Abstract
This study of British nationalism in the pre–1914 period has for its focus three patriotic movements selected from among scores of similar contemporary organisations. The Navy League, the National Service League and the Tariff Reform League arrest the attention of the historian, in the first instance for two quite simple reasons: these three had the largest following of any of their cohort; and they issued regular publications which make possible a degree of research on their membership as well as their policies. Their claim to special historical consideration, however, rests on other grounds. Each of them challenged political convictions which were the virtual dogma of the times, part of the bipartisan consensus of Britain’s parliamentary leadership. With this fact as justification, each of them claimed to be above mere party politics. Each recruited members across party political boundaries. Each attempted to assert a definition of patriotism which was in keeping with an age marked internally by the advent of a mass electorate, and externally by the emergence of competing aggressive imperialisms.
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Notes
H. Spenser Wilkinson, Thiry-Five Years (London,1933), PP. 189–94.
A.J. Marder, British Naval Policy 1800–1905 (London, 1940), p. 12.
H. F. Wyatt and L. G. H. Horton-Smith, The Passing of the Great Fleet (London, 1909), p. 213.
G. F. Shee, The Briton’s First Duty (London, 1901), pp. 62, 124, 181.
For a fuller account of the National Service League, see A. Summers, ‘British Militarism before the Great War’, History Workshop, 2 (Autumn 1976).
Lord Newton, Retrospection (London, 1941), pp. 115–16.
Denis Hayes, Conscription Conflict (London, 1949), pp. 33, 36–7.
D. P. James, Lord Roberts (London, 1954), p. 393.
J. Amery, Joseph Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform Campaign (The Life of joseph Chamberlain, vols v and vt) (London, 1969).
N. Blewett, The Peers, the Parties and the People (London, 1972), p. 32; Monthly Notes, xvIII, 6 (June 1813), p. 370.
On the TUTRA see Monthly Notes, passim and K. D. Brown, ‘The Trade Union Tariff Reform Association, 1904–13’, in Journal of British Studies, 9 (1969–70).
Miles’ (Sir Frederick Maurice), ‘Where to Get Men’, Contemporary Review (January 1902), 78–86.
Maurice, ‘National Health, a Soldier’s Study’, Contemporary Review (January 1903), 41–56.
J. A. Faner, Invasion and Conscription (London, 1909), pp. 22–3.
B. S. Townroe, A Nation in Arms (London, 1909), p. 137.
H. Cunningham, The Volunteer Force (London, 1976), pp. 33, 46, 49–50.
J. K. Dunlop, The Development of the British Army 1899–1914 (London, 1938), p. 287.
Lord Charles Beresford, The Betrayal (London, 1912).
Wyatt and Horton-Smith, Britain’s Imminent Danger (London, 1912), p. 171.
Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow (London, 1961), vol. I, pp. 156, 167.
See, for example, the rhetoric of the National Party: W. D. Rubinstein, ‘Henry Page Croft and the National Party, 1917–22’, in Journal of Contemporary History, IX, I, 129–49.
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© 1981 St Antony’s College, Oxford
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Summers, A. (1981). The Character of Edwardian Nationalism: Three Popular Leagues. In: Kennedy, P., Nicholls, A. (eds) Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04958-5_4
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