“New”? “England”? G. R. Searle's contribution to the New Oxford History of England, which replaces Sir Robert Ensor's England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936), contains a magisterial survey and a comprehensive assessment of domestic politics: the home rule crisis, the politics of society, the Boer War, the trials of Liberal and Conservative governments, and, of course, the Great War. All the usual suspects are there: Gladstone, Harcourt, Rosebery, Asquith, Lloyd George, Salisbury, Balfour, Carson, and Bonar Law. Nothing and no one is left out. Additionally, there is an extensive discussion of leisure and pleasure, art and culture, and science and learning. In keeping with the format of this series, Searle includes substantial appendices containing information on the composition of the various cabinets, the results of general elections, and an extensive bibliography. Lucid, logical, and long, this is the sort of book one wishes one could take in with a single gulp.

But “New”? This is a point Searle seizes pretty directly. The period 1886–1918 had a distinctive character, he argues, because it was an age of extremes: imperial pomp and the glamour of a Curzon, but also the criticisms of the conventional, the respectable, and the socially secure by a Edward Carpenter. Searle also regards this period as having a defining character because of the speed with which the old order changed. But all times have their exemplars and their critics. All times are time of transition with their markers of continuity and innovation. However, by cunningly throwing together contrasting features Searle brings this particular period of “English” history to life with vigor and vim. And by taking both a different terminus a quo and a different terminus ad quem than Ensor’s, by foreshortening his period to 1886 and by extending it to 1918, Searle is able to describe the effects of nationalism and war on the processes of decaying change. Traditions are innovatory; innovations have traditions.

But “England”? As in Ensor's treatment of the period 1870–1914, Searle has a master narrative, but it is a different master narrative. It would be impossible to summarize the complex argument of a book of these dimensions. Two points, however, might be made to reveal Searle's insights into the period 1886–1918. First, his is a master narrative resting on the ironic paradox that Britain was neither a federation nor a unitary state of a “recognizably modern kind” (116). Searle begins with an extensive discussion (7–148) of the contrasting and conflicting ethnic, religious, gender, and social identities of “England” in 1886. This allows him to adorn his tale with discussions of the way in which rival impulses of a not necessarily “English” sort intruded themselves, disrupting public life. The “English,” as a consequence “switched between apparently contradictory definitions of their national identity, usually without betraying any embarrassment” (42). In ways that had important consequences for politics and policy, these loyalties, cross-cut by gender, generational, and social differentiation, were constantly being discovered (or rediscovered) and invented with powerful implications for thoughts of themselves and their places in Britain and in the Empire.

Second, the reshaping of political loyalties, a series of provocations, reshaped the nature of government, the character of Whitehall, and the relationship between Parliament and the civil service. The civil service rapidly expanded in the first decade of the twentieth century. By the time of the war, the civil service numbered more than 167,000. Heath insurance alone called forth 2,000 civil servants by itself, and the Board of Trade was enlarged to 2,500. Bonar Law charged that the Liberals had created a spoils system after an American model. To be sure, there were new opportunities for a new kind of patronage in such agencies as the Labour Exchanges for Trade Union leaders to hold posts at salaries they would not have been able to earn in any other way. But the impulse toward a new civil service and increased bureaucratization was hardly “labour” or socialistic. Labour favored the extension of the state when it provided obvious benefits, such as old-age benefits, but shunned it when it seemed intrusive or coercive. Many of these transformations smack of nineteenth-century religious values. Labour remained tied to its voluntaristic traditions. Much of the welfare legislation rested on paternalistic motivations; its practitioners, as Searle puts it, were not “rebels but ‘repenters’” (389). In a great age of party Milner probably was not the only person to feel cursed by a cross-bench mind.

There is not much left of the Whig interpretation of history in the materials and arguments Searle presents in these pages. The trajectories of this narrative run in many directions rather than in one. They were often in conflict with each other. Contingency and choice rather than inevitability, fragility rather than triumphalism, reign supreme. And perhaps the awareness of contingency is the reason why liberalism suffered what Dangerfield called its “strange death.” Unconstrained by policy coherence, it dissipated in its own procedures and processes. As Keynes pointed out, in talking about the Paris peace conference, sometimes words do not become flesh. And the Conservative party became unionist because, as Gladstone pointed out, it was insufficiently conservative. It lost what it had sought to gain—a powerful House of Lords and a united kingdom—thereby. And the historical profession flowered into a discipline, marked by institutions such as the English Historical Review, because it sought to find coherence in its past. History's master narratives were not always successful. Acton failed to write his history of liberty because, as he himself came to recognize, sadly, the dust of the archives drives out ideas. Searle's master narrative has greater possibility for success precisely because, drawing as it does on the best research of the past decades, it takes into account the “new” contingencies of modern Britain.