The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918
This book examines the intrusion of imperialist modes of thought into the domestic politics of the Edwardian period and the war years. The author analyzes the fusion of social-imperialist ideology with the Lloyd George insurgency in the Liberal Party and reinforces the hypothesis that European imperialism in this era aligned itself with progressive Liberalism to form the chief defense against rising democratic and socialist forces. Major events of the war years such as the collapse of the Liberal Party and the dispute over war aims are shown to be the products of the continuing conflict between these forces rather than merely the result of the circumstances of war.

The author describes the development of the body of social-imperialist ideas and strategies between the Boer War and the formation of the Lloyd George Coalition of 1916. The political course of the Coalition idea is traced past the crisis of 1910 into the war years and the debate over plans for reconstruction. Thus, the Coalition of 1916 is seen mainly as an outgrowth of the prewar political crisis—a device originally designed as a response to domestic issues and adapted only later to the pressures of war. This original interpretation of the Coalition and its origins establishes the historical significance of social imperialism and places Lloyd George and the British right in new perspective.

Originally published in 1975.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918
This book examines the intrusion of imperialist modes of thought into the domestic politics of the Edwardian period and the war years. The author analyzes the fusion of social-imperialist ideology with the Lloyd George insurgency in the Liberal Party and reinforces the hypothesis that European imperialism in this era aligned itself with progressive Liberalism to form the chief defense against rising democratic and socialist forces. Major events of the war years such as the collapse of the Liberal Party and the dispute over war aims are shown to be the products of the continuing conflict between these forces rather than merely the result of the circumstances of war.

The author describes the development of the body of social-imperialist ideas and strategies between the Boer War and the formation of the Lloyd George Coalition of 1916. The political course of the Coalition idea is traced past the crisis of 1910 into the war years and the debate over plans for reconstruction. Thus, the Coalition of 1916 is seen mainly as an outgrowth of the prewar political crisis—a device originally designed as a response to domestic issues and adapted only later to the pressures of war. This original interpretation of the Coalition and its origins establishes the historical significance of social imperialism and places Lloyd George and the British right in new perspective.

Originally published in 1975.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918

The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918

by Robert James Scally
The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918

The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918

by Robert James Scally

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Overview

This book examines the intrusion of imperialist modes of thought into the domestic politics of the Edwardian period and the war years. The author analyzes the fusion of social-imperialist ideology with the Lloyd George insurgency in the Liberal Party and reinforces the hypothesis that European imperialism in this era aligned itself with progressive Liberalism to form the chief defense against rising democratic and socialist forces. Major events of the war years such as the collapse of the Liberal Party and the dispute over war aims are shown to be the products of the continuing conflict between these forces rather than merely the result of the circumstances of war.

The author describes the development of the body of social-imperialist ideas and strategies between the Boer War and the formation of the Lloyd George Coalition of 1916. The political course of the Coalition idea is traced past the crisis of 1910 into the war years and the debate over plans for reconstruction. Thus, the Coalition of 1916 is seen mainly as an outgrowth of the prewar political crisis—a device originally designed as a response to domestic issues and adapted only later to the pressures of war. This original interpretation of the Coalition and its origins establishes the historical significance of social imperialism and places Lloyd George and the British right in new perspective.

Originally published in 1975.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691617763
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 03/08/2015
Series: Princeton Legacy Library , #1619
Pages: 430
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.30(d)

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The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition

The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900-1918


By Robert James Scally

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07570-9



CHAPTER 1

Liberal-Imperialism


The Rosebery Revolt

"People talk much of the decay of Liberalism," Leonard Trevelyan Hobhouse mourned in 1904. By that date the once triumphant party of Gladstone had been denied office, but for the futile interlude of 1892-1895, for nearly twenty years. Gloomier still for the heirs of Gladstone was the fact that with the debacle over the war in South Africa the party had lost even the solace of unity in opposition. The influential imperialist minority led by the former Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery, disdained association with either the Radical "pro-Boer" or the moderate critics of the war, invoking as justification the higher loyalty to patriotism and the empire as above parties.

The title "Liberal-Imperialist," which distinguished those Liberal Members of Parliament who supported the government's policy in South Africa in 1899, had been revived by Rosebery from a term coined fifteen years earlier. As a student at Christ Church and in his first years as a Liberal M.P., Rosebery had attached himself to the imperialist spirit when it was still expansive, when empire and emigration seemed to possess the sanction not only of the economic interests of all classes and of national vitality but even of Christian philanthropy. The word had not yet acquired its pejorative usage. Rosebery described himself as "a Liberal who believes that the Empire is best maintained on the basis of the widest democracy." Liberal-Imperialism thus shared much in principle with other "parties above parties," such as the Primrose League, which sought, by identifying imperial aspirations with the patriotism and welfare of the masses, to draw on the strength of nationalism for the empire.

J. A. Hobson was among the first at the time to mark the tendency of nationalism and imperialism to mingle, but he noted also the inherent antagonism of the two forces. This contradiction became fully manifest during the Boer conflict. The European nation state, as has of ten been remarked, is not the best foundation on which to build an empire. The consent and cultural solidarity at the root of its law is not readily expanded, as was Roman law, to assimilate subject peoples without lethal danger to its constitution, particularly if that constitution is democratic. As George Orwell learned as a member of the Burmese police, when the white man turns tyrant over subject races it is his own freedom that he destroys — "He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it."

The inherent and ominous flaw in Rosebery's "Empire ... maintained on the basis of the widest democracy" would not become fully visible until the process of imperial expansion gave way to the problem of assimilation. While the war in South Africa lasted, the imperialists spoke as of old and succeeded in gathering wide patriotic support. But a fundamental change of principle had taken place. The policy of Chamberlain and Milner in the Cape was not primarily expansive but defensive. Moreover, as orthodox Liberals, Radicals, and Socialists were quick to point out, it could no longer be portrayed as a defense of the interests of all classes in the nation at home-not while the Colonial Office and the governor in the Cape were widely pictured as no more than willing instruments of the Rand mine owners and City financiers. Radical accusations on this score were persistent and unrestrained as the war dragged on, with Lloyd George's infuriating eloquence intoning the lead.

The necessity of answering Radical charges pressed most heavily on just those imperialists of both parties who had all along held the empire above class and party as a kind of transcendent interest cementing domestic unity. They had also to salvage somehow the popular glitter, or at least the innocuousness, of the word "imperialism" itself as its connotation became increasingly tainted in African intrigues and scandals. Political idealism, high-mindedness, selfless and ennobling service, patriotism, and the democratic impulse of English Liberalism were the virtues upon which the imperialist catechism drew, the ethos which had sustained that class of men who filled the civil services and parliamentary seats since the Reform Bill. The pro-Boer slings thus appeared to assault not merely a policy but a whole political culture. Faced with the dismaying revelations of the war — incompetence, self-interest, and concentration camps — and the increasingly strident criticism of the Left, new avenues to popular support and new ideological justifications were sought by an important segment of the more dynamic and generally younger imperialists of both parties. Rosebery's Liberal League on the one side and, later, Joseph Chamberlain's Tariff Reform League on the other, first sought to find such a departure through the doctrine of Social-Imperialism. They were, as Lenin noted as early as 1916, the "leading bourgeois politicians" who first comprehended the connection between the purely economic and the "social-political roots" of modern imperialism.

The attempt to recast the image and ideology of imperialism was carried on within the Liberal and Unionist parties by factions which were not in control of the official party machinery but strongly aspired to be. Consequently, in the internal fractures which distracted both parties between the Boer War and the Liberal victory of 1905, there was also an element of the prosaic wrangle for leadership and office in the campaigns waged by the leagues. It was particularly true on the Liberal side during the war, for there the conflict was greatly exacerbated by the personal rancors existing between imperialist and Radical leaders, the growing importance of the Labour-Socialist wing, and the presence of an eloquent former Prime Minister at the head of the disaffected.

Rosebery had returned from a political retirement which had been forced upon him by Lord Harcourt and the National Liberal Federation in order to support the Unionist government's policy at Fashoda in 1898. On that occasion, and in the Boer crisis which arose a year later, he was able to draw heavily from the Liberal ranks in support of the imperial position, coming quite close (shortly before the "Khaki Election" of 1900) to winning over a majority of the party. The first formal split in the Liberal Party in Parliament occurred shortly thereafter, in July 1900, over a proposed censure of the Unionist government. Sir Wilfred Lawson, who put the motion, was supported by thirty-one pro-Boers, while Sir Edward Grey, leading the Liberal-Imperialists in the House together with Herbert Asquith and Richard Burton Haldane, drew off forty Liberal members into the government lobby to defeat the measure. The moderate and undecided bulk of Liberal M.P.'s (106) abstained, anxious to forestall a final split.

The favorable division on the Lawson resolution encouraged the more sanguine of Rosebery's supporters to attempt unseating the Liberal Party leadership on the war issue. Haldane, a devoted admirer and always the most forward of the group, tried to persuade Rosebery to this course at once:

... if you choose to emerge [he wrote] and lead those Liberals who may be called 'Lord R.'s friends' with Asquith and Grey as lieutenants in the House I think this will work out. ... We have the machinery and the Whigs and the future, and this means that we grow and become the party.


Although Haldane greatly exaggerated their prospects, it seemed a propitious moment for some decisive action if the Liberal-Imperialists hoped to convert their temporary advantage into actual control of the party. This was Haldane's hope. But, as the large abstention on the Lawson motion showed, there was by no means a consensus even in the generally prowar faction to go to the extreme of splitting the party.

Moreover, on this early occasion and more critical ones to come, Rosebery displayed a marked tendency to be hard to reach at the critical moment. Even to his most enchanted supporters his political behavior was a puzzle. In a manner which could both inspire and irritate, he exuded the consciousness of being an exceptional man, what he himself might call "a man of acute angles." His highly visible independence, sustained by a great name and fortune, merely exaggerated the ideological image he had projected, in the style of other great eminences in politics, of a man incapable of taking the small view. Naturally, it was the men who did the day-to-day work of keeping the party together who were irritated by the Rosebery hauteur and those who despised the discipline of party organization who were inspired.

Among his other obvious gifts Rosebery was an industrious and occasionally brilliant biographer. It would also seem that something of his attitude regarding routine party affairs is suggested in the subjects of his biographical writings: Pitt, Peel, Randolph Churchill, and Napoleon (The Last Phase!) — a little of Achilles in them all. Inclined to complain of his tools, he found it difficult either to retire or to return to combat unreservedly. He was, as his closest friend remarked, "not steadfast and unmovable, but unmovable without being steadfast." Such was the character of his response to Haldane's ardent persuasion: "Politics may possibly come to me," he wrote, "but I shall not go to them."

The condition which appeared to favor the Rosebery faction in 1900 nearly evaporated with the government victory at the October elections, in which the Roseberites were inevitably cast in an ambiguous role between the pro-Boers and the Unionists. Furthermore, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, whose personal relations with the Liberal-Imperalists were rapidly worsening, soon after brought over the large moderate center of the party in support of a pro-Boer demand for immediate negotiations in South Africa, thereby leaving the circle of Rosebery's friends a relatively small, though highly distinguished, minority.

The more ambitious hopes harbored by Haldane were clearly futile after the election and Campbell-Bannerman's emergence as majority Opposition leader. Yet the imperialists neither left the party nor submitted to the now established lead of Campbell-Bannerman. Instead, in February of 1902 they formed the Liberal League which, like the Tariff Reform League and the numerous other extraparliamentary imperialist organizations which appeared at this time all over Europe, had as its original aim the conversion or "permeation" of established parties rather than an overt attack on the leadership or the acquisition of office. Needless to say, however, the leaders of the political parties still had cause to fear the emergence of the leagues.

At the time the Liberal League was founded, the issue dividing the party was still ostensibly South Africa and the question of supporting the government's policy on the war there — including its position on the terms of peace. But as an end to the war came slowly into sight there was increasingly little practical substance in this difference. From the first Campbell-Bannerman had favored, along with conciliation, the annexation of the Boer republics. Even Lloyd George was not opposed to this course. It was also the position of the Rosebery group. The remaining differences on the issue were matters of execution, not of principle.

What then estranged the Liberal-Imperialists from the rest of the party? They disagreed in general on the question of Home Rule for Ireland, but from that Liberal sore they were enjoying a brief respite. The most eminent historian of the period, Elie Halévy, has suggested that at bottom the divisive questions concerned neither the Boers nor the Irish but rather the European policy to be pursued by Liberals after the peace. The German threat and the debate over European alliances did eventually become, as we shall see, a predominant theme in the Liberal League's propaganda. It might even be said that at length the league became obsessed with this single issue. But, in the platform which the Liberal-Imperialists sought to develop with the founding of the league, there was reflected a concern less specific but closer to home.


Rosebery and the Fabians

A rather vague sense of crisis, much heightened by the public humiliation of the war, marked the utterances of the insurgents of both Right and Left during the last year of the war. Diplomatic isolation, the vehement criticism of the foreign press during the war, and the emergence of American power in Latin America and the Pacific pointed up the presence of larger and younger nations — the United States and Germany in particular — as economic and possibly military rivals in the future. Studies, graphs, and learned prophecies, reinforced by the new authority of social science and statistics, persistently argued the growing superiority of German and American industry, agriculture, and administration; the decline in Britain's birth rate, the degenerating influence of urban slums, prospects of increased unemployment, and endless other proofs of impending collapse filled the journals and tracts of the war years and after. It was a mood which put a timorous gloss on the old text of expansion and progress.

The campaign of Rosebery's dissident group was premised on the existence of this ubiquitous threat of national decline. Its very indefiniteness made for a heterodox appeal which attracted not only some of the most promising Liberal politicians of the day but also a good representation of younger Conservatives and of such new lights in the social and political sciences as W. A. S. Hewins, Halford J. Mackinder, and the Fabians. Rosebery himself maintained a dilettante's interest in the new rigorous methods being applied to social questions and had had some exposure to the work of the Webbs while serving as chairman of the London County Council a few years before, at the time when Sidney Webb was its most vocal member. Asquith, Grey and, more intimately, Haldane had been acquainted socially with the Webbs for several years, but did not display a practical interest in the Fabians' projects until the latest split began to develop in the Liberal Party. In fact, the first sign that the Liberal-Imperialists' interest in Fabianism had progressed beyond table talk was made by Rosebery himself in his response (in December 1900) to George Bernard Shaw's Fabianism and the Empire: A Manifesto of the Fabian Society, stating the position of the proimperial faction of the Fabian Society which had also become divided on the war question.

After writing several notes of praise to the author of the Manifesto, Rosebery directed Haldane to arrange a meeting with the Fabians. The fact that the Socialist society had now become an outspokenly imperialist organization, shorn of its orthodox Socialist and Radical elements, certainly made Rosebery's association with its leaders more palatable than previously. The society had always represented a variety of views and had always included highly independent men among its membership, held fragilely together by the very general principles of "collectivism" and expertise on social questions. The split of December, however, had sheared off its most politically aggressive spirits, like Ramsay MacDonald and J. A. Hobson, and most of the union and Radical members, leaving control of the rump in the hands of Shaw and the Webbs. Their ostensible policy was, like the Liberal League's, "above parties." But perhaps more important still in Rosebery's mind was the unmistakable lesson of the past few months, that the position of the Center during a crisis was a constantly diminishing one without a distinct and constructive policy or ideology. Liberalism, Rosebery felt, was being "squeezed out between Socialism and Conservatism," and seemed destined to fall victim to the growing political polarization unless radical renovations were made in its guiding principles.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition by Robert James Scally. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

  • Frontmatter, pg. i
  • Contents, pg. vii
  • Bibliographical Abbreviations, pg. ix
  • Acknowledgments, pg. xi
  • Introduction, pg. 1
  • I. Liberal-Imperialism, pg. 29
  • II. The Liberal League and the Policy of National Efficiency, pg. 48
  • III. The Coefficients Club, pg. 73
  • IV. The Tariff Reform Movement: "Le revenu c'est I'etat", pg. 96
  • V. Lloyd George and the Tariff Reformers, pg. 133
  • VI. The Budget and the Peers, pg. 146
  • VII. The Lloyd George Plan, pg. 172
  • VIII. The Coalition Plan in the Prewar Crisis, pg. 211
  • IX. The Rise and Fall of the First Coalition, pg. 250
  • X. Lloyd George's Estrangement, pg. 280
  • XI. "Advocates of Another Method", pg. 306
  • XII. The Coalition Government, pg. 336
  • Bibliography, pg. 387
  • Index, pg. 409



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