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The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901–14 PDF

223 Pages·1996·22.879 MB·English
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THE EDWARDIAN CRISIS British History in Perspective General Editor: Jeremy Black Eugenio Biagini Gladstone D.G. Boyce The Irish Question and British Politics, 1868-1996 (2nd edn) Keith M. Brown Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603-1715 A.D. Carr Medieval Wales Eveline Cruickshanks The Glorious Revolution Anne Curry The Hundred Year.s War Susan Doran England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century Sean Duffy Ireland in the Middle Ages David Gladstone The Twentieth-Century Welfare State Brian Golding Conquest and Colonisation: the Normans in Britain, 1066-1100 (rev. edn) Sean Greenwood Britain and the Cold War, 1945-91 David Harkness Ireland in the Twentieth Century: Divided Island Ann Hughes The Causes of the English Civil War (2nd edn) I.G.C. Hutchison Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century Ronald Hutton The British Republic, 1649-1660 (2nd edn) T.A. jenkins Disraeli and Victorian Conservatism I.A. jenkins Sir Robert Peel H.S. jones Victorian Political Thought D.E. Kennedy The English Revolution, 1642-7649 john F. McCaffrey Scotland in the Nineteenth Century A.P. Martinich Thomas Hobbes Roger Middleton The British Economy since 7945 W.M.Ormrod Political Life in Medieval England, 7300-7450 Richie Ovendale Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century Ian Packer Lloyd George Keith Perry British Politics and the American Revolution Murray G.H. Pittock Scottish Nationality Murray G.H. Pittock jacobitism A.j. Pollard The War.s of the Roses (2nd edn) David Powell British Politics and the Labour Question, 7868-7990 Richard Rex Henry VIII and the English Reformation G.R. Searle The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 7886-7929 (2nd edn) john Stuart Shaw The Political History of Eighteenth-Century Scotland W.M. Spellman John Locke William Stafford John Stuart Mill Bruce Webster Medieval Scotland Ann Williams Kingship and Govemment in Pre-Conquest England Ian S. Wood Churchill john W. Young Britain and European Unity, 1945-99 (2nd edn) Please note that a sister series, Social History In Perspective, is available covering the key topiCS in social and cultural history. BrItish History In Penpective SerIes Stand,", Order: ISBN 97B-O-333-71356-3· hInIcoVIr/lSBN 978-0-333-69331-5 paperbIck You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty. write to the address below with your name and address. the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution ltd Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RGZ1 6XS. England THE EDWARDIAN CRISIS 1901-14 BRITAIN DAVID POWELL palgrave * © David Powell 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court wn Road, London 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of st. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press ltd). Outside North America ISBN 978-0-333-59543-5 ISBN 978-1-349-24895-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24895-7 Inside North America ISBN 978-0-312-16093-7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library. library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Powell, David, 1956- The Edwardian crisis: Britain 1901-1914/ David Powell. p. cm. -(British history in perspective) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16093-7 1. Great Britain-Politics and government-1901-1910. 2. Great Britain-Politics and government-191Q--1936. I. Title. II. Series. DA570.P69 1996 941.082'3-dc20 96-15375 ClP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Transferred to digital printing 2001 CONTENTS Glossary VI Preface VII Introduction: The Victorian Legacy 1 1 The Social Crisis: Poverty, Social Reform and the State 10 2 The Constitutional Crisis, 1909-11 39 3 Suffragism and Feminism 68 4 The Challenge of Labour 98 5 Ireland and the Crisis of Nationalism 131 Conclusion 163 Appendix 1 Chronology 177 Appendix 2 General Election Results, 1906 and 19lO 180 Notes 181 Further Reading 201 Index 207 v Glossary ASRS Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants BSP British Socialist Party ILP Independent Labour Party LEA Labour Electoral Association LRC Labour Representation Committee MFGB Miners' Federation of Great Britain NUWSS National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies SDF Social Democratic Federation TUC Trades Union Congress UVF Ulster Volunteer Force WSPU Women's Social and Political Union VI PREFACE Seen from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, across what J. B. Priestley described as the 'vast dark chasm' of two world wars, Edwardian Britain evokes contradictory impressions in the mind's eye. One is that of the 'long summer afternoon', the leisurely swansong of an aristocratic society bathed in the afterglow of Victorian splendour. The other is of a time of mounting discord overshadowed by the lowering clouds of ap proaching war. Both of these images are more than usually shaped by the wisdom of hindsight, just as 'Edwardian Britain' (which should, logically, end with the death of Edward VII in 1910) is, in a sense, the retrospective creation of historians who know what happened after 1914 . Yet they remain the starting points from which most studies of the period take their cue, and the idea that the immediate pre-war years constituted some kind of emergency or 'crisis' in British history has been widely discussed. The great French historian, Elie Halevy, wrote about the way in which 'domestic anarchy' had spread in Britain before 1914. This theme was developed with seductive fascination by I the young George Dangerfield, whose book The Strange Death of liberal England was first published in 1935.2 Dangerfield argued that, far from being the quiet haven of social peace affectionately remembered by those wishing to return to pre-war 'normalcy' after 1918, the Edwardian period was itself a time of mounting conflict and instability, in which many of the unsettling post-war changes had their roots and in which British society was suffering VII The Edwardian Crisis from a deep-seated malaise that was symptomatic of a sea-change in the national psyche. The tensions of the pre-war years, with their increasing violence and political extremism, were evidence, he believed, of a loss of respect for the rule of law and for the institutions and conventions of parliamentary government; in short, of a fatal weakening of the spirit of moderation, com promise and social harmony which had been among the distin guishing characteristics (in his view) of the 'liberal England' of the middle and later part of Queen Victoria's reign. Dangerfield's concept of a generalised crisis has generated considerable controversy among historians. Recently there has been a tendency to dismiss his account as impressionistic and misleading.3 There nevertheless remains lively disagreement as to the nature and direction of events in the 'lost world' of pre-1914 Britain, over which the writings of Dangerfield and Halevy continue to cast a long shadow. What the present study sets out to do, therefore, is systematically to re-examine the components of the Dangerfield/Halevy thesis in the light of subsequent research and to attempt a fresh assessment of the severity or otherwise of the 'Edwardian crisis' in relation both to the short-term and the longer term perspectives of British history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In so doing it will not only touch upon specific issues of thematic concern but will also engage a number of broader areas of historical debate. For example, did the First World War accelerate or divert the currents of change in pre-war Britain? Was the Liberal party, which formed the government for most of the Edwardian decade, in any sense in irretrievable decline before 1914, faced as it was with a dual challenge from left and right? Above all, did the surface excitements of the Edwardian years - over constitutional and fiscal reform, women's and workers' rights, Irish Home Rule - signify a deeper crisis of social or political relations, or were they merely passing problems whose coincidence was uncon nected to any single, common cause? The emphasis throughout is on domestic affairs and space precludes any detailed treatment of foreign policy, but in this last respect it might be instructive to make comparisons between what was happening in Britain and the experience of countries like Germany or Russia, where Vlll Preface internal problems of equal or greater seriousness were occurring - problems which may have played their part in influencing the conduct of international relations and thus in precipitating a more profound catastrophe of which, whatever their gravity, the conflicts of 1901-14 were but the forerunners. In writing a book of this kind, I have obviously relied heavily on the research of other historians, which I have done my best to acknowledge in the endnotes and the guide to Further Reading. I am grateful to Jeremy Black, the series editor, for inviting me to undertake the work and to the publishers for their continuing support. My thanks also go to successive generations of students in Ripon and York who have endured my enthusiasms and helped to shape my thinking on the topic. Needless to say, any errors or eccentricities of interpretation are entirely my own. lX

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.