Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945, and: The British Peace Movement, 1870-1914 (review)

In February 2003, during the debate over the merits of invading Iraq, a British anti-war journalist expressed his surprise at finding himself on the side that enjoyed a preponderance of public support. He was much more accustomed, he wrote with mock wistfulness, to feeling "isolated, miserable and disregarded" (Mark Thomas, New Statesman 24 Feb. 2003: 14). The peace activists who appear in these important new books by Martin Ceadel and Paul Laity would have understood his comment. They too had experienced interludes when it was possible to believe that public opinion was opposed to war: the years between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Great Exhibition (1846 to 1851); the eve of the First World War when conflict between advanced commercial nations could be described as unthinkable; and the interwar era when the League of Nations Union drew people together in the hope that war would become a thing of the past. These heady times were all too fleeting. The peace movement fell into disarray during all the major wars after 1854, and by 1945 the myriad societies of earlier decades had withered away, leaving a mood that Ceadel describes as one of "apathy" and "disillusion" (421).

Historians have often been rebuked for showing a lack of interest in losers, but thanks in large part to Ceadel, the peace movement now occupies an important place on the historical agenda. Beginning with a series of important studies of twentieth-century peace movements, he moved back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to trace the origins of war prevention before 1854. Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945, the sequel to this earlier work, completes what Ceadel justifiably calls "the first properly researched long-run account and comprehensive overview" of the movement's fortunes until the end of the Second World War (3). While he emphasizes the principal peace societies, his impressive scholarship ranges much further. Merely to consult the second appendix, which lists the British Peace Associations and provides a brief statement of their dates, founders, memberships, and ideological positions, is to appreciate the extent of the research behind this impressive book.

Paul Laity's monograph, The British Peace Movement 1870-1914, is an important work in its own right, but it can be read profitably in conjunction with Semi-Detached Idealists. Derived from a doctoral thesis co-supervised by Ceadel, it draws on many of his ideas. The shorter chronology allows for greater depth in analysing important developments, including the links between the peace societies and other mid-Victorian movements, such as the Reform League. Laity argues that the scant attention given by historians to the peace movement of the late-Victorian and Edwardian era has produced an important historiographical gap. As he convincingly demonstrates, ideas of peace went to the core of liberalism, radicalism, and socialism; their proponents played significant roles during several important crises.

Until recently one of the principal impediments to the study of the peace movement during the Victorian era has been the difficulty of obtaining access to the records of the Peace Society, the most long-lived and influential of the anti-war associations. This reviewer remembers the dishearteningly protracted approaches that were required before he was allowed even a brief consultation of its minutes. Now, thanks in great part to the opening of the Peace Society archive, Ceadel and Laity have given historical substance to what has hitherto been a sketchy knowledge of the peace movement's nineteenth-century evolution. In their books we witness the creation of the Peace Society to uphold an absolutist peace testimony after the Napoleonic Wars; the coalition of pacifists and...