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The manner in which the war came to an end had very important consequences both for the future of Anglo‐American relations and for the impact which the loss of America would have on Britain and its empire. After the loss of an army at Yorktown, British political opinion was no longer supported a war to conquer America. This did not, however, mean that the war as a whole was thought to have ended in total defeat. In fighting against other European powers Britain had begun to hold her own, while America appeared to be in a parlous state close to disintegration. Generous concessions made to the Americans in the peace were therefore widely resented and in retrospect the war came to be seen as much as a triumph of British endurance as a disaster calling for sweeping reforms at home and in the rest of the empire.

London was outraged by Mussolini's bombardment and occupation of Corfu following the murder of the Italian president of the commission delimiting the Graeco‐Albanian border. Curzon and the Foreign Office were particularly concerned to back the League and reaffirm the principles of decent international conduct. Cecil at Geneva was more concerned to work with the French in finding a diplomatic solution. He largely devised the procedure whereby the Allied Conference of Ambassadors took responsibility for the outcome. Although criticized by the press barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook and by Lloyd George, London's support for the League was clearly popular, even if the result appeared disappointing. As a moderate compared to Curzon in this crisis, Cecil could not use the League as an issue against his colleagues. He became politically marginalized, while the 1923 election made support for Geneva essential for all major British statesmen.

As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.

This chapter describes the three phases of the war as experienced by the British cotton trade. The first phase (November 1860 to end June 1862) was characterised by a complacency in the trade, which expected neither a civil war nor a cotton scarcity. The Confederacy’s King Cotton strategy and its failure are examined, as well as British public opinion and British government policy. During the second phase (July 1862 to end August 1864), the full scale of the catastrophe was belatedly recognised and prices soared. Cotton speculation in the Liverpool market became endemic. A price collapse in September 1864 marked the end of the phase. Thereafter, confusion was widespread and prices oscillated violently, as did speculation. This third phase arguably lasted until 1876. The chapter concludes that the civil war period in Liverpool can best be seen as an extended series of bets on whether a war would start and how long it would last.

I explain how the BSS was reorganised on the basis of the League of Friendship in a complex diplomatic context. I study how Franco’s regime attempted to control the League through the Spanish Embassy in London. I also explore how the League launched a propaganda campaign to change the British public’s negative perception of Franco’s Spain.