In his day, "Josh" Wedgwood was one of Britain's best-known and most outspoken Radical politicians. He served in three wars, and, in a Parliamentary career lasting from 1906 to 1943, first with the Liberals, and then with Labour, he fought to uphold personal liberty and to limit the power of the state. Instead of the collectivism of socialists or social imperialists, Wedgwood advocated a Radical vision of Victorian Individualism as the solution to the problems of social inequality at home and growing threats abroad that Britain faced in the first half of the twentieth century. His support of individual freedom, a redistribution of landowner's wealth, and a voluntary and democratic British Empire received only limited support in his own lifetime, but he fought for them with vigour and passion throughout his career. This study of his life throws new light upon some of the defining ideological and policy issues of the most turbulent period of modern British history. Paul Mulvey teaches at the London School of Economics.
The Words of Winston Churchill, a study that ranges over the course of a rich, controversial and remarkable career, is about the power and art of his language as a writer and speaker. Churchill used words as the greatest of poets and orators do, and did so in Parliament and for the people, Britain and the empire, in war and peace, facing the changes in the world, and resisting Hitler and the Nazis. Drawing on the traditions of poetics, rhetoric and textual commentary, the study concentrates on Churchill’s writing and is sensitive to texts and contexts and to the archive. A central matter is Churchill speaking in Parliament and the reception of his speeches there for over six decades, although his work as a writer and a speaker outside the House of Commons is also important. Churchill speaks to the House, the people, Britain, the Empire, the Commonwealth and the world and, in crisis, defends freedom and democracy.
This book explores the work and legacy of Professor David Cesarani OBE, a leading British scholar and expert on Jewish history who helped to shape Holocaust research, remembrance and education in the UK. It is a unique combination of chapters produced by researchers, curators and commemoration activists who either worked with and/or were taught by the late Cesarani. The chapters in this collection consider the legacies of Cesarani’s contribution to the discipline of history and the practice of public history. The contributors offer reflections on Cesarani’s approach and provide new insights into the study of Anglo-Jewish history, immigrants and minorities and the history and public legacies of the Holocaust.
A biography of the historian and public intellectual Sir Lewis Namier from his origins in a secular Jewish family in Poland to recognition as the most important historian of his day, whose ‘revolutionary’ method was enshrined in the verb to Namierise.
Nazism remains an enigma. Historians do not know whether to slot Nazism as a phenomenon of the political “right” or “left,” largely because of a misunderstanding of how central eugenics was to the regime. Eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” was at the core of National Socialism’s domestic policy, foreign policy, culture wars, and even Hitler’s obsession with cars, highways, and city planning. Thus, no coherent understanding of the regime is possible without first grasping the nature of eugenics. Eugenics did not originate with Nazi Germany. It was the culmination of a worldwide movement that was widely accepted by the global scientific and academic community. This book traces the origins of the Nazi eugenics state, working backward down the timeline, tracing from leaf down to the root. We investigate this 100-year trajectory from its beginnings in British and American Academia, delving into the conveniently forgotten inner-workings of a scientific era, uncovering previously unpublished manuscripts, professional correspondence, and conveniently forgotten publications. With the centenary of The Holocaust looming, uprooting the web of professional connections that engendered this movement is in order. The seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims of justice, or rob the living of a future. www.RaceOfMasters.com NOTE: A preliminary version of this book was circulated amongst academic circles and other interested parties as an Advanced Readers Copy (A.R.C.) in 2015. This version is a part the Eugenics Anthology seven-book series that is currently being completed by A.E. Samaan. Hardbound versions of the books will not be released until the series is complete, and all the puzzle pieces in place. For more information, please visit EugenicsAnthology.com
"A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war." Remarkably, this same economic order is now under assault from the country most involved in its creation: the United States. A global economic nationalist resurgence - heralded by Donald Trump's "America First" protectionism and resultant trade wars with the USA's closest allies and trading partners - now looks to transform over seventy years of regional and global market integration into an illiberal economic order resembling that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Economic cosmopolitan critics of today's retreat from free trade have offered dire warnings that doing so would be catastrophic for global consumers and an existential threat to regional and world peace. But under what circumstances did this ideological marriage of free trade, prosperity, and peace arise? Who were its main adherents? How did this same free-trade ideology succeed in becoming the new economic orthodoxy following the Second World War? And how might the successes and failures of this earlier struggle to reform the economic order inform today's globalization crisis? In Pax Economica, economic historian Marc-William Palen finds answers amid a century of transnational peace and anti-imperial activism that stretched from Britain's unilateral adoption of free trade in 1846 to the founding of the US-led liberal trading system that arose immediately after the Second World War. Over five thematic chapters, considering the period from different perspectives, and utilising archival research conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia, Palen shows that this politico-ideological struggle to create a more prosperous and peaceful world through free trade pitted economic cosmopolitans against economic nationalists. Cosmopolitans sought to counter the industrialising world's embrace of economic nationalism because they believed - much like today's critics of Trump's tariffs and Brexit - that economic nationalism laid the groundwork for trade wars, high prices for consumers, and geopolitical conflict; while free trade created market interdependence, prosperity, social justice, and a more peaceful world. Pax Economica argues that this cosmopolitan fight for free trade laid foundations for a century of anti-imperial and peace activism across the globe - and paved the way for today's global trade regime now under siege"--
Jack Pease was at the heart of the British Liberal government from 1908 to 1915, holding the position of Chief Whip through two general elections, and a member of the Cabinet confronting domestic tumult, international tensions, and war. Pease was an unassuming participant in the deliberations of a unique gathering of political talent. His journals as President of the Board of Education from 1911 to the formation of the coalition ministry in 1915 are a closely observed, unvarnished record of what he saw and heard in Downing St and Westminster: constitutional and Home Rule crises, industrial conflict, electoral reform, women's suffrage controversies, struggles over budgets, naval estimates, and foreign policy. Despite his Quaker beliefs, Pease committed to supporting war against Germany, and his troubled conscience is laid bare in letters to his wife and friends. Replete with intimate portraits of his revered chief H. H. Asquith and the Prime Minister's social circle, the journals also provide evocative observations of the contest of ideas, arguments, and moods of prominent contemporaries, especially David Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill as Home Secretary then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Pease's candid accounts, augmented by the diaries and letters of others privy to Cabinet policy secrets and personal rivalries, reveal the stories not told in the Prime Minister's reports to the King. Together with the editors' biographical introduction, extensive explanatory commentaries, and bibliographical guidance, Pease's text provides a uniquely comprehensive understanding of Asquith's Liberal government in peace and war.
This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.
Much has been published about how Britain's ruling circle came to its decision for war in 1914 but little about what rank and file Members of Parliament thought and did as the continental 'Armageddon' drew closer. Fatal Fortnight tells the story of Arthur Ponsonby, and his backbench Liberal Foreign Affairs Committee. The book describes the suspense around Parliament as the skies darkened. It tells how, after the Foreign Secretary made his proposal that Britain should go in, Ponsonby's friend Philip Morrell stood up and called for a general debate, in the teeth of the fury of those who wanted Britain to get straight into the war. It describes how the neutralists, led by Ponsonby, made their passionate case in the fateful hours as Britain hung between peace and war.The book looks at the concealment from Parliament of the military understanding with France, and the issues of war and democracy which are still with us today. It re-examines the arguments and reflects on how the world might have been had the 1914 decision gone a different way.Alongside the political drama a human story emerges of how family support for Ponsonby and his allies sustained them as the world closed in.
After 13 years in power, Labour suddenly returned to being the party of opposition in 2010. This new edition of A History of the British Labour Party brings us up-to-date, examining Gordon Brown's period in office and the Labour Party under the leadership of Ed Miliband. Andrew Thorpe's study has been the leading single-volume text on the Labour Party since its first edition in 1997 and has now been thoroughly revised throughout to include new approaches. This new edition: - Covers the entirety of the party's history, from 1900 to 2014. - Examines the reasons for the party's formation, and its aims. - Analyses the party's successes and failures, including its rise to second party status and remarkable recovery from its problems in the 1980s. - Discusses the main events and personalities of the Labour Party, such as MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Brown. With his approachable style and authoritative manner, Thorpe has created essential reading for students of political history, and anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the history and development of one of Britain's major political parties.
