TY - JOUR
AU - Zevin, Alexander
AB - Abstract The influence of the City of London on British politics has been a focus of controversy among historians. Likewise, the ‘death of liberal England’, during the years in which Liberals governed in the run-up to the First World War. The Economist, as the City’s leading liberal weekly, allows us to explore the connection between these themes, in ways that challenge scholarly assumptions about both. Under Francis Hirst, its editor and an influential New Liberal thinker in his own right, The Economist acted as a bridge between the realms of finance capital and political practice, at just the moment that a serious conflict appeared to divide them—over the new taxes and social reform measures in the People’s Budget of 1909–10. This article deploys Hirst and his tenure at The Economist—including his ejection in 1916 for supporting a negotiated peace during the First World War—to argue that finance and politics were deeply intertwined in liberal understandings of free trade, empire, and social reform by the turn of the twentieth century; in addition, it suggests that the conflicts that emerged at this time, over the interests of the City and how and if these were compatible with other economic, social, or political aims or actors, prefigured later, better-known clashes that have recurred in Britain down to the present. That the City of London exercises a powerful influence on British politics is itself a powerful idea, stretching back at least to the era of the Glorious Revolution—when in 1694 the Bank of England was set up to fund the wars of the state to emerge from it. Today, it is associated with the ‘heterodox economist’ J. A. Hobson, a New Liberal who theorized the pernicious form that influence took in the context of the Second Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century: international finance, centred on the City, was the ‘governor of the imperial engine’, Hobson claimed, accounting for Britain’s otherwise irrational expansion overseas. This article revisits questions he and the lesser known New Liberal, The Economist editor Francis Hirst, raised about finance and empire, at a time when theories linking the sectional interests of the City to parties and politics in Britain face greater scholarly scepticism than at perhaps any time since they were first put forward.1 One of the most stimulating of the recent challenges to City-centred theories—whether to explain overseas expansion or the continuity of domestic economic policy—arrived in 2004 from Anthony Howe, as part of a larger effort to analyse concrete historical cases in which elected governments and the City, the Bank, or the Treasury were at odds. In his contribution to The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century, Howe examined the conflict that arose between Liberal politicians and City financiers over the welfare provisions—and new and higher taxes to pay for them—contained in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909–10. Among the most contentious of all twentieth-century budgets, in it Lloyd George sought to raise funds for old-age pensions (introduced in 1908) and health and unemployment insurance, primarily through direct taxation of large incomes, land values, and liquor licences—with the aim of avoiding heavy indirect taxation of the working class in the form of tariffs as well as the bulk of the middle classes, while taking more from those above them.2 Here, surely, was a case where the City failed to achieve its aims, protesting in vain against the new ‘Liberal finance’ as a redistributionary assault on wealth and thrift. ‘Under the Liberals between 1905-1914’, argued Howe, ‘rather than unfettered license being granted to the aspirations of cosmopolitan capital, those aspirations were increasingly reined in by the democratic promise of the post-Gladstonian Liberal party’, which ‘put what they saw as the wider needs of the British state and people above the narrow interests of the City’.3 The skirmishes between Liberals and the City over the People’s Budget in the run-up to the First World War is indeed a crucial episode for understanding the influence finance has (or has not) had on British politics. But that understanding risks being skewed unless we set this spat in a longer time frame, in order to assess the political, economic, and intellectual dynamics that produced it. This article proposes a different interpretation of the conflict based on a contextual reading of a source with a unique link to both the Liberal Party and the City: The Economist, the leading free trade business weekly founded in London in 1843, and its editor, who had come to act as a broker between them. Tracing the intellectual trajectory of Francis Hirst up to 1907, and the direction he pushed The Economist for the next 9 years, shows Edwardian Liberalism in a different light—not just less defiant than Howe has argued, or than Lloyd George cared to admit, but less combative than it had been a few years earlier, when ‘pro-Boer’ Liberals like Hobson had adopted theories of financial imperialism to explain Britain’s costly war in Africa. As Liberals moved from opposition into government after 1905–6, however, their attacks on finance were not merely toned down: they were turned upside down, as even radical opponents of the war came to see foreign investment as a pillar of the free trade order, on which mutual prosperity and peace depended. Hirst was a case in point: re-evaluating his conception of classical liberalism as a result of the Boer War, he began to advocate social reform and attack financial speculation as a cause of ‘aggressive imperialism’ between 1899 and 1902. And yet by 1907, he was promoting the ‘hegemony’ of the City as fundamentally benign. How can we explain this apparent reversal, especially at a time of friction between Liberals and the City over social reform and the People’s Budget? The Economist under Hirst offers compelling answers to this question, in which the earlier rupture over the war figures as a brief and qualified exception to the historical rule. After 1903, the liberal case for free trade became ever more entangled with foreign investment—both in reaction to Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign and as a measure of the City’s real importance in shoring up Britain’s economic and imperial position in a world of heightened competition. A strong backer of the Liberal agenda after he took over The Economist, Hirst and his small staff of editors saw the free flow of capital as essential to realizing the Liberal legislative project within a global free trade order underwritten by Britain: they thus sought to conciliate readers in the City—not just before but during and after the budget clashes and even in the face of hostility from ‘the bankers, brokers, dealers and promoters’ whose long-term interests they stoutly claimed to defend. This suggests a more nuanced reading of the relationship between finance capital and liberalism at the turn of the twentieth century, based less on the ‘dominance’ of the former over the latter than on their shared (if shifting) interests. It may also have implications for more recent transformations to Britain’s political economy and to historiographical debates about it. Michael Freeden has argued that the New Liberals laid the foundation for the welfare state in post-war Britain.4 But what if they also rehearsed its limits, given the importance they and their political successors continued to ascribe to capital mobility—and to the City itself, as a pivot of Britain’s world power? Seen from this perspective, turn of the century debates over the interests of finance, on the one hand, and the costs of empire and social reform, on the other, are relevant to the research agenda James Vernon has posited, exploring the reasons for the ‘brief life of social democracy’ in Britain.5 This article aims to contribute to that research question by tracing it to longer lived liberal understandings of finance, empire, and social reform in the pages of The Economist and the thought of Francis Hirst. The Economist: Between Anti-Corn Law League and Aristocracy Founded in 1843 at the height of agitation to repeal the corn laws, The Economist aimed to win readers to rigorous laissez-faire principles—which, the first issue explained, ‘we seriously believe will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality—yes, to extinguish slavery itself’.6 To find the backing needed to start his paper, James Wilson, a Scottish hat manufacturer turned speculator and political economist, made the City central to his pitch, soliciting both Whig grandees like William Pleydell-Bouverie, third Earl of Radnor, as well as the Anti-Corn Law League agitators John Bright and Richard Cobden. To the latter, he promised to reach ‘the higher circles of the landed and monied interests’—in particular in the City, where a by-election was due to pit a free trader against a protectionist. In exchange, Wilson received the vital distribution networks the League had built up while retaining full ownership and control over The Economist.7 For the first decade Wilson also wrote much of it, working ‘indefatigably’, according to Herbert Spencer, his sub-editor from 1848 to 1853.8 The Economist not only turned a regular profit after just 2 years. It offered a political platform to Wilson, whose subsequent career neatly captures the intercalation of state and financial power in modern Britain: elected to parliament in 1847, Lord Russell quickly appointed him to the India Board; in 1852, as a powerful financial secretary to the Treasury, he assisted Gladstone in crafting his first budgets in the Peelite–Whig coalition of Lord Aberdeen; in 1859 Lord Palmerston bade him quit the Board of Trade to be ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, as the Times put it.9 At the same time as it advanced his political standing, The Economist reoriented his business activities: as he set out to put the British Raj on solid financial footing after the Indian Mutiny, the Chartered Bank he co-founded in 1852 was opening branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai, and Hong Kong to profit from Indian opium pouring into China.10 The value of empire became so central to The Economist, it even provoked a row with Cobden and Bright when the paper took the government line on the Crimean War in 1854. Wilson had earlier sided with them in seeing free trade as a route to peace as well as plenty; now, his Economist called this a ‘shallow doctrine’, arguing that war might be the only way to secure ‘freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of thought and freedom of worship’ in Russia and China.11 The Economist, in short, became a conduit between the dominant form of liberalism as it took hold in Westminster and Whitehall and sections of the City most concerned with imperial and foreign investments. Over time, this relationship deepened. Wilson’s son-in-law and successor as editor, the banker Walter Bagehot, insisted that family trustees and future editors pay special attention to its upkeep. In 1873, as circulation reached 3,600 (at eight pence an issue) despite new competition, Bagehot attributed The Economist’s success to his mix of direct knowledge of money markets and political analysis, a ‘support to the paper’ that ‘strengthens its circulation’.12 In 1883 his ex-stringer Edward Johnstone was tasked with preserving this balance in coverage for the next 24 years; the reputation of the paper was so distinct amongst the run of the business press that he could play a direct role in resolving the Barings Crisis in 1890, mediating between joint-stock bankers, the Bank of England, and the reading public.13 When Johnstone suffered a stroke in 1907, the trustees chose a dynamic young editor who seemed even better prepared to carry out the advice that Bagehot had given them some 30 years earlier. Francis Hirst would renew ties to the leading Liberals that both Wilson and Bagehot had cultivated after a hiatus since 1886—when the paper had swung to the breakaway Liberal Unionists, in reaction to Gladstone’s support for Home Rule. In the event, Hirst’s brief and tumultuous tenure at The Economist demonstrates both how much liberalism had moved away from the laissez-faire of the Victorian era and yet how decisively it had come to rely on a connection to the City in order to craft, frame, and sustain a political programme in office. Francis Hirst en Route to The Economist: The Intellectual Trajectory of a Liberal Hirst set out on his path to the editor’s chair over 10 years before the outbreak of war, at Oxford, where he studied classics and economics, under F. Y. Edgeworth, and took a leading part in debates as Union president. There he met the Liberal luminaries Gladstone, Asquith, and John Morley.14 In Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men, dedicated to Morley in 1897, Hirst and Hillaire Belloc, J. A. Simon, J. S. Phillimore, J. L. Hammond, and P. J. Macdonell all advised Liberals to return to first principles as the ticket back into office: peace, retrenchment, and reform, the heroic struggles of Cobden and Bright for free trade, with attacks on collectivist and socialist ‘fads’ inside the party as well as Fabianism outside.15 Hirst organized the project after another electoral rout for Liberals in 1895 while teaching at the London School of Economics; he also wrote its most polemical piece, arguing that Liberals had accepted state meddling in the economy—Factory Acts, Death Duties, trade unions, compulsory education, income tax—only on an individual basis, to ‘prevent men, women, or children from suffering in their capacity of wealth producers’.16 Here was a fairly staunch restatement of classical liberalism, without much time for developments to its left. ‘Is it possible’, Belloc asked in an indicative passage, ‘to revert at this hour to the simple doctrines which formed the strength of our first leaders? Most undoubtedly it is’. If this work made a name for Hirst, the Second Boer War saw him move away from the positions it articulated, towards the collectivist ‘fads’ he had just denounced. Deviling for Morley on his Life of Gladstone, Hirst joined the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism, where he met future party leaders Henry Campbell Bannerman and Lloyd George. He also began writing ‘pro-Boer’ articles for the Speaker, collaborating with Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse, two leading lights of the New Liberalism, a loose assortment of thinkers who favoured a more positive role for the state, ‘removing obstacles’ in the way of individual fulfillment.17 The war cut down the distance between Liberal collectivists like Hobhouse and Hobson and radical Cobdenite individualists like Hirst, uniting them not just against Conservatives leading the war but against the so-called Liberal Imperialists in their own party.18 On ‘foreign and home politics’, Hirst wrote of Hobhouse at the time, ‘both of us have moved, but he, I think, the most’.19 Hirst may never have shed his Gladstonian views on sound finance, still less gone as far as Hobson—whose underconsumptionist diagnosis of British capitalism implied that state intervention might be required to prop up demand—but for the better part of the next two decades, Hirst allied himself to New Liberal journalists and politicians on most questions of foreign and domestic policy.20 If the war brought these formerly distinct strands of Liberal closer together, it also forced them to explain what had launched Britain on such an adventure. Many pointed directly at City speculators, along with mine-owners on the Rand, corrupt politicians, and venal journalists. Hobson may have developed the more sophisticated critique of finance capital, and the unequal distribution of wealth driving it, starting with his War in South Africa in 1900. But Hirst gave Hobson’s ideas his own slant in Liberalism and Empire, published later that year with Hammond and Gilbert Murray.21 Like Hobson, Hirst argued that the scramble for Africa in the decades prior to the war was misguided on commercial grounds, since British trade with foreign countries was worth three times as much as with the Empire. ‘Trade follows the flag’, he quipped, ‘over jungles, swamps, deserts’ and ‘in the face of facts, arguments and arithmetic’.22 Only a small group of capitalists stood to gain from such policies: arms-makers, the spoiled sons of free-trading fathers, ‘international financiers’. ‘Democratic as it may appear on paper’, wrote Hirst, his ire drawn above all by mineral magnate Cecil Rhodes, ‘the British Constitution is very little better than a pretence. It is only a mask over the face of plutocracy’. Condemnation of the corrosive effects of ‘financial imperialism’ on the British polity became quite common among Liberals in the context of the ‘Khaki Election’ of 1900.23 In the midst of this bitter electoral fight, Hirst warned that the war, and debts arising from it, could only benefit Conservatives, providing them with excuses to scrap free trade, raise tariffs, and taxes, as they cut out ‘productive investments’ in education and health in favour of unproductive expenditure on the navy and army. Liberals must instead renounce ‘aggressive imperialism’—in order to pay for old-age pensions while retaining free trade—if they wanted to win power.24 Despite his forebodings, in the years following the electoral defeat of 1900, Hirst had cause to feel that his advice to Liberals about the road to electoral renewal was being heeded. Indeed, his career provided ample evidence: from 1902, Hirst became one of the most effective propagandists for the common front of radical Cobdenites and social reformers, in ways that ought to alter our sense of him and his editorship of The Economist. Writing for the Speaker, Nation, Manchester Guardian, and as City editor for the Tribune, he also penned books updating the Cobdenite trinity of peace, retrenchment, and reform for this new era—from Free Trade and Other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School in 1902 to the Arbiter in Council in 1906 (attracting the interest of legal scholar F. W. Maitland, Andrew Carnegie, and Lord Chancellor Sir Robert Reid).25 Hirst even married—to Helena Cobden, Richard’s great-niece, in 1903—and travelled, liberally: establishing important global contacts that he would deploy in The Economist, including Luigi Einaudi in Italy, Josef Redlich in Austria, and Herbert Hoover in America.26 Hirst moved closer to the centre of this liberal universe when Sir Robert Giffen, a fellow member of the Political Economy Club, advised Eliza Bagehot to make him the next Economist editor in 1907.27 That this seemed a reasonable choice needs emphasizing, since Hirst has been misread as an intellectual outlier in light of his later refusal to go along with the First World War. He neither ‘automatically associated finance with speculation, gambling, luxury, and corruption’, nor was he an ‘extreme’ pacifist.28 These views would have disbarred him from The Economist—a paper so keenly interested in foreign investment and adamant that war had often been a legitimate means for securing the freedom of intercourse it required. By 1907 Hirst no longer spoke of ‘financial imperialism’, and Liberals overall were less critical of the City than they had been up to 1902.29 Becoming Editor After the Landslide: A New Tune on Finance? Four years after the end of the Second Boer War, Liberals were elected in a landslide. To the New Liberals, it seemed a special vindication over Joseph Chamberlain and his campaign since 1903 for imperial preference—a victory, in other words, over the twin evils of imperialism and protection. The battle that preceded it, between free traders and tariff reformers, was not just the ‘most extensive popular debate in the history of British politics’, fought out in papers, meetings, and countless forums—but one that the newly united Liberals won based on the very synthesis of Cobdenism and social reform that Hirst and the New Liberals represented. In the process, as Howe argues, they altered the meaning of free trade: detached from nineteenth-century laissez-faire, it became compatible with state action at home and allowed Liberals in 1906 (two-thirds of whom pledged to enact old-age pensions) to appeal to the working classes (by then over half the electorate).30 What Hirst and The Economist add to this picture is just as significant, however. For as free trade came to apply more to external trade, so capital export from the City became more central to it, not least as the means by which Britain balanced that trade, turning a deficit in goods into a surplus with invisible income on investments abroad.31 As editor of The Economist, Hirst became a leading commentator on—and defender of—the City and its ramified global interests. Whatever stigma he had attached to the ‘gold-reefed City’ in 1900 was a faint memory by 1909, when he portrayed it rather as a model of free trade dynamism, uniting the Empire and world through investment rather than brute force. The most famous formulation of this idea again belonged to someone else—Norman Angell, who stressed disruption of credit as the crucial reason war was unprofitable, and unlikely, in Europe in The Great Illusion (1910), which found strong support in the university clubs, urban reading groups, and periodicals of the radical milieus Hobson and Hirst frequented.32 But here Hirst did not merely follow Angell in establishing a link between foreign investment and peace.33 In 1910 the reissue of Bagehot’s Lombard Street was an occasion for Hirst to savour the global reach of the City and the banker-editor who had anticipated its turn to foreign flotation. The Boer War had been a setback, Hirst wrote in The Economist, swallowing £160 million or 2 years’ worth of British savings, but these losses should be put in perspective: Wall Street’s boastful anticipations that it would succeed London as the centre of the financial world were humbled to the dust by the crisis of 1907, when all the banks of the United States suspended payments. Never was the City of London’s hegemony more plainly demonstrated. The Bank of England’s rate controlled the world. London attracted gold from every part of the compass and doled it out to New York and Chicago as a good doctor distributes drugs to suffering patients.34 In a guide to investing published the next year, Hirst beamed at ‘the banking and financial centre of the world, our merchants and shippers seek profit in every corner of the globe; our investors large and small have interests in every continent, and the London Stock Exchange List is itself a sort of key to the distribution of trade and capital’.35 While he might be accused of a bias in favour of small investors, he added, ‘I would beg to assure the reader that he and I have no better friends than the numberless bankers, brokers, dealers and promoters of new undertakings who practise callings so useful and so indispensable with the highest sense of honour’. The need to educate the public about this ‘vast and delicate’ system revolving round London, he explained by way of an epigram from Burke: ‘Great Empires and little minds go ill together’.36 The question of how to account for this apparent reversal has bedeviled historians.37 That is partly because they have given insufficient weight to the political context in which critiques of financial imperialism were first formulated and later revised. The earlier context was a war Hirst and other pro-Boers fiercely opposed and a bitter fight not just with Conservatives but fellow Liberals for control of the party. The result was a critique that sounded more radical and consistent than it was. In fact, what Hirst’s writings as editor from 1907 onwards allow us to see more clearly is that even in the earlier period, there were limits to that critique: Hirst attacked the City less over stock market speculation than Rhodes’s ‘rigging’ of it, while Hirst and other Speaker writers defended the ‘liberal empire’ against ‘aggressive imperialism’.38 Hobson’s paradoxical-sounding statement in Imperialism can be viewed in the same light. ‘A completely socialist State which kept good books and presented regular balance-sheets’, would, he wrote, ‘soon discard Imperialism; an intelligent laissez-faire democracy which gave duly proportionate weight in its policy to all economic interests alike would do the same’.39 Such a government, from this perspective—pledged to a mix of socializing reforms at home and free trade abroad—arrived in 1906. Once Liberals took power, moreover, their adherence to this formula led them to view the issue of foreign investment as critical to the success of their economic policies. Asquith and Lloyd George, back-to-back chancellors, required buoyant growth to raise funds for social reform and looked for it from the City: indeed, as Avner Offer has shown, both men saw the latter as central to the global division of labour that had made free-trade Britain prosperous. Furnished with arguments from the two leading liberal business editors of the day—George Paish at the Statist as well as Hirst at The Economist—they maintained that capital sent to develop transport, agriculture, and mining in foreign and colonial lands would result in British industrial exports now and cheap food and raw materials later.40 Historians are quite right to draw our attention to the clash that got underway between the City and the Liberal government in 1909 over this very issue, when death duties and super taxes proposed in Lloyd George’s People’s Budget elicited fierce resistance—and direct threats—that capital export could turn into ‘capital flight’. What Hirst’s The Economist underscores is how lopsided the ensuing conflict would be since both sides agreed on the need to safeguard the City and the power it gave Britain in the global economy. People’s Budget Versus City: The Economist as Broker In response to Lloyd George’s proposed budget, the banker Lord Rothschild immediately wrote an open letter with thirty-six other City ‘grandees’ warning not only that the chancellor’s new taxes would reduce the stock of capital available for productive investment but also harm Britain’s reputation for assuring ‘indisputable safety for capital’.41 Five months later in a budget debate in the House of Lords, the banker Lord Revelstoke argued the mere possibility of such levies was already damaging that hard-won reputation and ‘the legitimate flow of capital abroad had become an exodus’.42Bankers Magazine, still fuming at the unabated fall in the price of Consols (a fixation of business journalism of the period, since these were the principal reserve security, accounting for a large portion of bank reserves, investment portfolios, and savings accounts), gave space to the anxious former The Economist editor Inglis Palgrave, who warned that excessive taxation could send Britain down the same slope of decline as eighteenth-century Holland.43 This push-back did constitute open conflict with the City—leading to a constitutional crisis, two general elections, and a threat to flood the House of Lords with Liberal peers if the upper chamber did not acquiesce on the People’s Budget—between 1909 and 1911. Two significant things remain to be said about it, however: first, it also indicated how New Liberals had shifted from warning that capital export was a ‘motor’ of imperialism during the Second Boer War to making their case for peace and free trade dependent on it; secondly, that the conflict took place on terrain that was always favourable to the City. With a foot in both camps, The Economist under Hirst illustrates these points. The Economist proceeded with caution during the ensuing budget dispute, preferring to assuage, cajole, and caution holdouts in the City, by emphasizing the probity of Liberal social legislation, and the long-term benefits that Britain’s financial hub would derive from it. The ‘Lloyd George budget’ was ‘bold’, ‘ambitious’, and ‘equitable’—offsetting spending on social reform with a mix of indirect taxes on luxuries like motorcars, tobacco, and liquor and direct ones on income, estates, and land.44 Above all, it paid for social reforms without touching free trade. ‘The bankers and brokers and shippers, merchants and financiers of the City need ever and anon to be reminded, that although the increasing burden of direct taxes upon their incomes is naturally exasperating, it is infinitely preferable to indirect taxes upon their trade and commerce which will take away their business, hand it to foreign centres, and inevitably destroy the supremacy of London’.45 Hirst made a similar case outside the pages of The Economist, leading the City’s Free Trade Committee, which included eminent bankers such as Lord Avebury, Sir Felix Schuster, and Frederick Huth Jackson; he even contemplated an offer to contest the first of two general elections in 1910 in the City with their support.46 The Economist was less often combative than reassuring. It could even be defensive, as for example, when Hirst tried to rebut charges that British capital was being sent to employ cheap foreign labour and equip industrial rivals, while at home, manufacturers starved for want of funds. In rejecting this picture of self-harm, Hirst played his best card on behalf of Liberals in the City. For there was no better authority on the free flow of capital abroad than The Economist, which kept weekly track of the ‘interest on foreign and colonial government securities, company dividends, income disclosed by bankers, coupon dealers, persons, firms, public companies and railways’, and the top national customers for debt.47 Asquith ought to remind distraught bankers, advised The Economist, that Consols had fallen further under the Conservatives and to his strides in cutting the national debt that the latter had built up fighting the Boers.48 ‘Surely we can look composedly upon the exports of British capital’ in this context, argued the paper, putting the total at over £3 billion in 1909, ‘as the surplus profits of an enormously wealthy country, whose trade spreads all over the world’. ‘There is no fear of our home industries being starved. Capital is cheaper here and credit more abundant than in any other country.’49 Conservative politicians, journalists, and bankers, out to smear the People’s Budget, were arguing the opposite—using The Economist’s own figures to try to show that London sent abroad over eight times what it raised for domestic purposes. ‘They omit to explain that most sections of British industry are never publically financed, but draw on private men’, as well as provincial banks, syndicates, and insurers.50 Fear for the safety of capital had nothing to do with this disparity between inbound and outbound investment, and The Economist feigned surprise to hear Lord Revelstoke, head banker at Barings, bewail the ‘exodus’ of British capital on account of ‘wicked’ Lloyd George ‘to quarters where it is more warmly welcomed’. ‘We fancy the largest foreign loan in London since this Government came into office was issued by Baring Bros’ to Russia—where riskiness and high returns, not security, had attracted it.51 It was poor countries that borrowed in London, and this was a boon for Britain, Hirst argued in step with Paish and Hobson: pushing back distant frontiers would yield a new bounty of cheap food to workers (price rises since the mid-1890s had hurt their buying power), raw materials to industry, and a steady demand for British exports.52 Clearly, faith in free trade had been shaken inside the City if a such a reiteration of its basic tenets was necessary; yet The Economist did not flinch from the task, offering constant reminders that the long-run ‘supremacy’ of the City itself depended on the New Liberal mix of social reform and ‘free trade finance’.53 Return of the Repressed? Financial Imperialism and the Road to War The Economist under Hirst did not just sell social reform to wavering financiers; it also advocated on their behalf to the government, in a back-and-forth that argued for their mutual self-interest. If the City should be prepared to pay a modest price for the preservation of its ‘financial hegemony’, Liberals needed to practise fiscal restraint: otherwise, they risked not only a loss of confidence but the sacrifice of that other benefit that had come to be associated with capital export, peace. Indeed, so widespread was the view that global financial interdependence made war irrational; if not impossible, it seemed to blind radicals like Hirst to signs that cosmopolitan capital remained at least as great a destabilizing force as in their earlier analyses, from the turn of the century. How did The Economist under Hirst react to these signs, and what do they tell us about the relationship between Liberals and the City in the run-up to the First World War? Hirst may have muted his critique of finance after 1902, but he was steadfast that paying for social reform required military retrenchment—not just new taxes. For if raised too high, these would indeed endanger thrift, hard work, and ‘safety of capital’. He thus kept up pressure on his old Liberal Imperialist foes, as well as the Tory press. In 1907 Hirst privately wrote in his new capacity as The Economist editor, which ‘compels me to watch trade and finance very closely’, to the then prime minister, urging Campbell Bannerman to back Colonial Secretary ‘Lord Willy’ Harcourt and ‘make it the policy of the Government to return to the pre-war level … cutting four millions at least off army and navy this year’.54 He also tried to light a fire under Asquith at the Treasury, who sought to calm Hirst by sketching his fiscal plans for 1906–9.55 In return, Hirst praised Asquith in The Economist for trimming that year’s naval budget, while demanding more cuts, as this was still twice as high as before the Second Boer War.56 Hirst pressed his views in Cabinet, the National Liberal Club, Liberal Federation, and in lectures and letters after Campbell-Bannerman’s death in 1908—which in his (retrospective) view fatally weakened resistance to the naval panic that gripped the government the next year. His The Economist denounced calls for four let alone eight new dreadnoughts; and mocked as fantasy a German invasion of England, by which the Daily Mail, the Times, and even the left-leaning Clarion and Daily News tried to justify them.57 And yet despite Hirst’s efforts, the relationship between Liberalism as a force for social reform, on the one hand, and for peace, on the other, turned out to be just the opposite of what he predicted. Lloyd George and Churchill finally won the backing needed in Cabinet to press on with health and unemployment insurance, land, death, and super taxes, in the People’s Budget, not by halting the naval race with Germany but in joining with Liberal Imperialists on its escalation.58 The elections in 1910 encouraged them to keep on in this direction since these slashed the number of radical Liberal MPs prepared to challenge the imperialists over armaments.59 Hirst showed greater combativity in letters to party allies after 1910, but he never registered this change or showed much sense that he and other radicals were ‘whistling in the dark’, as one historian has described their efforts.60 Hirst continued to believe that pressure on the Cabinet could halt the arms race, for outside it, ‘old fashioned Liberals and modern Radicals’ outnumbered imperialists.61 Spending on social reform was compatible with rising military estimates for the majority of ministers. Nor was the idea Angell did most to popularize—that foreign investments were a form of insurance against war—much more straightforward empirically. Avner Offer has carefully exposed the flaws in such reasoning, but his explanation that Liberals like Hobson had altered their views since the Second Boer War because of a ‘change in historical circumstances’ begs the question. What had changed? Japan, as Hirst understood, was tapping the London money markets to finance a war with Russia in the Far East, where victory in 1905 raised its credit high enough to carve out an empire. Tokyo borrowed £84 million from 1897 to 1913, becoming the City’s single best customer in the years up to the First World War.62 Lloyd George made explicit the connection between investments of just this sort and Britain’s great power status. In 1911, as chancellor, he delivered a hawkish speech at the height of the Agadir Crisis, in which he backed French claims to Morocco, rebuked Germany, and argued that Britain—with the greatest financial stake in the prosperity of other countries—could not, for this reason, afford to have its interests in them overlooked. ‘It is essential in the highest interest not merely of this country but of the world, that Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige among the great powers.’63 In The Economist, Hirst reacted to Lloyd George’s speech by minimizing ‘a few words taken out of context’ from the mouth of a ‘notorious pacifist’, even as Hirst warned how disastrous a war would be over a ‘sordid squabble, a scramble for concessions and commercial monopolies’.64 Yet Hirst was not alone in seeing the outcome of the Agadir crisis as a vindication of European finance, which had forced intemperate statesmen to back down: when a financial panic gripped Berlin after French bank withdrawals, Germany had to accept a compromise in North Africa for French concessions in West Africa.65 For The Economist, the moral of the story was that more French capital should cross the Rhine, with the Paris bourse taking on German industrial listings, spinning ties of mutual interest like those the City wove with the Empire.66 The geopolitical conflicts that such financial links could also entail were never seriously considered. When a new diplomatic crisis struck in the Balkans 3 years after Agadir, Hirst saw still less reason to get involved and predicted the Liberals could be trusted to keep Britain out of it. In the last week of July 1914, recalled one The Economist journalist, Hirst ‘was calmly planning a summer holiday which was to take him to the battlefields of Europe’, arriving at the office in a ‘brown linen suit which a very hot day and the imminent prospect of departure made suitable’.67 On 1 August, The Economist foresaw a short, local conflict. For Britain, war was ‘utterly opposed to the interests of the business community’ and ‘the instincts of the working classes’, and it could see no reason why ‘any British Government was entitled to plunge this nation into the horrors of war, in a quarrel which is no more of our making and no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan’.68 Britain entered the war 3 days later. First World War: Saving the City? Without understanding the conciliatory attitude of even radical Liberals to the City, it is difficult to explain much of what passed between them in 1914. For Howe, it is ‘ironic’ that Lloyd George ended a period of conflict with leading financiers by bailing them out as global markets froze at the end of July. Rather, it should be seen as emblematic of Liberals’ 9 years in power, which made free trade finance a centrepiece of its political programme. According to a recent study, in ‘the most severe systemic crisis London has ever experienced – even more so than 1866 or 2007–8’, the Bank of England doled out £133 million, or 5 per cent of GDP, to banks and discount houses, taking a third of the entire discount market off their books. Lloyd George garnered wild praise—on the floor of the Stock Exchange no less, which he shuttered on 31 July—for these and other decisive measures.69 For The Economist, in contrast, these and other market interventions confirmed all its fears about the consequences of just a few days of war on the hegemony of the City.70 Over the next 2 years, it attacked one betrayal of liberalism after another, with this bailout the original sin against it, followed by martial law, censorship, tariffs, taxes, conscription, and compulsion.71 In withholding his support for these policies, and in calling for a negotiated peace after the Battle of the Marne, Hirst now diverged sharply from the mainstream of the Liberal Party and financial press, setting up a clash that led to his ouster as editor in 1916. But just as important as his break with party and press was his commitment to finance. This continuity is especially striking, given Hirst’s bitter disillusionment at British participation in the war. Hirst heard the news on 4 August with John Burns, who had resigned his post at the Board of Trade 2 days before, anticipating the decision for war. Both men burst into tears.72 Lord Morley, Hirst’s mentor, quit a day later, along with Charles Trevelyan, earning them emotional praise from Hirst.73 At The Economist, Walter Layton, a future editor, asked Hirst to reprint an old The Economist article from 1871 claiming that Parisian banks had kept their doors open for the entire Franco-Prussian War, in order to ‘restore confidence on the financial front’ in London. Hirst told him not to bother: ‘Grass will be growing in Lombard Street before the end of the year.’74 By 1915 Hirst grimly welcomed the fall of the Liberal Government he had defended, while criticizing Asquith for heading a coalition.75 ‘I am not sorry to see the organised hypocrisy of Liberal Imperialism based upon the unholy alliance of Jingoism and Socialism falling to pieces’, he told C. P. Scott, publisher of the Manchester Guardian.76 Pressure for conscription had clear goals: ‘discipline and enslave the working class and keep down Ireland’.77 But even as his private correspondence showed strains of his earlier pro-Boer vitriol, it eschewed the attack on finance that had been its hallmark. Indeed, The Economist maintained that war was inimical to financial interests, and thus to the nation as a whole, and it appears it was as much for pessimism on this ‘financial front’ that Hirst lost his job. In ‘The Finance of the War’, a talk in Leeds in November 1915, Hirst called for ‘courageous financial leadership’, using ‘our superior financial strength’ to ‘win the victory’ so that ‘finance must have a controlling voice in policy’. But what he meant by this was something different than total war, which was neither possible nor desirable. ‘The maintenance of public credit and of our gold standard is of supreme importance both for success in war and for the maintenance of British commerce and of the British Empire. It was no longer a case of subordinating money needs to military. We must now reverse this maxim and subordinate our military schemes to the means of defraying them. Otherwise, we should be pulled up short and sharp. We must cut our military coat according to our financial cloth’. ‘Political economy would end the war’, he concluded—as Lloyd George prepared to oust Asquith for his ‘business as usual’ approach—or ‘the war would end political economy’.78 In response to these and other warnings about the cost of the war, the Times began to run ‘Through German Eyes’, a column that often featured German papers quoting The Economist: in one, the Lokalanzeiger cited ‘the authoritative London financial journal’ to suggest that the City favoured peace negotiations.79 This campaign took its toll by 1916, at which point ‘Hirst had brought the proprietors of The Economist to the point of revolt’.80 In June, the Times broke a story it had helped to write. ‘Questions are being asked in the City as to the prospects of a change in the editorial attitude of the Economist towards the war’, it explained, announcing Hirst’s replacement by one of its former editors, Hartley Withers.81 On 8 July, a week after declaring The Economist circulation and letter bag showed his criticisms of the war were ‘rapidly gaining ground in business circles’, Hirst received less than half a column on page eleven to make his closing remarks.82 Hirst’s replacement as editor is a clear indication of the stakes involved for the trustees. A former City editor at the Times, Withers came from the same intersection of liberalism and finance as past editors of The Economist—Seligman Brothers and Treasury—whose owners were eager to repair its fraying ties to both.83 Withers’ main divergence with Hirst was on armaments and war. ‘Mr Angell’ claimed that ‘war does not and cannot pay’, but he failed to prove ‘that it does not pay better to win than to be beaten’, Withers had written in 1914.84 In 1915 he explained how well the City had faced the days leading up to war—itself the ‘greatest evidence of London’s strength as a financial centre’.85 Under him, The Economist did a volte-face—rejecting calls for an early peace and promoting ‘financial heroism’, which burnished the image of the City as a patriotic fund-raiser for the inter-Allied cause, and as vital to its victory as an adequate supply of munitions or food.86 After 2 years of encouraging the rich to eschew luxuries and reinvest profits into war bonds, the paper could demand similar acts of austerity from the rest of the population: in 1918 it endorsed the Cunliffe Report, including calls for a quick return to gold at the prewar parity, a run of budget surpluses, state withdrawal from the money market, and rejection of a post-war ‘capital levy’.87The Economist ended the war with its position as a broker intact: advocate for the City and a major influence pushing post-war governments to reinstate liberal fiscal and monetary policies. Finance as Free Trade: Conclusion The man overseeing the turn to austerity in 1919 was Lloyd George, whose later boast that Liberals tamed the City over the People’s Budget ought to be reconsidered in light of the trajectory outlined here. Hirst broke with Lloyd George over the war, but in the longer history of The Economist in which I have tried to situate the conflict between Liberals and the City, the former never questioned the fundamental centrality of the latter. Rather than a straightforward reversal, it was the tenacious commitment to free trade alongside social reform and empire that reinforced the Liberals’ reliance on the City. In the aftermath of the Second Boer War, the idea of London as the nerve centre of global capitalism looked even more attractive than before—as a means to preserve British power without tariffs or wars while accommodating later industrial developers inside a world system in which London still set the rules; on this basis, Hirst could connect the City to a Cobdenite vision of peace—even if Cobden had attacked ‘bankers and money mongers’ as ‘outworks’ of an idle and warlike aristocracy.88 In retrospect, the clash over the People’s Budget may be less significant as an example of Liberals standing up—or giving in—to the City, than for the ways they and their successors continued to define the national interest through it. The hostility of Lord Revelstoke to redistribution and taxation was much fiercer than the counter-response from Liberals, for the latter agreed not just that capital flight, if true, would be a disaster but that the hegemony of the City was a pillar of British hegemony as a whole. In this sense, the ‘last Liberal government’ was also the first to grapple with a recurring feature of twentieth-century British politics: spectres of crises of investor confidence, haunting ministries of the centre left, whose halting responses were magnified in the crisis of 1931 and have continued down to the present. Footnotes 1 In the 1990s impressive synthetic histories began to appear about the City, weakening the pull of the neo-Hobsonian ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis that had sought to explain imperial expansion in the previous decade. P. J. Cain, and A. G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas I. The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850’, Economic History Review, 39 (1986), 501–25; ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850–1945’, Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 1–26. Scholars have questioned the cohesion of the City as an ‘interest group’, given the variety of activities carried on there. Ranald C. Michie, The City of London: Continuity and Change since 1850 (London, 1992); David Kynaston, The City of London: A History (London, 1994–2001). Martin Daunton has called the idea that a ‘City-Bank-Treasury nexus’ ever dominated economic or foreign policy ‘a regrettable commonplace’ that ‘obscures other, and more interesting, features of policy formation’: ‘How to Pay for the War: State, Society and Taxation in Britain 1917–24’, English Historical Review, 111 (1996), 882–919. 2 Bruce K. Murray, The People’s Budget 1909/10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics (Oxford, 1980), 7. 3 A. E. Howe, ‘The Liberals and the City, 1900–1931’, in Ranald Michie and Philip Williamson, eds, The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2004), 136. 4 Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978), 1; Michael Freeden, ‘The Coming of the Welfare State’, in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2003), 7–44. 5 James Vernon, ‘The Local, the Imperial and the Global: Repositioning Twentieth Century Britain and the Brief Life of its Social Democracy’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), 418. 6 ‘Preliminary Number and Prospectus’, Economist, 1 August 1843. 7 Cobden to Wilson, 22 June 1843, Wilson Papers, Manchester Central Library. Lord Radnor gave £500, and the League ordered 20,000 copies to be sent to ‘all the leading Tories in Manchester and neighborhood’. Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League: 1838–1846 (London, 1958), 182–4. Emilie Barrington, The Servant of All: Pages from the Family, Social and Political Life of My Father, James Wilson: Twenty Years of Mid-Victorian Life, 1 (London, 1927), 69. 8 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 6 (London, 1904), 379. 9 The Times, 5 August 1859; Emilie Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot (London, 1914), 286. 10 ‘The Bankers’ Gazette: Bank Returns and Money Market’, Economist, 9 October 1852; Zhaojin Ji, A History of Modern Shanghai Banking: The Rise and Decline of China’s Finance Capitalism (Armonk, 2003), 43. The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China Subscription Contract, 16 November 1852, London Municipal Archive. 11 ‘True Purpose of the War’, Economist, 2 December 1854. Asked if he had read the issue backing an ultimatum to Moscow in December 1855, Cobden replied, ‘I never see the Economist though I have it on my conscience that I was mainly concerned in starting it. It was always a dull stupid paper even when it was honest’. Cobden to Joseph Parkes, 18 December 1855, in Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, eds, Letters of Richard Cobden: Volume III: 1854–1859 (Oxford 2012), 174. ‘Peace the Result of Free Trade’, Economist, 9 May 1857. 12 Memo to the family trustees in Bagehot, CW, 14 (London, 1986), 424–6. 13 ‘Retiring Editor’, The Bankers’ Magazine, 150. ‘Mr Edward Johnstone’, Economist, 13 December 1913; Wayne Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press (Aldershot, 1989), 35–9; ‘Liquidation of the Barings’, Economist, 22 November 1890; Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: Barings 1762–1929 (London, 1988), 237–42. 14 Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days (London, 1947), 133–6. 15 Hillaire Belloc et al., Essays in Liberalism (London, 1897), 3–4, 19–20, 25, 155. 16 Hirst favoured control of ‘natural monopolies’ (‘coinage, sanitation, water, gas, tramways’), where competition ‘is difficult or impossible’. Essays in Liberalism, 69, 82–3, 89. 17 Recent scholarship downgrades the importance of T. H. Green in this development. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1979), 12–18, 43, 55–8; Murray, The People’s Budget, 34, 95–7; Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1979), 171–84. 18 ‘We wish we could discover a single reason for prefixing the epithet Liberal to the new type of Imperialism’. Hirst, ‘Pitt the Youngest’, Speaker, 4 November 1899. H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of A Post-Gladstonian Élite (Oxford, 1973), 110–19. 19 Hirst, Golden Days, 174, 193, 205, 214; Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978), 77. 20 The notable exception was on women’s suffrage, which Hirst opposed in and outside the Economist. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, 80–1. Hirst shocked Hobson by suggesting that both should resign from a New Reform Club committee if it took up the ‘unconstitutional’, ‘Anti-Liberal’ issue, 23 January 1906, Hirst Papers, Box 13. 21 Hirst et al., Liberalism and Empire, 16 (London, 1900), 72. 22 Hirst et al., Liberalism and Empire, 72. 23 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1935), 29. Simon Mackley, ‘Liberal Party Politics, the South African War, and the Rhetoric of Imperial Governance’, Twentieth Century British History, 29 (2018), 4. 24 A ‘great future awaits that portion of the Liberal Party’ that repudiates ‘wasteful excesses of aggressive imperialism’ while maintaining ‘the superiority of our fleet at the proportions fixed by tradition and reason’. W. Hirst et al., Liberalism and Empire, 32, 113. 25 Hirst, The Arbiter in Council (London, 1906), 350, 507 . Hirst, Golden Days, 238–40. Francis Hirst, Commerce and Property in Naval Warfare (London, 1906). ‘Private Property at Sea’, The Times, 11 November 1913. 26 Hirst, Golden Days, 136, 228–9; F. W. Hirst By his Friends (London, 1958), 63–73; Hirst Papers, Box 13. 27 The Economist: A Centenary Volume (London, 1943), 71. 28 P. J. Cain, Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance 1887–1938 (Oxford, 2002), 97; Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, 78; a ‘committed pacifist’, a ‘completely closed mind’, Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843–1993 (London, 1993), 398, 465, 525. ‘I have never been able to agree with the Quakers a clearly aggressive attack on one nation by another – e.g. that of Soviet Russia on Finland, or of Germany on Holland – should be resisted unless resistance is hopeless.’ Hirst, Golden Days, 233, 256, 258. 29 For the same shift in Hobson, see Cain, Hobson and Imperialism, 97, 177–99. 30 A. E. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England: 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), 192–3, 268–72. F. Bealey and H. Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906 (London, 1958), 143–6, 158. A. K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906 (Newton Abbott, 1973); H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics 1892–1914 (Cambridge, 1973). H. C. G. Matthew et al., ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, 91 (1976), 733–5. 31 Robert Skidelsky, ‘Retreat from Leadership’, in Benjamin M. Rowland, ed., Balance of Power or Hegemony (New York, 1976), 165, 173, 175–7. 32 See Howard Weinroth, ‘Norman Angell and The Great Illusion: An Episode in Pre-1914 Pacifism’, The Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 564, 568–9; Martin Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872–1967 (Oxford, 2009), 90–109, 155. 33 Hirst praised Angell as an effective propagandist. Economist: ‘Economics of War’, 21 May 1910; Illusions of War and The Progress of Peace’, 20 May 1911; ‘Norman Angell and His Critics’, 6 June 1914. 34 ‘Bagehot’s Lombard Street’, Economist, 23 July 1910. 35 Francis Hirst, The Stock Exchange: A Short Study of Investment and Speculation (London, 1911), 243. ‘British Finance in 1910’, Economist, 11 January 1911. 36 Hirst, Stock Exchange, 15–17. 37 P. J. Cain, ‘J. A. Hobson, Cobdenism and the Radical Theory of Economic Imperialism, 1898–1914’, The Economic History Review, 31 (1978), 581–2; P. F. Clarke, ‘Hobson, Free Trade, and Imperialism’, 34 (1981), 308–12. 38 ‘Blind neither to the glories nor yet the responsibilities of the British Empire’, they found the ‘teachings of modern imperialism … inconsistent with the greatness and safety of the Empire’. Hirst et al., Liberalism and Empire, vols. 15, 17; 32, 113–14. Hirst, Golden Days, 233, 256, 258. 39 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), 54. 40 Avner Offer, ‘Empire and Social Reform: British Overseas Investment and Social Reform, 1908–1914’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 126. 41 ‘Budget Protest League’, Economist, 15 May 1909. 42 ‘Lord Revelstoke’s Maiden Speech’, Economist, 27 November 1909. 43 R. H. I. Palgrave, ‘The Influence of the Taxation of Capital upon the Welfare of a Country’, Bankers’ Magazine, December 1909, 728–30. 44 A ‘super tax’ on income of £3,000–£5,000, rising from 1s to 1s 2d, can ‘hardly be called unreasonable’. Higher rates had prevailed during the Napoleonic, Crimean, and Boer Wars. ‘The Budget’, Economist, 1 May 1909. 45 ‘Free Trade in Being’, Economist, 13 March 1909. 46 Youssef Cassis, City Bankers, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 21. 47 ‘Our Investments Abroad’, Economist, 20 February 1909. 48 ‘Our Investments Abroad’, Economist, 20 February 1909. 49 ‘The Reservoir Would Not Overflow Unless It Were Full’: ‘Free Trade in Being’, Economist, 13 March 1909. 50 ‘When a profitable opportunity for investment occurs in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow … the last thing that people think of is to go to London’. ‘British Capital At Home and Abroad’, Economist, 20 November 1909. 51 ‘Lord Revelstoke’s Maiden Speech’, Economist, 27 November 1909. 52 J. A. Hobson, ‘Do Foreign Investments Benefit the Working Classes?’, Financial Review of Reviews (March 1909), 22–31 ; George Paish, ‘The Export of Capital and the Cost of Living’, Statist, 14 September 1914, quoted in Offer, ‘Empire and Social Reform’, 126. 53 Economist, 16 May 1908; ‘Parliament Bill’, 25 February 1911; ‘After the Parliament Bill’, 5 August 1911. 54 Hirst to Campbell Bannerman, 9 November 1907, BL Add. MSS. 41238-41240, Campbell-Bannerman Papers. 55 Hirst to Asquith, 30 January 1906; Asquith to Hirst, 9 May 1908, Hirst papers. 56 Economist, 16 May 1908. 57 ‘But for this “invention” most of the slums in our great towns could have been cleared away without any addition to rates or taxes’. Hirst, The Six Panics (London, 1913), 61, 65–8, 72, 91. ‘The German Navy and the British Navy’, ‘Political Fog’, Economist, 6 February 1909. 58 Murray, The People’s Budget, 129–30. 59 Michael Brock estimates there were around 130 such radical MPs in 1909 but just forty in 1911; only fifty-six voted to cut armaments that year. ‘Did Lloyd George Mean War?’, London Review of Books, 26 November 1987. 60 Hirst to Brunner, 15 July 1912, in Stephen Koss, Asquith (London, 1976), 149–50, 267. A. Morris, Radicalism Against War, 1906–1914: The Advocacy of Peace and Retrenchment (London, 1972). 61 ‘The Political Fog’, Economist, 9 February 1909. 62 Japan had ‘everything to inspire confidence’—naval pluck, a sinking fund, cash balances abroad, railway securities—to open up Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan. ‘Japan as A Borrower’, Economist, 20 July 1907. Mark Metzler, Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan (Berkeley, 2011), 3, 258. 63 Even Cabinet radicals worried that France might give in to the Kaiser. Wilson, ‘The Agadir Crisis, the Mansion House Speech, and the Double-Edgedness of Agreements’, Historical Journal, 15 (1972), 519–21. 64 ‘British Interests and the Moroccan Dispute’, Economist, 29 July 1911. 65 Jonathan Kirshner, Currency and Coercion: The Political Economy of International Monetary Power (Princeton, 1995), 83–5. ‘Morocco and Tripoli Judged by Results’, Economist, 18 November 1911. 66 Economist: ‘The Financial Influence of Paris in Berlin’, 29 July 1911; ‘German Securities and the Paris Bourse’, 5 August 1911. 67 Mary Agnes Hamilton, Remembering My Good Friends (London, 1944), 65. 68 If the Prince and Princess of Wales had been slain in an Afghan plot to raise a rebellion in Northwest India, ‘the cry for vengeance would have been raised’ in England. ‘The War and the Panic’, Economist, 1 August 1914. 69 For the cost of ‘cold storage’, guaranteeing purchase of unmarketable bills, see Richard Roberts, Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (Oxford, 2013), 5, 158, 237. ‘The War, Trade and Finance’, Economist, 22 August 1914. 70 Economist: ‘The Moratorium’, 8 August 1914; ‘Some Effects of the War at Home and Abroad’, 15 August 1914. 71 ‘Cabinet Crisis and Perplexities of Faith’, Economist, 1 July 1916. 72 Hirst, Golden Days, 238. 73 Morley to Hirst, 5 August 1914 and 7 August 1914, Hirst papers, Box 36. Douglas Newton, Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, 2014), 194–7, 279–80. 74 Walter Layton, Dorothy (London, 1961), 57–8. 75 Economist: ‘The War and the Coalition’, 15 May 1915; ‘Coalition Government and Progress of the War’, 29 May 1915; ‘Mr Lloyd George and the War’, 5 June 1915. 76 Hirst to Scott, 21 May 1915, in Trevor Wilson, ed., The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, 1911–1928 (London, 1970), 124–5. 77 Hirst to Scott, 28 May 1915, in Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, 126. 78 ‘The Finance of the War’, The Leeds Mercury, 22 November 1915. Hirst spoke at a Leeds Luncheon Club and to bankers at Albion Hall. Hirst Papers, Box 36. 79 ‘Through German Eyes’, The Times, 16 March 1916; ‘The British Radical Press’, The Times, 2 June 1916. 80 Hamilton, My Good Friends, 79. 81 ‘City Notes’, The Times, 28 June 1916. 82 ‘The Cabinet Crisis and Perplexities of Faith’, 1 July 1916. Burlingham to Hirst, 6 July 1916. Hirst Papers, Box 42. Bagehot’s widow pointed out the threat to circulation. ‘You know how much we regret losing you. A newspaper is a curious property to be in—, but the Economist is so + we have no choice, but to submit to what the trustees arrange’. Elizabeth Bagehot to Hirst, July 1916. Hirst Papers, Box 42. 83 Frederick Harcourt Kitchin, The London ‘Times’ Under the Managership of Moberly Bell (London, 1925), 91–3. Hartley Withers, The English and the Dutch in South Africa (London, 1896), 212–13. Hartley Withers, Stocks and Shares (London, 1910), 294–302; Hartley Withers, Money Changing (London, 1913), 47–69. 84 Hartley Withers, Poverty and Waste (London, 1914), 154–5. 85 Hartley Withers, War and Lombard Street (London, 1915), 99, 123. 86 Economist: ‘Peace Talk and War Measures’, 16 December 1916. ‘The President and Peace’, 30 December 1916. ‘After Two Years’, 5 August 1916. ‘The War Loan’, 13 January 1917. ‘At the Front and at Home’, 24 November 1917. 87 ‘Back to Sanity’, Economist, 2 November 1918. 88 P. J. Cain, ‘Capitalism, War and Internationalism in the Thought of Richard Cobden’, British Journal of International Studies, 5 (1979), 244–5. © The Author(s) [2020]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - New Liberalism and the City of London: Reassessing Empire, Finance, and Politics in Francis Hirst’s Economist, 1906–16
JO - Twentieth Century British History
DO - 10.1093/tcbh/hwaa014
DA - 2020-05-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/new-liberalism-and-the-city-of-london-reassessing-empire-finance-and-03EqRMdBOJ
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -