The Confederacy and the Purge of the Unionist Free Traders, 1906–1910

Bibliographic Data

ID8955667
AuthorsAlan Sykes (University of St Andrews, corresponding author)
Year1975
Volume18
Issue2
Pages349-366
Publication date1975-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Historical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0018246x00023724
OpenAlexW1974001356
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited4

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘... in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers ... [which] ... saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement...’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’

Economic history · Empire · Enthusiasm · Ideology · Passion · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tariff · History · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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