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Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945, by Martin Ceadel; pp. viii + 477. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, £60.00, $90.00.
The British Peace Movement, 1870-1914, by Paul Laity; pp. ix + 270. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, £45.00, $72.00.
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 Ccadcl 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 Ccadcl 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...