136. Triumph proves transitory

136. Triumph proves transitory

It had all been going so well. The Congress of Berlin had been a huge success, allowing Disraeli (and Salisbury) to bring back peace with honour. Things should have been flowing the Conservatives’ way.

But then there were a couple of bad military adventures, launched by over-powerful and out-of-control colonial administrators. Both ended up costing a lot of money and a lot of lives, for little gain. One, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, was even launched from India while a famine that eventually cost 8 million lives was raging and relief budgets were being cut to save money, although funds were being poured into waging war.

At the same time, the British economy was doing badly, with a recession and bad harvests.

That all added up to a rather bleaker picture for the Conservatives than their successes might have implied.

This episode also introduces three people we'll be hearing more about later, and who had significant moments in the 1870s (in one case, the moment was birth, a pretty significant event, without which it’s hard for anyone to make a name for themselves).

Illustration: Graveyard at Isandlwana, site of Britain's worst defeat in a colonial war since the American War of Independence. Photo from Zulu Kingdom Travel Guide.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Jaksot(275)

250. Return of the crisis man

250. Return of the crisis man

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249. Who governs Britain?

249. Who governs Britain?

How did Heath end up calling an election on the question of who governed the country? Especially as the choice he seemed to be offering was between him and the minders. This episode traces the impact ...

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248. Withered Heath

248. Withered Heath

Ted Heath’s government had to deal with two problems drawn from Britain’s postimperial standing: • adapting to its loss of global status, by negotiating, at the third time of asking and for the first ...

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247. Hopes dashed

247. Hopes dashed

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246. The sixties, swinging - high and low

246. The sixties, swinging - high and low

According to the English poet Philip Larkin, the sixties saw the invention of sexual intercourse. While that may not be quite the case, it was certainly a time when a lot of people decided that it was...

8 Kesä 202514min

245. Pressures preventing progress

245. Pressures preventing progress

The Wilson government got off to a pretty sticky start, with the new Prime Minister learning, more or less as he arrived at Downing Street in October 1964, that the trade deficit for the year was like...

1 Kesä 202514min

244. Harold gets Home

244. Harold gets Home

Here we’re focusing on the changes that took place in Britain after Supermac (Harold Macmillan) stood down as Prime Minister.A lot of how that went depended on the Opposition formed by the Labour Part...

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243. Sex, spies and a slippery slope

243. Sex, spies and a slippery slope

Last time we looked at the continuing disintegration of the British Empire. In this episode we look at two other key aspects of Macmillan’s foreign policy, Britain’s relations with the US and with pot...

18 Touko 202515min

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