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A case study of the two politicians who came closest to constructing a winning majority for (the white) race and the British Empire: Chamberlain and Powell. Analyses Chamberlain's success over Home Rule for Ireland and his failure over protection. Discusses how close Powell came to overthrowing British politics at the peak of his career. Establishes that he won the 1970 general election for the Conservatives and probably won the February 1974 general election for Labour.

The events of 1897–8 had revealed growing opposition to Salisbury's policy within the Cabinet. This chapter re-examines the clandestine efforts by a group of ministers, led by colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, to prepare the way for an Anglo-German alliance. Based on new material, it demonstrates that Chamberlain's talks with the German diplomats Eckardstein and Hatzfeldt had the support of an influential section within the Conservative Party, and can no longer be written off as meaningless amateur dramatics. Even so, Chamberlain overreached himself, and his alternative imperial and foreign policy strategy remained abortive. Reasserting his influence over foreign policy, Salisbury concluded a more limited agreement with Russia: the Scott–Muravev agreement. Ostensibly on railway concessions, it effectively recognized British and Russian spheres of influence in Northern China. This agreement helped to stabilize the politics of the Far East.

Events of 1898 made abundantly clear what had already been on the cards for some time for Britain: that it should either take steps to shore up its weaker colonies in the West Indies or risk losing them to the United States or France. When the pro-imperialist Joseph Chamberlain took over the Colonial Office in 1895, Dominica was set to become a test case for the ‘new imperialism’, with Henry Hesketh Bell as Chamberlain's instrument. The effects of all this on the situation of the Caribs would turn out to be surprisingly far-reaching, and Bell himself, as well as wielding considerable influence as the island's Administrator, was also a voluminous writer about the Caribs. However, this period also saw the beginnings of the long process of contact between the Caribs and the majority Dominican population, especially its political class, responsible for slowly forging the nationalist ethos that would inherit the island after independence.

This chapter consists of two parts. The first surveys the meanings and implications of liberty for Victorian radicals, and explores the relationship between popular and intellectual radicalism. The second examines some of the internal tensions and inconsistencies in late-Victorian radicalism, focusing on Joseph Chamberlain's response to imperial emergencies in Africa and Ireland. These highlighted questions would continue to confront radicals in the 20th century: in international affairs, the tension between the rhetoric of peace and international law and the practice of unilateralism; in domestic politics, the tension between parliamentary centralism and the claims of national separatism.

This chapter investigates the popular memory of ‘overseas’ for English people and suggests that evokes the history of the so-called white colonies which came into being in the late 19th century. It discusses the place of colonial emigration (from England to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and southern Africa), suggesting that this has formed a crucial means by which the colonies and the metropole come to be connected. The experience of arriving in a new ‘white’ colony was formative in the making of what is termed here a wider ethnic populism. The chapter analyzes the ideological making of this populism in the work of such figures as JA Froude, JR Seeley, and Charles Dilke, before going on to look at how these ideas entered the state through such figures as Lord Milner and Joseph Chamberlain.

Scholars have often referred to the Edwardian years as witnessing a crisis of conservatism. Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign has been blamed for causing chronic divisions within constituency organisations. This chapter explores the cultural reasons behind the rapid development of the grassroots tariff reform movement during the early years of the twentieth century. The development of the tariff reform campaign reflected a widespread desire amongst Unionists to shape a new ethos of activism better suited to dealing with the challenges of democratic politics. Chamberlain’s supporters sought to forge a genuinely Unionist identity combining the Liberal Unionists’ concern to promote political education with the Conservatives’ focus on developing a popular social culture.

This chapter is concerned with labour's response to the rise of the Liberal party machine, which became pejoratively known as the ‘caucus’. The first part examines the impact of the National Liberal Federation on labour's prospects of returning working-class men to Parliament, and analyses the labour movement's intellectual response to the caucus. The contemporary debate regarding this new kind of party organisation is considered, particularly whether the formation of the National Liberal Federation heralded the beginning of the ‘Americanisation’ of British politics. The views of Joseph Chamberlain and Joseph Cowen are considered. The next part of the chapter examines the travel writings of working-class radicals who journeyed to the United States and recorded their assessment of the American caucus, and examines the lessons that could be drawn from them by the labour movement. Using case studies of contests in Sheffield and Newcastle at the 1885 general election, the final part of the chapter explores the different ways in which labour candidates used the language of the caucus, with its rhetoric of ‘dictation’ and ‘tyranny’, to not only express their frustrations at intransigent Liberal associations, but also articulate labour's demand for the right to nominate their own candidate for a parliamentary election.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Africa has offered opportunities for idealisation in the history of British engagement with the continent. First, it looks at the ways in which British involvement in West Africa has been described, as a backdrop to ideas about Britain's role of ‘doing good’ in Africa. It then considers two key movements and streams of thinking about Britain in Africa: the abolition movement in the early nineteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century colonial expansion into West Africa under Joseph Chamberlain. Finally, the chapter looks at how these two periods in history, and the ideas that guided them, fed via different streams into the Labour Party, causing internal tension over the issue of colonial possession, and ultimately becoming fused into one glorious idealisation of Africa and British history and policy there. It was this fused idealisation that informed the Party's approach to Africa under Tony Blair. The chapter also discusses the ideas of William Wilberforce, Joseph Chamberlain, Frederick Lugard, Leonard Woolf, and Fenner Brockway.

After 1867 the Reform settlement was modified further by electoral legislation, the 1872 Ballot Act ending public voting, while national political parties exerted greater control in constituencies. The Conservative Central Office, National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, and Liberal Central Association carried this process forward. The titanic clash between Gladstone and Disraeli symbolized confrontation between the Liberal and Conservative parties. The duration of governments became aligned with general elections. Tighter discipline was established over Commons voting of MPs. By the 1880s parliamentary parties were expected to speak and vote as a bloc. Westminster’s function in passing ministerial legislation came to the fore. The careers of Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill illustrated opportunities for ambitious politicians to exploit extra-parliamentary organization in applying pressure on party leaderships. Programme politics became adopted. So ‘parliamentary government’ gave way to a national party system in which sovereignty became vested in electoral opinion.

This chapter explores how Mary Kingsley believed the British merchants and traders in West Africa were better placed than missionaries or colonial officials to understand West African beliefs, laws and social practices; she supported the liquor trade. It looks at her two major books, Travels in West Africa and West African Studies, analyzing Kingsley’s literary style and the challenges her observations and arguments posed to the British colonial authorities and the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. In this chapter we see the emergence of Kingsley as a political campaigner for the rights of Africans, as she campaigns against the Hut Tax that was imposed on the people of Sierra Leone in 1898. The South African War offered her an excuse to leave England and return to the Africa she loved.

Dissenters in the long nineteenth century believed that they were on the right side of history. This chapter argues that the involvement of evangelical Nonconformists in politics was primarily driven by a coherent worldview derived from a Congregationalist understanding of salvation and the gathered nature of the church. That favoured a preference for voluntarism and a commitment to religious equality for all. Although Whig governments responded to the rising electoral clout of Dissenters after 1832 by meeting Dissenting grievances, both they and the Conservatives retained an Erastian approach to church–state relations. This led to tension with both those Dissenters who favoured full separation between church and state, and with Evangelical Churchmen in Scotland, who affirmed the principle of an Established Church, but refused government interference in ministerial appointments. In 1843 this issue resulted in the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of a large Dissenting body north of the border, the Free Church. Dissenting militancy after mid-century was fostered by the numerical rise of Dissent, especially in cities, the foundation of influential liberal papers often edited by Dissenters such as Edward Miall, and the rise of municipal reforming movements in the Midlands headed by figures such as Joseph Chamberlain. Industrialization also boosted Dissenting political capacity by encouraging both employer paternalism and trades unionism, whose leaders and rank and file were Nonconformists. Ireland constituted an exception to this pattern. The rise of sectarianism owed less to Irish peculiarities than to the presence and concentration of a large Catholic population, such as also fostered anti-Catholicism in Britain, in for instance Lancashire. The politics of the Ultramontane Catholic Church combined with the experience of agrarian violence and sectarian strife to dispose Irish Protestant Dissenters against Home Rule. The 1906 election was the apogee of Dissent’s political power, installing a Presbyterian Prime Minister in Campbell-Bannerman who would give way in due course to the Congregationalist H.H. Asquith, but also ushering in conflicts over Ireland. Under Gladstone, the Liberal party and its Nonconformist supporters had been identified with the championship of oppressed nationalities. Even though Chamberlain and other leading Dissenting liberals such as Isabella Tod resisted the extension of that approach to Ireland after 1886, preferring local government reform to Home Rule, most Dissenting voters had remained loyal to Gladstone. Thanks to succeeding Unionist governments’ aggressive foreign policy, embrace of tariff reform, and 1902 Education Act, Dissenting voters had been keen to return to a Liberal government in 1906. That government’s collision with the House of Lords and loss of seats in the two elections of 1910 made it reliant on the Irish National Party and provoked the introduction in 1912 of a third Home Rule Bill. The paramilitary resistance of Ulster Dissenters to the Bill was far from unanimous but nonetheless drove a wedge between British Nonconformists who had concluded that religion was a private matter and would do business with Irish Constitutional Nationalists and Ulster Nonconformists, who had adopted what looked like a bigoted insistence that religion was a public affair and that the Union was their only preservative against ‘Rome Rule’. The declaration of war in 1914 and the consequent suspension of the election due in 1915 means it is impossible to know how Nonconformists might have dealt with this crisis. It was the end of an era.

This essay concerns the use of advance notes to recruit seamen for long distance voyages during the age of sail, how it both shaped market behaviour and came under scrutiny by maritime reformers of the latter half of the century. Williams examines the exploitation of seamen that accompanied tbhe practice, the inability of owners to recruit seamen without the advance note, and details the efforts of reformers to abolish the notes - which succeeded in 1881 but was largely ignored by seamen and shipowners alike, and so advance notes were re-legalised in 1889. Williams then charts the true disappearance of the advance note, as they became obsolete once the age of sail shifted into the age of steam and the market shifted to accommodate new technology, fundamentally altering the role of the seafarer.

Chapter 1 considers how the idea of using referendums came onto the political agenda, and how on a number of occasions its imminent entry into use seemed plausible but did not take place. Important figures such as Albert Venn Dicey, Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Herbert Henry Asquith, and Winston Churchill played a part in events. Even without being held, the prospect of referendums had an impact on British political thought, words, and actions. There was also practical use of the device: at local level, and as part of external initiatives in which Britain played a part. The referendum could come to the forefront of political attention, recede and then return to it again. Though the extent of its prominence varied, once it appeared on the political landscape the referendum was, in some form, a continual presence.

This short conclusion sums up section three, returning to Birmingham to explore the foundation of the first unitary civic university. It notes the questions that still remained about its function and its form, but also draws attention to the growing confidence of an increasing number of Redbrick institutions.

Unitarianism and Presbyterian Dissent had a complex relationship in the nineteenth century. Neither English Unitarians nor their Presbyterian cousins grew much if at all in the nineteenth century, but elsewhere in the United Kingdom the picture was different. While Unitarians failed to prosper, Presbyterian Dissenting numbers held up in Wales and Ireland and increased in Scotland thanks to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. Unitarians were never sure whether they would benefit from demarcating themselves from Presbyterians as a denomination. Though they formed the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, its critics preferred to style themselves ‘English Presbyterians’ and Presbyterian identities could be just as confused. In later nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland, splinter Presbyterian churches eventually came together; in England, it took time before Presbyterians disentangled themselves from Scots to call themselves the Presbyterian Church of England. While Unitarians were tepid about foreign missions, preferring to seek allies in other confessions and religions rather than converts, Presbyterians eagerly spread their church structures in India and China and also felt called to convert Jews. Missions offered Presbyterian women a route to ministry which might otherwise have been denied them. Unitarians liked to think that what was distinctive in their theology was championship of a purified Bible, even though other Christians attacked them as a heterodox bunch of sceptics. Yet their openness to the German higher criticism of the New Testament caused them problems. Some Unitarians exposed to it, such as James Martineau, drifted into reverent scepticism about the historical Jesus, but they were checkmated by inveterate conservatives such as Robert Spears. Presbyterians saw their adherence to the Westminster Confession as a preservative against such disputes, yet the Confession was increasingly interpreted in ways that left latitude for higher criticism. Unitarians started the nineteenth century as radical subversives of a Trinitarian and Tory establishment and were also political leaders of Dissent. They forfeited that leadership over time, but also developed a sophisticated, interventionist attitude to the state, with leaders such as H.W. Crosskey and Joseph Chamberlain championing municipal socialism, while William Shaen and others were staunch defenders of women’s rights and advocates of female emancipation. Their covenanting roots meant that many Presbyterians were at best ‘quasi-Dissenters’, who were slower to embrace religious voluntaryism than many other evangelical Dissenters. Both Unitarians and Presbyterians anguished about how to reconcile industrial, urban capital with the gospel. Wealthy Unitarians from William Roscoe to Henry Tate invested heavily in art galleries and mechanics institutes for the people but were disappointed by the results. By the later nineteenth century they turned to more direct forms of social reform, such as domestic missions and temperance. Scottish Presbyterians also realized the importance of remoulding the urban fabric, with James Begg urging the need to tackle poor housing. Yet neither these initiatives nor the countervailing embrace of revivalism banished fears that Presbyterians were losing their grip on urban Britain. Only in Ireland, where Home Rule partially united the Protestant community in fears for its survival, did divisions of space and class seem a less pressing concern.

Brexiteers’ historical and nostalgic elucubrations coincide with a concrete, albeit utopian, political project: that of Global Britain. Bringing this to fruition entails rekindling old friendships in the Commonwealth, rediscovering the special relationship with America, and intensifying links with Asian economies. This chapter shows how the debate concerning Great Britain’s global role is nothing more than the culmination of an intellectual dispute that has lasted for more than 150 years—since the late Victorian era when the British Empire’s global pre-eminence was slipping as a result of combined internal and external fractures. It all started in 1873 at the Oxford Union, with a debate on how to reorganize and modernize Pax Britannica. Since then, plans have differed in detail, but they have all sought to unite the Anglosphere behind a common purpose. Some have called for the creation of a British imperial federation or a multi-national commonwealth, while others would have liked to see a more formalized Atlantic Union, or even a new Anglo-American state. Hardcore Brexiteers simply continued this project. All the institutional arrangements proposed over the years were intrinsically nostalgic and utopian. They attempted to creatively preserve a past that was falling apart by promoting Britain’s political and economic interests to the detriment of increasingly more assertive colonies. Unsurprisingly, none of these proposals has ever amounted to anything. Nostalgia, which tends to oversimplify reality, hardly makes for enlightened politics and effective policies.