Two central developments in the economic history of Edwardian Britain are rarely considered in conjunction. Large flows of investment overseas between c. 1905 and 1914 have been regarded as a feature of ‘high imperialism’, or more innocuously, as a phase in the growth of an international economy. In domestic politics, the ‘New Liberal’ achievement of tax and welfare reforms has been viewed as a stage on the road to the ‘welfare state’, and as a bid for political survival. Was there any link between the export of capital and domestic politics? This article will describe how capital flows affected the choice, timing and scope of Liberal social and economic policies.

Hitler's foreign policy is still an area of widespread interest - particularly the question of its inner coherence. The present consensus goes back to the early 1950s and 1960s, when the German attack upon Russia was viewed as one stage in Hitler's quest for European hegemony or even world domination. While Alan Bullock viewed Hitler as an opportunist, Hugh Trevor-Roper in his essay on Hitler's war aims interpreted Hitler's invasion of Russia as a systematic step in Hitler's programme. Since then this model has been highly refined and systematized, notably by Andreas Hillgruber, who argues that Hitler's foreign policy programme had already been formulated long before he came to power, particularly in Mein Kampf and Hitler's Second book. On this model National Socialist foreign policy was programmatically fixed and Hillgruber goes as far to say that Hitler's programme ‘alone determined the great line of German policy in general’ and that he devoted all the energies available to him to realizing it. Yet even before Hillgruber had formulated his model, case studies were available which appeared to contradict its inner coherence and logic. Serious objections have also been raised by Martin Broszat, who describes Hitler's idea of an eastern empire as a ‘metaphor and Utopian figure of speech’.

Improved Franco-German relations are rarely associated with the years preceding the Great War or with the policies of Raymond Poincaré. Yet from 1907 to 1914 a persistent attempt was made to bring about détente between Paris and Berlin, which eventually led to the French president adopting a conciliatory attitude towards Germany, occasionally at the expense of relations with Russia. The instigator of this policy was the French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon. He believed that Franco-German détente could best serve the two axioms of French diplomacy since 1870: continental security and overseas expansion. Cambon considered the growth of German power in Europe and abroad to be both natural and inevitable and that France must come to terms with it.1 His policy involved ending the intransigence which he saw as having characterized French diplomacy, often with disastrous results, since 1870. He confessed in May 1908 that his ideas were fairly summarized in Clemenceau's remark to him: ‘On dit que vous avez dit que vous ne voulez aller ni à Ems ni à Faschoda.’2 These two incidents, the ‘Ems telegram’ and the Fashoda crisis, symbolized for him the recklessness and inflexibility of France's past diplomacy.

During the years following the end of the Second World War the British Labour government was preoccupied with the threat posed by Russia. Britain could not contain Russia on its own; indeed, only the United States possessed the necessary power. At the beginning of 1949 this was emphasized by the newly formed permanent under secretary's committee headed by William Strang. That committee considered the Anglo-American special relationship as the pivot of British foreign policy: British interests were best likely to be ensured by its maintenance and consolidation. An inequality was, however, inherent in the association, and Britain thought that the alliance would be least effective in Asia and the far east, an area where American naivety and selfishness were particularly evident. The spread of Mao Tse Tung's communists across the Chinese mainland emphasized Britain's predicament, especially as, initially, the Chinese were regarded as orthodox communists.

The 1930s, a decade Labour in Scotland could have done without, ended appropriately. On Sunday, 3 September 1939, hours before war was declared, police closed down a Labour party meeting on Glasgow Green. The Glasgow left-wing weekly Forward, reporting this, concluded gloomily: ‘It is doubtful whether any other meeting will be allowed during the war period.’ Labour’s fortunes in 1939 were mixed, and it did not regard the imminent prospect of an election with enthusiasm. In Scotland it had recovered from the nadir of 1932, when after the secession of the Independent Labour party (I.L.P.) it was left with only three M.P.s out of the seven who had survived the 1931 election. But its gains in 1935 still gave it only 20 out of 74 seats, well short of its 1929 level of 37. It later won two by-elections, and acquired George Buchanan M.P. from the I.L.P. in 1938, but by then its municipal successes of 1932—5, when it took over most of the larger Scottish towns, had been checked. In November 1936 it lost Dundee. There was some recovery in 1937, but a net gain of only one seat in 1938. It had yet to take control in a single Scottish county.

The study of the Edwardian Conservative party is rapidly becoming as much of a minefield as that of the Edwardian Liberal party. Both parties were in serious difficulties in the years immediately preceding the First World War. But whilst the condition of the Liberal party is at least openly acknowledged as a disputed area, its perils clearly marked, the condition of the Conservative party is treacherous ground, the hazards uncharted. From one point of view, ‘it would be easy to give an account of Edwardian politics in which the emphasis fell on “the crisis of Conservatism” and on the parlous state of the Conservative party on the eve of the War… The fundamental weakness of the Conservative party lay in its inability to win elections.’ Alternatively, ‘Both at the local-government level and in national by elections in 1912 and 1913, what was at work was not so much “The Strange Death of Liberal England” as “The Strange Revival of Tory England”. The most likely outcome, moreover, was not apocalyptic, merely a Conservative triumph in the general election scheduled for 1915.’ By a curious coincidence, or perhaps editorial perversity, these two views are juxtaposed on consecutive pages of the same collection of essays.

In the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, the estimate outside Britain of the status of intellectuals in the British Labour movement grew to prodigal dimensions.

In a recent communication to the Historical Journal, Greta Jones submitted a critique that was largely a commentary on my article ‘Eugenics and progressive thought: a study in ideological affinity’. I am taking the liberty of replying not only because my views have been seriously misrepresented by Dr Jones but also because I believe that she has failed to appreciate important questions of methodology that transcend the particular subject of eugenics and are worth further elaboration. I shall relate in turn to the issues she raises.

Despite the stature of J. S. Mill as a political philosopher and the growth of interest in Irish history, the literature on Mill's writings on Ireland is sparse. Aside from passing comments in some of the major works on Mill, the issue has been addressed by only three recent scholars who, for the most part, have not dealt directly with the relationship between Mill's political theory and his published materials on Ireland. R. D. C. Black has concentrated on economic considerations, arguing that Mill broke ranks with most of the English economists of his time because he believed that Irish conditions were different from those of England and hence that radical land reforms were necessary for economic development in Ireland. E. D. Steele has challenged this position, claiming that Mill was not so radical about Irish matters in his early years, that Mill hedged significantly on governmental interference with landed property until the rise of Fenianism in the 1860s, and that, even then, Mill's reforming zeal was guided by his concerns for saving the Union and upholding the empire. R. N. Lebow has argued that Mill's writings reflect the tensions in his own thought and in Victorian England concerning individual rights and social concerns, suggesting that Mill resolved the problem only late in his life, by deciding that the interests of society (in this case, the issue of land reform for the benefit of Irish tenants) overrode the individual property rights of the Irish landlords.

In 1970 Esmonde Robertson rightly took Geoffrey Warner to task for having failed, in his biography of Pierre Laval, to outline the background to the Rome Agreements of January 1935 between France and Italy which preceded the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Basing his argument upon published French and Italian sources, Robertson showed that the statement of French disinterest in Ethiopia made to Mussolini by Laval in 1935 had antecedents which stretched back as far as 1932. In a more recent work Robertson has added to the picture of Franco-Italian relations in the early 1930s from unpublished sources, perhaps most notably in demonstrating that as early as July 1931 Pierre Laval raised the matter of an Italian occupation of Ethiopia in a favourable sense with the then Italian foreign minister, Count Dino Grandi. Robertson's lead in establishing the importance of these developments has been followed by Lowe and Marzari in their study of Italian foreign policy in the period 1870–1940, although another scholar in a recent survey of Mussolini's aspirations makes no mention of them at all.