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.

Here is the first book to cover the history of British Liberalism from its founding doctrines in the later eighteenth century to the final dissolution of the Liberal party into the Liberal Democrats in 1988. The Party dominated British politics for much of the later nineteenth-century, most notably under Gladstone, whose premierships spanned 1868-1894, and during the early twentieth, but after the resignation of Lloyd George in 1922 the Liberal Party never held office again. The decline of the Party remains a unique phenomenon in British politics and Alan Sykes illuminates its dramatic and peculiar circumstances in this comprehensive study.

Kidd argues that emergence of Labour politics in southern England represented the renewal of the working-class radical tradition. Mapping the trajectory of Labour politics from its mid-Victorian origins to the 1920s, the book offers a new narrative that challenges conventional understandings of politics, identity and ideology in modern England.

A thematic analysis of the career of Bronterre O’Brien, one of the most influential leaders of Chartism, this book relates his activities—and the Chartist movement—to broader themes in the history of Britain, Europe, and America during the nineteenth century. O’Brien (1804–64) came to be known as the “schoolmaster” of Chartism because of his efforts to describe and explain its intellectual foundations. The campaign for the People’s Charter (with its promise of political democratization) was a highpoint in O’Brien’s career as writer and orator, but he was already well known before the campaign began, and during the 1840s he distanced himself from other Chartist leaders and from several important Chartist initiatives. This book examines the personal, tactical, and ideological reasons for O’Brien’s departure, as well as his development of a social and economic agenda to accompany “constitutional” Chartism, in line with the evolution of radical thought after the Great Reform Act of 1832. It also evaluates O’Brien’s reputation, among his contemporaries and among modern historians, in order better to understand his contribution to radicalism in Britain and beyond.

A study of three centuries of radical ideas and activity in English political and social history.

In this insightful new study, Andrew August examines the British working class in the period when Britain became a mature industrial power, working men and women dominated massive new urban populations, and the extension of suffrage brought them into the political nation for the first time. Framing his subject chronologically, but treating it thematically, August gives a vivid account of working class life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, examining the issues and concerns central to working-class identity. Identifying shared patterns of experience in the lives of workers, he avoids the limitations of both traditional historiography dominated by economic determinism and party politics, and the revisionism which too readily dismisses the importance of class in British society.

A comprehensive analysis of the international political pronouncements of John Stuart Mill: the pre-eminent thinker of the liberal tradition.