity occurred'07 and partly by asserting that when in the I88os an
apparently new phase of activity began it was prompted by external events,
and concluding that what happened then was 'imperialism without impulse'.
By its very nature, however, imperialism implies that the motive force must
come from the centre of power, not from the periphery. The view that the
' official mind' was the ultimate controlling influence in Britain's participation
in the 'scramble' ignores the complicated interplay involved in the relationship
between government and society. Official decisions come at the end of a series
of public and private impulses whose origins are simultaneously economic,
social, political and much else besides; officials could not conceivably initiate
such impulses. It may well be that in the i88os there were no 'strong social
impulses towards a new African empire... on the surface of British opinion or
politics'.'08 But there is ample evidence that from i866 to i868 compelling
influences bore upon the British polity, that Disraeli recognized them and used
them, primarily for the sake of domestic peace which was threatened by class
divisions and demands for more authoritarian government, but also to
underpin his strategy for Britain's future role in a competitive world.
That there was no immediate expansion of Britain's imperial possessions in
i868 may be explained by the discovery that Abyssinia was unrewarding in
wealth and strategic value. But the international hazards were also daunting.
Neither France nor Russia could be provoked without grave risk. And it must
be remembered that the institutional changes necessary before greatly increased
responsibilities could be undertaken had not even begun. The Reform Act in
itself accomplished nothing but the widening of the electoral base of parlia-
mentary government, though it was the essential step which allowed institu-
tional reform to take place in succeeding years. Disraeli did what he could
within the limits of power at the time, his essential contribution being to set
Britain on the path of the 'new' imperialism at this critical moment. His
accomplishment in this direction was bound up with his part in the making
of the Reform Bill and ranks in importance with it. His use of imperialism to
preserve the cherished attributes of the liberal society, even in an advanced
stage of industrialization, made it both politically respectable for his party and
desirable for the nation. In consequence Disraeli's imperialism remained a
significant part of national policy for the rest of the century.

Disraeli gained power too late. He aged rapidly during his second ministry. But he
formed a strong cabinet and profited from the friendship of the queen, a political
conservative who disliked Gladstone. Disraeli treated her as a human being, whereas
Gladstone treated her as a political institution.

In regard to social reform, Disraeli was able at last to show that Tory democracy was
more than a slogan. The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act made
effective slum clearance possible. The Public Health Act of 1875 codified the
complicated law on that subject. Equally important were an enlightened series of
factory acts (1874, 1878) preventing the exploitation of labour and two trades union
acts that clarified the legal position of those bodies.

Disraeli’s imperial and foreign policies were even more in the public eye. His first
great success was the acquisition of Suez Canal shares. The extravagant and
spendthrift khedive Ismāʾīl Pasha of Egypt owned slightly less than half the Suez
Canal Company’s shares and was anxious to sell. An English journalist discovered
this fact and told the Foreign Office. Disraeli overrode its recommendation against the
purchase and bought the shares using funds provided by the Rothschild family until
Parliament could confirm the bargain. The deal was seen as a notable triumph for
imperial prestige. Early in 1876 Disraeli brought in a bill conferring on Queen
Victoria the title empress of India. There was much opposition, and Disraeli would
have gladly postponed it, but the queen insisted. For some time his poor health had
made leading the Commons onerous, so he accepted a peerage, taking the titles earl
of Beaconsfield and Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden, and became leader in the
House of Lords.

Foreign policy largely occupied him until 1878. The Russian-Turkish conflict had lain
dormant since the Crimean War in the 1850s, but Christian subjects of the Ottoman
Empire revolted against intolerable misrule. Russia declared war on Turkey in 1877
and reached the gates of Constantinople early in 1878. Britain feared for the safety of
the route to India, but Disraeli correctly judged that a show of force would be enough
to bring the exhausted Russian forces to terms. The highly Pan-Slavist Treaty of
Stefano forced on Turkey by Russia had to be submitted to a European Congress at
Berlin in 1878. Beaconsfield attended and won all concessions he wanted. He
returned to London in triumph, declaring that he had brought back “peace with
honour.”

At this climax of his career, the queen offered him a dukedom, which he refused, and
the Order of the Garter, which he accepted. Thereafter his fortunes waned with
disaster in Afghanistan, forces slaughtered in South Africa, agricultural distress, and
an industrial slump. The Conservatives were heavily defeated in the general election
of 1880. Beaconsfield kept his party leadership and finished Endymion (3 vol., 1880),
a mellow, nostalgic political novel viewing his early career. His health failed rapidly,
and, a few days after his burial in the family vault at Hughenden, Queen Victoria
came to lay a wreath upon the tomb of her favourite prime minister.

Benjamin Disraeli is unique among Victorian novelists in that, outside of specialists

in Victorian literature, he is much better known as a politician and statesman (he was
leader of the Conservative Party, and twice prime minister) than as a novelist.
Historians are as interested in him as are literary critics, if not more so, and
consequently his novels have long been mined for information about Disraeli the
historical figure rather than approached as works of literature and studied in relation
to literary history in the 19th century. His novels have been read with two principal
goals in mind: (1) to better understand the mind of the enigmatic man who wrote
them, and (2) as historical documents that will shed light on Disraeli’s political career
and the policies he advocated. The first of these approaches has tended to produce
biographical readings of the novels, even in a time when biographical approaches to
literature are no longer fashionable. The goal of historians and literary critics alike has
been to peep behind the mask and uncover the real Disraeli. The second approach,
reflecting the turn to history and politics in literary studies, has produced historical
readings that tend to see the novels as more or less reliable reflections of ideas
existing outside the text, either in history or in politics. Viewing the novels as
containers of political ideas, or as reflections of dominant Victorian ideologies, is
particularly prevalent in criticism of Disraeli’s major novels—the Young England
trilogy consisting of Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—which are
widely read either as the manifesto of Young England, a rather loose political
grouping of Tory MPs that Disraeli was widely taken to be the leader of, or as
examples of a sub-genre of the Victorian novel known, variously, as the “condition-
of-England” novel, the social-problem novel, or the industrial novel. When reading
criticism of the novels, then, one needs to be aware that much critical commentary on
them is not written by literary critics—and thus, strictly speaking, is
not literary criticism at all—and is often motivated by non-literary purposes.
Nevertheless, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been a reevaluation of
Disraeli by historians and, to a lesser extent, by literary scholars, focusing on “the role
played in Disraeli’s conception of life and politics by his Jewishness and his
romanticism” (Smith 1996, cited under Biographies). A major new focus of recent
criticism of the novels has been the vexing question of Disraeli’s Jewishness and, to a
lesser extent, Orientalism in his novels. Particularly after the publication of Edward
Said’s influential Orientalism in 1978, there was a renewed interest in the
representation of the East in Disraeli’s fiction, with critics divided over whether (as
Said claimed) Disraeli contributed to the construction of the Orient as “Other,” or
whether he admired Oriental culture and saw his mission as one of reuniting the West
with its Eastern origins.

Because of his distinguished political career, his long career as a novelist (from 1826
to 1880), his enigmatic personality, and his puzzling pronouncements on race and
religion, Disraeli has attracted a large number of biographers. Indeed, the biographical
approach, to both his political career and his fiction, has dominated scholarship and
commentary on him. Biographies tend to be divided between those that see Disraeli as
ambitious, manipulative, and less than principled (Blake 1966 and Ridley 1995) and
those that admire him (Weintraub 1993). Most biographies contain discussions of the
novels, but since his biographers have not been literary scholars, they tend to read the
novels either as historical documents or as revelations of their author’s inner life (or
both), and only rarely as works of literature. Early biographies, such as Meynell
1903 and Monypenny and Buckle 1929, are of limited use for criticism of the novels.
Ridley and Weintraub reflect, respectively, the two prevailing attitudes to Disraeli:
admiring and skeptical. Of the biographies since Blake 1966, Smith 1996 has received
the highest praise and is probably the most balanced. Of the many popular
biographies Bradford 1982 and Hibbert 2004 are probably the best. A note of caution:
biographies published before the Disraeli Project and the University of Toronto Press
began publishing the Letters could not take into account the thousands of letters
uncovered by John P. Matthews and later scholars and need to be supplemented with
later ones.

References :
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-
9780199799558-0135.xml..

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benjamin-Disraeli/Conservative-leader.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-19580-0_15