Welsh Journals

not very profound, leading easily to truisms. Finally, regarding the constituency of this journal, the history of Wales, there is little to note, for it cannot be claimed that Dr. Jones makes special concessions to Wales in his allocation of space. He has a busy schedule to keep in paying attention to the wealth of local and personal peculiarity which most historians of Chartism have lovingly accumulated and, in fulfilling this part of his task, Dr. Jones is generously eclectic and non-partisan. P. J. WALLER Merton College, Oxford. THE CRISIS OF IMPERIALISM, 1865-1915. By Richard Shannon. The Paladin History of England. Hart-Davis, Macgibbon, 1974. Pp. 512. £ 5.95. What happens to the intelligent sixth-former or undergraduate, who is studying nineteenth-century British history, when he reaches the end of Asa Briggs's The Age of Improvement, 1783-18671 At present he is let down with a bump. Teachers of the subject have long been uncomfort- ably aware that none of the standard series of textbooks has a volume of comparable scope and authority covering the period from the 1860s to the First World War and drawing on the research which has been done in the last twenty years. The core of this book is an articulated political analysis which gives special attention to the intellectual basis of different schools of thought and to the way political practice grappled with changing social, economic and diplomatic problems. The title of the volume expresses its concerns more closely than a casual sampling might suggest. The author assigns a special importance to the impact of three great issues: Bulgaria and the Eastern Question in the 1870s; Irish Home Rule in the 1880s; and 'imperialism' and South Africa particularly in the 1890s. The effect of all these crises was to hit at tender spots in the ideological armour of Victorian liberals. Some were consequently goaded and invigorated; others were wounded and incapacitated. At all events, the mid-Victorian equilibrium had been upset and was not to be re-established. The relation between liberalism and imperialism is there- fore a crucial theme and many of the most illuminating suggestions bear on it. Parts I and II of the book cover the period up to the Home Rule crisis. There is no more knowledgeable and perceptive interpreter of Gladstone than Dr. Shannon, as readers of his monograph, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation (1963), will already be aware. He is by no means a narrow partisan of the Grand Old Man, but he allows him his full stature as the creative genius of Victorian politics. And he follows through the logic of recent studies on aspects of Disraeli's career to offer us a fully revised estimate here. The notion that Disraeli founded his career on a consistent conception of Tory Democracy is one which has latterly been deprecated, not least by his biographer (and the editor of this series) Lord Blake. But whereas Blake sought to salvage Disraeli's reputation for prescience by pointing to the fact that under his leadership Conserva- tism was successfully consolidating the very bourgeois support which he