At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant reference of applied science changed. This chapter addresses the question: How could research be discussed using the old language of applied science previously used principally for pedagogy? Where was the continuity? The term’s meaning was constructed and reconstructed with the new organisations, such as the National Physical Laboratory and the newly incorporated civic universities. Therefore, the hectic emergence of a host of new organisations and awareness of research is of particular interest. In an era of growing foreign competition, Liberal politicians such as R. B. Haldane put their faith in applied science. Three key themes structure the analysis: the challenge of foreign powers, the growth of institutions, and the attraction of applied science to governments committed to maximising national efficiency but minimal interference in the market. The focus is on the years between 1899 and the outbreak of war.

The conclusion examines the negotiations of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which led to the formation of the Irish Free State, foregrounding the British-Irish political figures brought together at 10 Downing Street who illuminated the events of this book. Far from a sideshow to developments in Ireland, the concluding chapter submits, Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to both Irish and British contemporary assessments of the Irish Revolution. Irish nationalists in Britain, further, mobilised popular political interest, and activism, on an unprecedented scale across this decade of constitutional crisis, war, and revolution. The potential influence of Irish nationalism in British cities, moreover, occupied the minds and minutes of British policy makers, from Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George. How was Irish nationalism re-constructed across Britain between 1912 and 1922? Shaped by the influences of the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, and the British Empire, Irish nationalism was the cumulative experience of layers of overlapping representations of, and relationships with, ideas of nation. In its modes of political activism, gendered experiences of political life, and representations of public politics, Irish nationalism was impacted by changes, and continuities, across the British polity between the late Edwardian, First World War, and post-war periods.

Chapter 11 reappraises the peace conceptions and reordering strategies of Lloyd George and the other architects of the British agenda for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that what they envisaged centred, not on containing Germany and re-establishing a workable balance of power but rather on the novel aim to create, in cooperation with the United States, a new Atlantic concert that was to stabilise a modern international equilibrium within a recast global order. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of what became an ambitious British peace programme, which included the most elaborate and influential blueprints for a League of Nations as framework for a novel, and integrative, international concert. And it highlights that British approaches to peacemaking, which were also designed to bolster the British Empire and expand British imperial influence in the Middle East, evolved and changed significantly between the armistice and Versailles as well. Finally, it analyses the extent to which Lloyd George and other key actors like Robert Cecil and Jan Christiaan Smuts had embarked on constructive learning processes – and the extent to which their evolving concepts and strategies were conducive to the creation of a durable and legitimate Atlantic and global order.

This chapter examines the political power of the British monarchy during the July Crisis (1914) and the First World War. It suggests that David Lloyd George’s attempts to reduce royal power, while important, had a relatively limited impact.

Over the first year of the war, Britain moved from a position of financial power over the United States to a position of increasing economic dependency. Responsibility for managing this shift fell first to Chancellor David Lloyd George, who showed little interest in the Treasury's operations during the war, and then to Reginald McKenna, who became increasingly seized of the problem. American Colonel Edward House moved to try to mediate the war, taking a trip to Europe. Finding that it was still far too early to mediate the conflict, House set his sights much lower. He looked merely to convince the powers that, when it came time to end the war, the United States should serve as the necessary neutral clearing-house through which the negotiations would be completed. At the same time, British intelligence organization MI1(b) worked to solve the American diplomatic codebooks, succeeding not long after House returned to the United States.

A sense of crisis emerged amidst growing anxieties over the Allied financial, shipping, and food situations. The British faced hard economic choices for the coming year, but the Cabinet remained divided and paralyzed. Lord Lansdowne finally put to paper the worries that had filled a number of ministers all year: the 'Lansdowne Memorandum' called for a consideration of a negotiated peace, finding a number of supporters within the Cabinet and sparking vigorous debate. Lloyd George rejected Lansdowne's position, determined to force the adoption of industrial conscription and to increase British spending in the United States. Lloyd George rejected the reality of Britain's increasingly fragile economic position even amidst a serious financial crisis. Plotting with Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law and with Edward Carson, Lloyd George sought to eject Asquith and his supporters from the levers of power, but Asquith outmanoeuvred him, holding his government together with a series of compromises and isolating Lloyd George within the Cabinet. Lloyd George responded by launching a desperate gambit to remove Asquith's control over the war. When the dust settled, Lloyd George was on Downing Street.

Britain's great gamble began with the launch of the Somme Offensive. To extend their American assets, Asquith dislodged the spendthrift Lloyd George from the Ministry of Munitions by promoting him to War Secretary, replacing him with the more economy-minded Edwin Montagu. Startling talk of peace came from French President Raymond Poincaré, which British hardliners moved rapidly to bury. Otherwise, the question of American mediation only rumbled very quietly beneath the surface. British intelligence opened a new source of information with the discovery of the "Swedish Roundabout", unlocking the communications of the German Ambassador to the United States. The British military leadership continually reassured the government that the Somme Offensive was making great headway. As Romania moved to enter the war on the Allied side in August, the government was taken to unfamiliar heights of optimism: it finally seemed as if the Allies might be able to win the war on schedule.

The optimism within the government steadily receded. Some ministers began to grapple with the reality of the failure of British war strategy, while others remained in emphatic denial of their growing US economic problem. Although some within the government remained tempted by the possibility of American mediation, Montagu aimed to offer an alternative way forward, seeking to build new munitions factories. This would enable the Allies to continue the war even after a radical wind-down in their American purchasing. Lloyd George, however, stridently opposed any reductions in their US spending. He also abruptly became a vehement opponent of American mediation when he was shown misleading intelligence that seemed to reveal secret German-American collaboration against the British. Distrusting his colleagues to take appropriate action, Lloyd George moved to kill the possibility of American mediation with a dramatic newspaper interview. Lloyd George committed Britain to an indefinite war until they had landed a 'knock-out blow'. This was popular with Conservatives, but it left his Asquithian colleagues furious and the Americans bewildered and hurt. Grey attempted, with some success, to apply a salve to the wound inflicted on the Americans by publicly promising British support for a league of nations.

In the aftermath of German-American diplomatic crisis over submarines, House conceived a new, more ambitious strategy of trying to use US power to end the war and prevent an Allied defeat. Although House initially struggled to find a receptive audience amongst the British leadership, anxiety within the British government was on the rise. Efforts to reconcile Britain's economic and military strategies settled on a plan to win the war with a great 1916 offensive – a strategy that provoked serious disquiet amongst a number of key British leaders. By February 1916, a number of British leaders, including Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, encouraged House towards a still more ambitious conception of American mediation: not only would the United States play a key role in setting up the negotiations, but it would also chair them. House and Grey agreed the 'House-Grey Memorandum', in which House promised that the United States would guarantee a set of limited Allied war aims at a peace conference. All the while, British intelligence was decrypting House's telegrams and attempting to undermine his negotiations.

The formation of the National Government and the debates around national recovery bring into stark focus the national distinctions that still shaped British politics in the age of mass democracy and mass media. This chapter explores the effect of these distinctions on how Scottish Unionists and Welsh Conservatives related to the National Government, how they presented its record of economic recovery to local voters, and how their opponents responded. Drawing on case studies including Dunbartonshire and Dundee in Scotland, Pembrokeshire and Gower in Wales, the chapter analyses the popular politics of National Conservatism as it traversed the so-called ‘Anglo-Celtic frontier’. Starting with a discussion of the 1931 general election campaign, it demonstrates how the National Government helped the Conservatives to neutralise old hostilities while also helping their opponents to renew or inspire anti-Tory sentiment. This was reflected in the election results: in Scotland, the Unionists gained twenty-eight seats, including Dundee for the first time, while in Wales it gained only five seats and failed to regain Pembrokeshire. The chapter argues that this in turn set the politics of recovery in Scotland and Wales on different trajectories. Through its MPs and ministers, the government enjoyed a high-profile presence in Scotland that it lacked in Wales. Even so, in both nations its claims of recovery, like the National Government itself, provoked renewed anti-Tory – and often anti-Westminster – rhetoric among Liberals, Labour and, in Scotland, nationalists. At the 1935 general election while little changed in the relative strengths of Scottish Unionism and Welsh Conservatism, Labour emerged as the net beneficiary.