Urban Elites, 1850–1914: The Rule and Decline of a New Squirearchy?

Abstract

In recent decades, several historians, including myself, have argued that many nineteenth-century British urban elites were akin to a sort of new squirearchy. The intention of this article is to explore how far this idea enables us to better understand the role, power, and style of urban leadership, and the political, social, and economic context in which it existed. Given that the termination point is 1914, it also examines how much the notion has to say about political change in the rapidly expanding urban context after around 1850. The notion of a “new squirearchy” implies two things about nineteenth-century local leadership and the nature of its power: first, that urban elites aped and importantly resembled their rural “old” squirearchical counterparts in both substance and style; second, in so doing, such elites were calling up (whether intentionally or not) rural patterns of behavior to try to resolve problems of order, authority, legitimacy, and power in a situation where they did not naturally have easy and economical access to the means of producing any of these things. With this in mind, and after some preliminary clarification of terminology, the article will divide into three broad sections. In the first, it explores the utility of the squirearchical model to understanding the character and power of urban elites in the period up to around 1880 when local leadership in many industrial towns seemed most generously endowed with attributes to which the model might apply. The not very astonishing conclusion will be that the model is helpful in some ways, less so in others, all of which stem from the urban and industrial context in which leaders were operating. The second section will focus on the years up to around 1918 when “men (and women) of property and station” were withdrawing from active participation in the urban and industrial scene. Here, the argument will be that, at least in those northern towns under particular scrutiny, elements of the “new squirearchical” style proved remarkably resilient in spite of the withdrawal of many of those who practiced it—and may well have much to say about how the transition from one sort of leadership to another was managed, or at least took place. The final section will be concerned with the consequences of withdrawal for the power of urban leaders who remained. It will suggest that, just as property and station was no more than a partial predictor of power in the period when it was most abundantly in evidence, so its decline after 1880 was only one among many factors explaining what happened to the ability of local leaders to achieve intended effects. In fact, for various reasons, again heavily connected with the urban context in which leadership was exercised, the power at least of local political leaders in important respects increased.

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