Richard Cobden

This is an important study of British radicalism in the years between the collapse of Chartism in 1848 and the rise of Gladstonian liberalism in the 1860s. Taylor begins by examining the rise of radicalism in the 1830s and 1840s, arguing that it was the 1832 Reform Act which invigorated radicalism, by enlarging the powers of Parliament and increasing the need for independent MPs. Set against the backdrop of revolution and reaction in Europe, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, this wide-ranging book looks at how and why radicalism lost its hold on British politics.

This book makes an original contribution to international relations and British politics. It identifies for the first time the dominant pre-modern theory of international relations, which fatalistically assumed that war was beyond human control. It then shows how this theory was undermined from the 1730s onwards, with the consequence that a debate began about how best to prevent war in which a vocal minority argued that war as an institution for settling disputes could be abolished. Britain led the way in this repudiation of fatalism and exploration of pacific alternatives: it produced the world's first peace movement (which appeared in the mid-1790s as a response to the French wars) and the first enduring national peace association (the Peace Society, founded in 1816 and active for nearly a century); and it was the first counbtry to allow peace thinking to enter its political mainstream. This book, the first to make use of the Peace Society's records, fills a major gap in the historiography of British politics.

Free trade was one of the most distinctive features of the British state--and of British economic, social, and political life--in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the first book to explain why free trade was so important, and to examine the reasons for its longevity. Howe covers a crucial century in free trade history, from the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, through the turbulent years of the Tariff Reform debate, to the end of the Second World War.

In this stimulating study of mid-Victorian ethics and the political economy, Geoffrey Searle argues that entrenched ideals of public virtue posed a much more effective challenge to market forces than the need to mitigate poverty. Highly readable as well as instructive, the book captures the ideological dilemma at the heart of nineteenth-century British history.