Matthew Johnson has written a very well-researched and well-argued study of the liberal and radical left's involvement in the politics of militarization in Edwardian Britain. Appearing on the eve of the centenary of the First World War, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 is a timely reconsideration of the notion that militarism was a project of the conservative and radical right, that it held little appeal for progressives and socialists, and that it overcame liberal principles and overtook the Liberal party with the passage of military conscription in 1916. Johnson shows to the contrary that a variety of left-of-center political actors were already coming to terms with the armed forces and taking up the seemingly collectivist or democratic content of militarism in an Edwardian world increasingly shaped by the promise as well as danger of war.

In his introduction, Johnson carefully reviews scholarly discussions of both militarism and the liberal and radical left. He is wise, I think, to differentiate between what he calls the “militarization of the state” and the “militarization of society” (6). The former is the appropriation of the gold and iron of the state, the latter the mobilization of the hearts and minds (and bodies) of the population. He is also right to construe the left not only broadly but also relationally; the left shared and contested a wider political culture with the right. Chapters 1 and 2 survey the nature of support for the military in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and assess the interaction of the armed forces and the Liberal governments of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith. While British forces, especially the rank and file, did not enjoy the sort of authority and status granted to the German army, Britons were not generally hostile or indifferent to soldiers. In addition to the celebration of manly and Christian heroes of military history, there were sympathetic treatments of soldiers in literature and popular culture. Critics concentrated their fire on targets like budgets or ministers. Soldiers and their officers suffered few if any consequences for excesses of war and occupation, such as the deaths of civilians during the South African war, the Denshawai incident in Egypt, or the aftermath of the Howth gun-running episode in Ireland on the eve of the First World War. As Johnson examines the increasingly centralized, reformed, and professionalized army and navy staffs and the collaboration of ministers with chiefs and experts during the tenures of Richard Haldane and J. E. B. Seely at the War Office and Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, he reminds us that the civil-military divide was crossed repeatedly by both sides, from H. H. Kitchener in Egypt to numerous parliamentarians, including Liberals, with significant service records. Although I would lay greater stress on the tensions generated by military interventions in labor unrest and by the Curragh incident in Ireland, Johnson's account helps me appreciate the rapport that enabled a figure like General Sir Nevil Macready to enjoy the confidence of the government and undertake politically sensitive missions in places like South Wales and Ulster.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the two forms of militarization by tracing the controversies over calls for construction of new classes of battleships and cruisers and proposals for compulsory military service. While we may think that prewar Britain hardly qualified as a militarized state, the Royal Navy alone required enormous expenditures to maintain its global operations and modernize its high-tech fleets. And yet the Navy League could count on the support of Liberals and even Lib-Lab and Labour parliamentarians, not just Tories. This willingness to pay for keels as well as pensions owed something to the political economy of the navy: “Peace, Free Trade, and Employment” might well have been etched on its trident. Thus it was “big Navy” rather than “little Navy” Liberals at the helm as the ship of state sailed on to 1914. By contrast, the campaign for a bigger and better army based on conscription was a hard slog in the prewar era, when few saw a spell in barracks as more eligible than other walks of life. Nevertheless, as Johnson convincingly argues, the National Service League mounted a serious effort that reached well beyond the right. It won support from some Liberals and progressives by appealing to themes of fraternity and fairness that anticipated the widespread demand for equality of sacrifice during the First World War. Moreover, the very fact that its program competed with socialist proposals for a popular army, ready for revolution as well as invasion, suggests that martial forms of democratic and patriotic citizenship resonated widely, even if many Edwardians stopped short of supporting obligatory military service.

Chapter 5 and the conclusion and epilogue bridge the divide of 1914 by first recounting Richard Haldane's robust advocacy of expanded military training and service along voluntary lines, realized in the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act of 1907, and then tracing the swing of a growing number of Liberals to the merits of conscription, confirmed by the Military Service Acts of 1916. It may be that what happened in that year was as much a culmination of prewar trends as a response to wartime challenges. Johnson's reconstruction of Haldane's conception of a “nation-in-arms” and the eclectic mix of progressive and conservative elements in his initiatives around youth, women, local notables, and employers, and the officer corps reveals the “essentially Liberal nature” (155) of the effort. The shock of the war fractured, either temporarily or permanently, both the liberal and radical lefts. In particular, Liberals from different points along the prewar spectrum came out in support of conscription without repudiating their political identity. As I understand Johnson's argument, what divided their party and the left more broadly was not a sudden, sharp contradiction between anti-militarist principle and militarist practice, but instead a long-deferred reckoning with the very capaciousness of liberal and radical Edwardian politics.

Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914, which I found more and more absorbing as I read, is a genuinely valuable contribution to Edwardian history. It makes particularly nice pairs with Paul Ward's Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism, and the British Left, 1881–1924 (1998) and with Nicoletta F. Gullace's “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (2002). Johnson's fresh approach to militarization invites further research on a number of fronts. Three examples that come to mind are the gendered militarization of contentious politics in Ireland brought to the fore by the founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Irish Volunteers, and the Irish Citizen Army in 1913; prewar and wartime interactions between Britain and the dominions around military conscription, opposition to conscription, and the enfranchisement of men and women based on a martial conception of citizenship; and the place of soldiers of color from India and other colonies in strategic planning and popular controversy before and after 1914, or, if you will, from the parading of imperial troops at the Diamond Jubilee to E. D. Morel's The Horror on the Rhine (1920). Equally important, Johnson's rich evidence and persuasive analysis of the nature and extent of progressive engagements with militarism promises to open up an exciting discussion of the left-right crossings of Edwardian politics in an age of empire and war.