‘Not a Weapon for an English Policeman’: Nevil Macready and the Limits of Liberal Imperialism 1910–1922

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From the labour dispute in Tonypandy in 1910 through the withdrawal of British forces from the Irish Free State, General Sir Cecil Frederick Nevil ‘Nevil’ Macready served as the British government's trusted agent for using imperial methods to preserve or restore order within the United Kingdom. Macready's commitment to enforce the policies of the Liberal and the Coalition governments before, during, and after the First World War and his application of his experiences as a soldier and an administrator in the British Empire in both war and peace embody the ways that the practices of empire collided with the assumptions of liberalism at home. In the labour disputes in Wales in 1910 and the increasing tension in Ireland over Home Rule in 1914, Macready's personal judgement and tact proved superior in managing the threat of disorder. During the war, both his role in supporting the Government's policy of conscription and his leadership of the London Metropolitan Police after a strike by the rank-and-file Police Constables in 1918 maintained Britain's war effort at home while seeking to improve the lives of those he led. As the last British commander in Ireland before the establishment of the Irish Free State he understood the failures of Britain's forces as an inability to carry out the methods that had worked previously in his career. Analysing Macready's career reveals the contradictions and continuities between liberalism and imperialism at the apogee of both within Britain.