by Frank McLynn
119. C. Cross, Philip Snowden (1966), p. 221.
120. Philip Snowden, An Autobiography (1934), p. 730.
121. Keith Laybourn, Philip Snowden: A Biography (1988), p. 113.
122. T. Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party 1914–35 (1966), pp. 330–4; Roy Jenkins, Asquith (1964), p. 514.
123. H. H. Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 1852–1927 (1928), pp. 234–5; cf. also H. H. Asquith, Speeches by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1927), p. 310.
124. Asquith, Speeches, p. 310.
125. John Campbell, Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness, 1922–1931 (1977), p. 136.
126. Ibid., p. 138.
127. Lucy Masterman, G. F. G. Masters (1939), p. 61; Campbell, Goat, p. 139.
128. Asquith, Memories and Reflections, p. 236.
129. Campbell, Goat, p. 136.
130. Jones, Whitehall Diaries, i, pp. 12–13.
131. Francis Stevenson’s diary, 15 May 1926, in A. J. P. Taylor, ed., Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson (1971), pp. 245–6.
132. Campbell, Goat, p. 137.
133. Manchester Guardian (21 May 1926); Morning Post (21 May 1926); Westminster Gazette (21 May 1926).
134. Campbell, Goat, pp. 143–6. See also Frances Stevenson’s diary, 30 May 1926 in A. J. P. Taylor, ed., My Darling Pussy (1975), pp. 100–1.
135. Skidelsky, Keynes, pp. 249–50; Peter Rowland, Lloyd George (1975), p. 623.
136. ‘Financing the Gold Standard and British Politics, 1925–1931’, in John Turner, ed., Businessmen and Politics: Studies of Business Activity in British Politics, 1900–1945 (1984), pp. 105–29.
137. Taylor, English History, p. 206.
138. Ibid., p. 359. For an attempt to defend Thomas see David Howell, ‘“I Loved My Union and My Country”: Jimmy Thomas and the Politics of Railway Trade Unionism’, Twentieth Century British History, 6 (1995), pp. 145–75.
139. Wasserstein, Samuel, p. 291; Cole, ed., Diaries of Beatrice Webb, p. 121.
140. Howell, MacDonald’s Party, p. 279.
141. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 236; David Howell, Respectable Radicals: Studies in the Politics of Railway Trade Unionism (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 278–81.
142. Paul Davies, A. J. Cook, 1883–1931 (1983), pp. 117–18, 166–7, 194–207.
143. Ibid., pp. 146–51; Howell, MacDonald’s Party, p. 135; Citrine, Men and Work, pp. 245–6. Sir Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett (1868–1930) founded ICI in 1926. He served in Lloyd George’s postwar coalition government, but in 1926 joined the Conservative Party after finding Lloyd George’s proposed land reforms too radical. He was portrayed as Mustapha Bond in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s A Cooking Egg (1920). See Frank Greenaway, ‘Mond family’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004), 38, pp. 614–19; G. M. Bayliss, The Outsider: Aspects of the Political Career of Alfred Mond, 1st Lord Melchett, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, 1969.
144. Howell, MacDonald’s Party, pp. 135–6, 151–2, 280, 300.
145. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 210.
146. Bell, ed., Diary of Virginia Woolf, iii, p. 84.
147. G. K. Chesterton’s Weekly (22 May 1926).
148. Perkins, General Stike, p. 263.
149. Middlemas and Barnes, Baldwin, p. 392.
150. Martin, Father Figures, p. 160; Martin, British Public, p. 163. Curiously, Martin’s biographer passes over the General Strike in silence: C. H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (1973).
151. Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt, p. 232.
152. Sunday Times (16 May 1926).
153. Cole, ed., Diaries of Beatrice Webb, p. 98.
154. Morrison, Autobiography, p. 113; Jennie Lee, My Life with Nye (1980), p. 70 One can see why H. G. Wells lampooned Sidney and Beatrice Webb in The New Machiavelli as ‘the Baileys’ – a pair of bourgeois manipulators of limited intelligence and insight.
155. Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt, p. 234.
Conclusion: Revolutions
1. Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China (1970), pp. 305–48.
2. Geoffrey Holmes, Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679–1742 (1986), p. 258; cf. also W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption”, 1780–1860’, PP 101 (1983), pp. 55–86; D. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967 (Leicester, 1980).
3. See the discussion in Jeremy Paxman, The English (1999), pp. 33–4.
4. Hansard (13 May 1901).
5. Simon Featherstone, Englishness: Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English (2009).
6. P. A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols (1941), Appendix.
7. Peter Mandler, The English National Character (Yale, 2006); cf. also Homayun Sidkey, Perspectives on Culture (NY, 2004), pp. 174–8.
8. André Maurois, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble (1918).
9. For the crucial role of sport and gambling in British society see A. Nathan, Sport and Society (1958); Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (1955); Ross McKibbin, ‘Working Class Gambling in Britain, 1880–1939’, PP 87 (1979) pp. 147–78; Paxman, English, pp. 194–201.
10. George Orwell, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950).
11. See Roger Mettam and Douglas Johnson, French History and Society: The Wars of Religion to the Fifth Republic (1974).
12. Richard Besel, ‘1933: A Failed Counter-Revolution’, in E. E. Rice, ed., Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oxford, 1991), pp. 129–52.
13. Dennis Mack Smith, ‘Revolution and Counterrevolution in Modern Italian History’, in Rice, ed., Revolution, pp. 153–70 (esp. pp. 154, 161, 163).
14. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1998), pp. 125–33, 219–22. For the more general implications of the idea see S. E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (1962).
15. Philip Thody, French Caesarism from Napoleon to Charles de Gaulle (1989).
16. Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, eds, Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism and Totalitarianism (Cambridge, 2004); Alfred Cobban, Dictatorship: Its History and Theory (1939).
17. Douglas Ostrowski, ‘The Mongols and Rus’, in Abbott Gleason, ed., A Companion to Russian History, (2009), p. 78.
18. Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? (1926), p. 127.
19. There is a huge literature on all this. The Napoleon– Hitler analogy has proved most popular. See Desmond Seward, Napoléon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography (1988); Claude Ribbe, Le Crime de Napoléon (Paris, 2005); Steven Englund, ‘Si l’habit ne sied pas … la comparison Napoleon–Hitler au debut’, Revue des Deux Mondes (April 2005), pp. 97–117. For Napoleon–Stalin see A. J. P. Taylor, From Napoleon to Stalin (1950), and, more generally, Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (1996), esp. pp. 392–3. The Napoleon–Stalin comparison is of course implicit in Orwell’s Animal Farm, as Orwell calls his Stalinist pig Napoleon. For Rousseau–Stalin see Robert Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt (1968), and J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1960).
20. Baehr and Richter, Dictatorship in History and Theory.
21. See especially Mark Hagopian, The Phenomenon of Revolution (NY, 1975), pp. 52, 112, 123, 185, 363; Perez Zagorin, ‘Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography’, Political Science Quarterly, 88 (1973), pp. 23–52.
22. It is interesting to compare the classic works on the English Civil War by the Marxist Christopher Hill with those of the present-day doyen of Civil War studies, Blair Worden, who does not think the old ‘grand theories’ even worth a passing mention: Worden, The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (2010). Scholars were unhappy with the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution even earlier. See Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1968), where he boldly argued that all social, sociological interpretations of that revolution are either platitud
es or a case of trying to fit the facts into an a priori scheme. Ibid., pp. 8–14.
23. For a lucid summary see Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), pp. 111–55; See also Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978).
24. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, pp. 130–1
25. Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going?, pp. 130–1.
26. Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1978), p. 42.
27. See the tour d’horizon in my own Invasion: From the Armada to Hitler (1987), and, at much greater length, Norman Longmate, Defending the Island: From Caesar to the Armada (2001); Norman Longmate, Island Fortress: the Defence of Britain, 1603–1945 (1991).
28. For this aspect of the Armada see T. P. Kilfeather, Ireland: Graveyard of the Spanish Armada (1967).
29. See John A. Harris, Without a Trace (1981); Susan Carey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Ocean’s Greatest Furies (2010); Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (1997).
30. See Hamish Haswell-Smith, The Scottish Islands (2004); James Morrisey, A History of the Fastnet Lighthouse (2005).
31. For the Schrodinger equation see W. J. Moore, Schrodinger: Life and Thought (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 219–20.
32. François Crouzet, ‘The Second Hundred Years War: Some Reflections’, French History, 10 (1996), pp. 432–50; H. M. Scott, ‘The Second Hundred Years War, 1689–1815’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 443–69.
33. Wolfe Tone’s Journal, 26 December 1796, in T. W. Moody, R. B. MacDowell and C. J. Woods, The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1763–1798, vol. 2, America, France and Bantry Bay (Oxford, 2002).
34. Frank McLynn, Napoleon: A Biography (1997), p. 483.
35. Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek: The Man Who Discovered Britain (2002).
36. This voyage is described in Walter Ford Carter, No Greater Sacrifice, No Greater Love (2004); cf. also Ran Levi, ‘The Wave that Changed Science’, The Future of Things, 3 (March 2008); The Economist (17 September 2009).
37. See Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, NY, 2006), esp. pp. 18–45; Harvey Starr, ‘Revolution and War: Rethinking the Linkage Between Internal and External Conflict’, Political Research Quarterly, 47 (1994), pp. 481–507.
38. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Harvard, 2002).
39. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 20.
40. See, for example, T. K. Rabb, ‘The Effect of the Thirty Years War on the German Economy’, Journal of Modern History, 34 (1962), pp. 40–51.
41. M. Morineau, ‘Budget de l’étât et gestation des finances royales en France en dix-huitième siècle’, Revue Historique, 264 (1980), pp. 289–336 (esp. p. 325); R. Harris, ‘French Finances and the American War, 1777–1783’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1976), pp. 233–58.
42. Finer, Man on Horseback; Constantine P. Danopoulos and Cynthia Watson, eds, The Political Role of the Military: An International Handbook (Westport, CT, 1996).
43. See Ezekiel Spanheim, Relation de la Cour de France (Paris, 1973).
44. Michel Winock, La Fièvre hexagonale: les grands crises politiques, 1871–1968 (Paris, 1999).
45. Particularly significant was the failed right-wing army coup against President De Gaulle in April 1961. See Pierre Abramovici, Le Putsch des généraux (Paris, 2011); cf. also Adam Roberts, ‘Civil Resistance to Military Coups’, Journal of Peace Research, 12 (1975), pp. 19–36; Edward Luttwak, Coup d’Etât: A Practical Handbook (Harvard, 1969).
46. See, for instance, the volume by John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford, 1964).
47. Carl Watts, ‘Killing Kith and Kin: the Viability of British Military Intervention in Rhodesia, 1964–5’, Twentieth Century British History 16 (2005), pp. 382–416.
48. Ian F. W. Beckett, The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (1986); A. P. Ryan, Mutiny at the Curragh (1956).
49. A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians (2005), p. 106.
50. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 318.
51. Thompson, The Chartists, p. 83.
52. Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going?, pp. 23, 27–8.
53. For a full investigation of this see David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy, 1832–1898 (Oxford, 1999).
54. Ernest Barker, ‘Some Constants in the English Character’, in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, eds, Writing Englishness, 1900–1950 (1995), pp. 55–63. See also, at much greater length, Ernest Barker, The Character of England (1942).
55. Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (1961), pp. 14–15.
56. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867: new edition, 1963).
57. Ibid., p. 248.
58. Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (1988), p. 128.
59. Ibid., passim.
60. See Michael Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (1992); Edward Shils and Michael Young, ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, Sociological Review, 1 (1953), pp. 68–81.
61. Guardian (27 June 2003).
62. Stuart MacIntyre, A Plebeian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, 1980).
63. See Taylor, English History, 1914–1945, pp. 162–75.
64. See especially the views of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn as examined by E. P. Thompson in ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), pp. 35–91.
65. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1975), Book 1, Part 1, Section 1; cf. ‘Custom, then, is the great guide of human life’ in Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1975), Part 1, Section 5.
66. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), pp. 127, 168.
67. J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in J. L. Austin, Philosophical Essays, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. S. Warnock (Oxford, 1961), p. 182.
68. There have been many critiques of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ but two of the hardest-hitting and most entertaining are Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (1959) and Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (1998).
69. Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992).
70. C. H. Williams, The Making of the Tudor Despotism (1935); P. Williams, ‘A Revolution in Tudor History?’, PP 25 (1963), pp. 3–8; Joel Hurstfield, ‘Was There a Tudor Despotism After All?’, TRHS, 5th series, 17 (1967), pp. 83–108.
71. J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Evanston, Ill. 1961), pp. 133, 144–5. It would be naive, however, to imagine that sheep and the wool trade always work in a progressive direction. In Spain the migratory flocks of sheep (the mesta) and their owners were used by centralising monarchs as a weapon against local elites and landlords: Julius Klein, The Mesta: A Study in Spanish Economic History (Harvard, 1920), pp. 351–7.
72. C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, ad 990–1992 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 124–32; R. Bremner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1663 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 713–14.
73. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, pp. 424–6, 444.
74. Ibid., pp. 254–5.
75. Ibid., pp. 477–8.
76. Thompson, ‘Peculiarities of the English’.
77. ‘Perry Anderson, English Questions’. (1992), pp. 15–47 (esp. pp. 20–3).
78. Thompson, ‘Peculiarities’.
79. F. Parkin, ‘Working Class Conservatism: A Theory of Political Deviance’, British Journal of Sociology, 18 (1967), pp. 278–90.
80. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (1991), is the best-known such exposition.
81. For full details see Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (1972).
82. Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going?, pp. 22–3.
8
3. A. W. Ward and G. P. Gooch, eds, The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, vol. 3, 1866–1919 (1923), pp. 9–10.
84. Andrew Thompson, The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2005), p. 122; Ross McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain?’ EHR, 99 (1984), pp. 297–331 (at pp. 316–17).
85. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism (1916), in Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1964), 22, p. 281.
86. Lenin, Collected Works, 13, p. 77.
87. Elie Halévy, England in 1815 (1949), pp. 387–485. The theory was essentially restated and revived in B. Samuel, The Methodist Doctrine (1974), esp. pp. 197–8.
88. Michael Hill, A Sociology of Religion (1973), p. 183.
89. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (Gloucester, Mass., 1975), pp. 292–9.
90. Gerald W. Olsen, ed., Religion and Revolution in Early Industrial England: Halévy Thesis and Its Critics (1990); J. D. Walsh, ‘Elie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism’, TRHS, 5th series, 25 (1975), pp. 1–20.
91. Brian W. Gobbett, ‘Inevitable Revolution and Methodism in Early Industrial England: Revising the Historiography of the Halévy thesis’, Fides et Historia, 29 (1997), pp. 28–43; Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and Working Class Movements in England, 1800-1850 (1937).
92. J. S. C. de Radius, Historical Account of Every Sect of the Christian Religion (1848, republished 2003), pp. 89–90.
93. Deborah M. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preachers and Popular Religion in Industrial England (1985) – with explicit criticism of the Halévy thesis on pp. 5–11.
94. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class (1963), pp. 354–70.
95. Ibid., p. 393. To an extent Thompson’s request was answered in Robert Samuel Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: The Effect of Methodism on a Durham Mining Village (1974), esp. pp. 1–27.
96. See, for the mainstream, G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (Harvard, 1962), p. 22 and, for the Marxist, Victor Kiernan, ‘Evangelism and the French Revolution’, PP 1 (1952), pp. 44–56; George Rudé, Debate on Europe, 1815–1850 (NY, 1972), p. 132. For a middle-of-the-road position see Alan D. Gilbert, ‘Religion and Political Stability in Early Industrial England’, in Patrick O’Brien and Roland E. Quinault, eds, The Industrial Revolution and British Society (1993), pp. 79–99.
