Britannia's Zealots, Volume I opens the first longitudinal study to examine the Conservative Right from the late-19th century to the present day. British Conservatism has always contained a significant section fundamentally opposed to progressive reform. A permanent minority in Parliament, dissident right-wing Conservatives nevertheless had allies in the press and sympathy among grassroots party members enabling them to create crises in the media and at party meetings.N.C. Fleming charts the evolution of reactionary politics from its preoccupation with the Protestant constitution to its fixation with the prestige and strength of Britain’s global empire. He examines the overlooked ways in which Conservative Right parliamentarians shaped their party’s policies and propaganda, in and out of office, and their relationships with the press and ordinary activists. He seeks to demonstrate that this influence could be circumscribing, and on occasion highly disruptive, with consequences which remain relevant for today's Conservative party. Britannia’s Zealots, Volume I will be of great interest to academics and students of British history, right-wing politics, imperialism, and 20th-century history.
N.C. Fleming is Principal Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Worcester, Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London and Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University, UK. He has been a Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College and Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK.
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Edwardian Crisis, 1900-142. Patriotism Strained, 1914-183. Breaking the Coalition, 1918-224. Democracy and Empire, 1922-355. Consensus and Disunity, 1935-40Retrospect and ProspectBibliography
Dr N.C. Fleming has accomplished two main things ... First, he establishes, with care and precision, the continuities and contrasts between the different phases of ‘Right-Conservatism’ that existed between 1900 and 1939. Second, he supplies what has been lacking in our knowledge of interwar Conservatism ... Within the confines of 320 pages (nearly a third of them endnotes) a great deal of ground is covered very thoroughly indeed. Dr Fleming clearly has a formidable grasp of his subject matter, and a second volume (whatever precisely that may consist of) of this project deserves to be anticipated eagerly by any student of 20th-century British Conservatism.