The Tory World

Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679-2014

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472414281
• eBook ISBN: 9781317013778
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Political decisions are never taken in a vacuum but are shaped both by current events and historical context. In other words, long-term developments and patterns in which the accumulated memory of what came earlier, can greatly (and sometimes subconsciously) influence subsequent policy choices. Working forward from the later seventeenth century, this book explores the 'deep history' of the changing and competing understandings within the Tory party of the role Britain has aspired to play on a world stage. Conservatism has long been one of the major British political tendencies, committed to the defence of established institutions, with a strong sense of the 'national interest', and embracing both 'liberal' and 'authoritarian' views of empire. The Tory party has, moreover, at several times been deeply divided, if not convulsed, by different perspectives on Britain's international orientation and different positions on foreign and imperial policy. Underlying Tory beliefs upon which views of Britain's global role were built were often not stated but assumed. As a result they tend to be obscured from historical view. This book seeks to recover and reconsider those beliefs, and to understand how the Tory party has sought to navigate its way through the difficult pathways of foreign and imperial politics, and why this determination outlasted Britain's rapid decolonisation and was apparently remarkably little affected by it. With a supporting cast from Pitt to Disraeli, Churchill to Thatcher, the book provides a fascinating insight into the influence of history over politics. Moreover it argues that there has been an inherent politicisation of the concept of national interests, such that strategic culture and foreign policy cannot be understood other than in terms of a historically distorted political debate.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on Dates, Spelling and Titles
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction—Jeremy Black
• 2 Toryism and the World in the Later Stuart Era, 1679–1714—Tony Claydon
• 3 Foreign Policy and the Tory World in the Eighteenth Century—Jeremy Black
• 4 The Tories and France, 1714–60: Faith and Foreign Policy—Nigel Aston
• 5 Edmund Burke in the Tory World—Iain Hampsher-Monk
• 6 Lord Liverpool: Alliances, Intervention and the National Interest—William Anthony Hay
• 7 The Tory World View: Sea Power, Strategy and Party Politics, 1815–1914—Andrew Lambert
• 8 From Country Party to Conservative Party: The Ultra-Tories and Foreign Policy—Richard A. Gaunt
• 9 ‘A Calm, Temperate, Deliberate, and Conciliatory Course of Conduct’: Mid-Victorian Conservative Foreign Policy—Angus Hawkins
• 10 Disraeli and Foreign Policy—Douglas Hurd
• 11 1864: The Genesis of a New Conservative World?—Adrian Brettle
• 12 ‘We are part of the community of Europe’: The Tories, Empire and Foreign Policy, 1874–1914—T.G. Otte
• 13 Winston Churchill – Conservative or Liberal Imperialist?—Richard Toye
• 14 Geoffrey Dawson, All Souls College and the ‘Unofficial Committee for the Destinies of the British Empire’, c. 1919–1931—S.J.D. Green
• 15 Is There a Tory Strategy?—Brian Holden Reid
• 16 Conservatism Obscured, 1935–1939—Geoffrey Hicks
• 17 The Conservatives and Radical Reform: The 1971 Industrial Relations Act and North America*—Richard Whiting
• 18 The European Question, the National Interest and Tory Histories—Jeremy Black
• Selected Further Reading
• Index