Parliamentary Career Research Articles

Charles Dawson and the Public Sphere in Late Victorian and Edwardian Dublin

Charles Dawson and the Public Sphere in Late Victorian and Edwardian Dublin* Patrick Maume (bio) In the period between the implementation of the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act (1840) and the early twentieth century, a Catholic business class challenged the established Protestant elites for control of Dublin municipal politics and administration. Described by David Dickson as a “shopocracy,” this class consisted of a small number of great business magnates, a developing body of Catholic professionals (often the sons and daughters of these same individuals), and a generational cohort trained in a growing Catholic secondary-school system dominated by the burgeoning religious orders. This group has not received a good press. Conservative and unionist writers have tended to portray it as a self-seeking and incompetent class of populist upstarts, while nationalist critics (later joined by socialists) saw it as a collection of snobs and collaborators whose corruption by self-interest was reflected in the frightful living conditions of Dublin’s heavily crowded slums.1 These criticisms contain a great deal of truth, but they are not the whole story. Nineteenth-century Dublin Protestant elites also underwent a process of professionalization in response to the demise of the sectarian patronage structures, a change that has been documented by historian Jacqueline Hill. Protestants accomplished this by laying claim to leadership on the basis of superior professional [End Page 113] competence to handle the administrative, social, and economic needs of the growing city.2 Sections of the Catholic “shopocracy” similarly sought to assert their position as a ruling class in waiting through participation in a wide range of activities to improve the life of the city. These included direct philanthropy, the creation and support of civic institutions, and alliances built with skilled workers (whose craft unions dominated the late Victorian trade-union movement) on the understanding that employers and laborers shared a common interest in economic expansion through the promotion of Irish industry. However much tension might arise between ruling class and skilled workers in practice, the central concept here was that mutual benefit could be gained by gathering and tabulating information about Dublin’s social problems and by looking overseas for applicable solutions. These processes of professionalization and associational philanthropy developed to a significant extent along sectarian lines, but they also gave rise to spaces where members of the rival groups could cooperate for civic betterment despite political and religious rivalries. This essay offers insights into this overlapping civic sphere and its tensions through an examination of the career of one particular Catholic businessman, nationalist politician, and administrator who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles Dawson (1842–1917), inheritor of a substantial bakery business and graduate of the Catholic University of Ireland, was prominent in the civic life of Dublin from the 1870s until his death. Because of the weakness of the Catholic University in these early years, its relative lack of alumni organizations, and the vicissitudes of the early Home Rule movement, mid-Victorian Catholic University students (unlike their Edwardian counterparts) are not usually viewed by scholars as a governing class in waiting, but this is clearly how the young Charles Dawson saw himself.3 As a Home Rule MP for Carlow borough (1880–85) and lord mayor of Dublin (1882–83), Dawson was briefly [End Page 114] regarded as one of Parnell’s leading followers. Yet Charles Dawson was not included in a recent essay collection on prominent lord mayors of Dublin, and there is no existing study of his career.4 Even detailed accounts of the Dublin of his era rarely mention his name. Several reasons can be assigned for Dawson’s eclipse. First, his political career—and much of his early social prominence—was underwritten by his network of bakeries, but his attempt to create a lasting business empire failed, and he was eventually obliged to abandon the enterprise along with direct political involvement in favor of city administrative office. The brevity of Dawson’s parliamentary career, and the tendency of accounts of the period to focus on land agitation and on Westminster, have obscured his municipal significance. Moreover, Dawson published no memoir and left no archive. Two of his four sons became...

Classificando ocupações prévias à entrada na política: uma discussão metodológica e um teste empírico

O artigo propõe uma discussão sobre definição, classificação e mensuração de posições sociais de origem para o estudo do recrutamento de elites políticas. Para tanto, apresenta diferentes estratégias teórico-metodológicas para enquadrar a variável "ocupação prévia à carreira parlamentar" e sugere a pertinência de um critério mais analítico que sociográfico na codificação das profissões daqueles que postulam ingressar no mundo político. Sustenta-se que o recrutamento político pode ser mais bem apreendido por meio de uma tipologia que leve em conta não apenas variáveis institucionais, mas, na linha sugerida por Max Weber, variáveis econômicas e sociais. No teste empírico dos critérios propostos neste artigo, foram utilizados dados sobre candidatos a deputado federal no Brasil em 2006 e 2010 para simular o rendimento de uma classificação alternativa. Essa classificação está baseada em três parâmetros: 1) a flexibilidade da carreira profissional do candidato (tempo livre e autonomia financeira), 2) a importância dessa ocupação numa dada comunidade (status social) e 3) sua afinidade prévia com os valores e as práticas do mundo político. O resultado revelou que clivagens sociais e clivagens de gênero podem ser reforçadas pelo tipo de atividade profissional exercida previamente pelos candidatos a parlamentar antes mesmo que filtros institucionais produzam seus efeitos.

Standing for Re-Election Under Different Electoral Rules: Evidence from the Romanian Legislature

What drives an incumbent legislator’s desire for re-election? Drawing on two MP surveys from 2003 and 2011, the paper seeks to answer this question. The bi-variate and multivariate statistical models focus on the explanatory power of a few individual variables: parliamentary experience and office, the decentralization of selection procedures, importance given to the parliamentary office, professionalization and career perceptions, while controlling for socio-demographic characteristics. Our results indicate that the political career perceptions and the importance given to the parliamentary office are the key motivations to seek re-election, but their strength varies according to the type of electoral system. Similarly, other mechanisms seem to work chiefly in the PR closed list system (e.g. professionalization of the legislature) or within the SMD setting (e.g. being a frontbencher and age).

Rzeczpospolita na łamach „Annual Register” w latach 1758–1776

From the early 18th century the British press went through a process of rapid expansion. In 1759 there appeared a new magazine, The Annual Register. Despite its elitist character, high price – 11 shillings per issue – and strong competition, the magazine became popular among members of the public. Until 1764 the first editor and the author of the major lead articles on recent events was Edmund Burke, but even after this date he wrote articles about the issues he found particularly interesting. One of these issues was the internal and external condition of Poland-Lithuania. Burke presented Poland-Lithuania as a weak and anarchic state, with no serious influence on the international stage. In the first few years he saw the main reason for that in the politics of the Polish nobility, who interested mainly in limiting royal power. From 1768 Burke saw the main reason to be in the foreign policies of neighbouring powers, Russia, and then, from 1772, Prussia. This change was due to two factors. In the case of Russia, Burke was afraid of its fast growing importance in European politics and of what he saw as Russian plans to build a ‘universal monarchy’. In the case of Prussia, he was disappointed with the aggressive policies of his former hero, Frederick II, that led to the first partition of Poland. Burke regarded this partition as not only a disaster for Poland, but also as a disaster for the entire European system. From a wider perspective, Burke’s articles about Poland-Lithuania are a valuable source of knowledge about his main political and social ideas in a period just before he began his parliamentary career and during its first few years.

‘They were the best of friends; they were the worst of friends’: A Tale of Two MPs

Edward Hemmerde and Francis Neilson were both Liberal MPs at the outbreak of the First World War, bound together by a common commitment to the principle of land taxation. A shortage of money, at a time when MPs had only just started to receive salaries, led them into extra-parliamentary co-operation in the joint authorship of plays. But the two men fell out over the profits from their literary endeavours. One or other was clearly not telling the truth. Although he gave up his parliamentary career in opposition to British involvement in the war, Neilson later prospered greatly as a writer in the United States. Meanwhile, Hemmerde turned to his career as Recorder of Liverpool, but the wealth that he craved eluded him. This article reminds us that financial impropriety among MPs is no new phenomenon, while highlighting the difficulty of establishing certain historical truth in the face of conflicting documentary evidence.

Radicals, Tories or Monomaniacs? The Birmingham Currency Reformers in the House of Commons, 1832–67*

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood's Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood's brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early‐ and mid‐Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People's Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. George Frederick Muntz's death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham's radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasized Birmingham's contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers' views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.

Burke's Vehemence and the Rhetoric of Historical Exaggeration

This article seeks to explain Edmund Burke's notorious verbal vehemence as the consequence of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. I argue that over the course of a thirty-year parliamentary career, Burke relied on sharply formulated historical contrasts in order to express his opposition to the policies of successive ministries and warn of threats to the nation's defining achievements. Through the use of four distinct syntactical patterns, Burke cultivated a style of hyperbole which exaggerated both the failings of the present and the virtues of the national past, focusing on two periods in particular: the High Middle Ages and the early eighteenth-century era of Whig Oligarchy.

SIR EDWARD DERING, POPULARITY, AND THE PUBLIC, 1640–1644

ABSTRACTThis article reassesses the political career of Sir Edward Dering (d. 1644), a prominent but extremely controversial MP during the Long Parliament, who has fascinated historians because of the way in which he appears to have ‘defected’ from the cause of political and religious reform, who was eventually expelled from the Commons for publishing his parliamentary speeches, and who briefly flirted with royalism before making a humiliating return to Westminster. It does so by focusing upon his relationship with the public, in terms of how he courted popular support in order to secure election, and how people followed his subsequent parliamentary career, not least through the circulation of scribal and printed texts. It highlights how constituents (and others) responded to such activity, not least by making clear what policies he was expected to promote, thereby revealing that Dering's career was driven not just by his own political and religious views, but also by ideas about his role as an MP, and about his relationship with his constituents. Dering thus provides a rare opportunity to scrutinize the dynamic relationships between MPs and the public, thereby revealing hitherto neglected evidence about transformations in political culture and ideas regarding representation.

The Parliamentary Career of Charles De Laet Waldo Sibthorp, 1826-1855: Ultra-Tory Opposition to Reform in Nineteenth Century Britain - Edited by Stephen Roberts and Mark Acton

The Parliamentary Career of Charles De Laet Waldo Sibthorp, 1826-1855: Ultra-Tory Opposition to Reform in Nineteenth Century Britain - Edited by Stephen Roberts and Mark Acton

Catholicism, Apostasy and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The Case of Sir Thomas Gascoigne and Charles Howard, Earl of Surrey

Apostasy among the English Catholic gentry in the late eighteenth century was not uncommon. In this period contemporary Catholic observers were concerned by what they perceived to be a great qualitative decrease of English Catholic gentry and they regarded apostasy as ‘a major and catastrophic cause of the decline’. Conformity to the established religion was a social virtue and was rewarded with social advantages; it was part and parcel of one's rise in the social scale and so was a great temptation for gentlemen outside the Anglican fold who were desirous of a service or parliamentary career. In almost every county in England many heads of old English Catholic families conformed. Indeed, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, of the twenty-four Catholic gentry families that existed in the Riding in. 1706 only twelve remained by 1780. Between the years 1754–1790 seven members of the House of Commons had renounced Roman Catholicism in order to pursue political careers and according to the contemporary Catholic priest Joseph Berington, by 1780 there were but 177 landed Catholic families in England ten of which had either died out or recently abjured their faith. Just a few conversions could have devastating consequences for Catholic communities. As David Butler points out, often ‘Catholic missions were over-dependent on the Catholic aristocracy and gentry for the continuance of Catholic worship’ and for Butler, in eighteenth-century London alone, if ‘just eight prominent families had apostatised … the Catholic missions would have lost about half of their numbers’.

Holding Australia to Ransom

Probably no one who has entered either federal or state Parliament in Australia departed from it as loathed and despised as Malcolm Arthur Colston. A Labor senator from Queensland between 1975 and 1996, he is remembered by that party as a 'rat' who betrayed it for the sake of personal advancement. Whereas many Labor parliamentarians - most notably Prime Minister 'Billy' Hughes in 1917 - have left the party because they strongly disagreed with it over a major policy issue or a matter of principle, in the winter of 1996 Colston unashamedly left it to secure the deputy presidency of the Senate and the status, income and several other perquisites that went with it. Labor's bitterness towards Colston stems not merely from the fact that he showed extraordinary ingratitude towards a party that had allowed him a parliamentary career but more especially because, between his defection from the party in August 1996 and his retirement from Parliament in June 1999, his vote allowed the Liberal-National Party government led by John Howard to pass legislation through the Senate that might otherwise have been rejected.

El proyecto de Ley de Autonomía local de Andalucía

La Mesa del Parlamento andaluz, en sesión de 3 de febrero de 2010, acordó enviar a la Comisión de Gobernación el Proyecto de Ley de Autonomía Local de Andalucía y abrir el plazo de quince días hábiles, a partir de su publicación, para la presentación de enmiendas a la totalidad. Comenzaba así su andadura parlamentaria la iniciativa que, sin temor a error, puede considerarse la más relevante de la presente legislatura.

Tom Wharton and the Whig Junto: Party Leadership in Late Stuart England*

This previously unpublished lecture by Geoffrey Holmes looks at the parliamentary career of Thomas, 6th Baron Wharton, 1st earl and 1st marquess of Wharton, a leading member of the whig junto in the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. It examines his ‘unsavoury’ character and how his reputation as a libertine and swordsman may have helped his role as a party leader. It also examines his historical reputation, partly through the works of Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele and Lord Macauly and attempts to restore his position as a much‐maligned major figure in Augustan parliamentary and electoral politics.

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small.Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career.On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.

Containing Discontent: Anti-Chinese Racism in the Reinvention of Angus Cameron

Angus Cameron is usually remembered as one of the pioneers of labour representation, a carpenter elected to the New South Wales parliament in 1874 who became a leading advocate for legislation to stop Chinese immigration. Historians have seen this link as evidence that racism was pushed from below by the working class. This article shows that Cameron turned to anti-Chinese agitation at the very point he broke with the labour movement, and argues that he most likely did so in the hope of saving his political career. In particular it looks at Cameron's infamous Select Committee Report into Common Lodging-houses, and the crisis in Cameron's parliamentary career that preceded the establishment of the select committee. It also suggests that key members of the Sydney ruling class had an interest in deflecting attention from the appalling condition of rental housing in Sydney, and that Cameron's report relieved some of the pressure on them.

Edmund Burke, the Atlantic American war and the 'poor Jews at St. Eustatius'. Empire and the law of nations

This essay is devoted to a relatively minor episode in Edmund Burke’s parliamentary career and political speculation involving the rights of war and international law in the final years of the American War of Independence. The starting point for Burke’s consideration of these questions was the affair of St. Eustatius, that is to say Britain’s conquest in 1781 of the Dutch West-Indian island early in the “fourth Anglo-Dutch War” of 1780-1784. The harsh treatment of the Dutch colony’s cosmopolitan community by the commanding officers of the British Navy and Army provoked a series of reactions in Britain and the colonies. The essay starts by outlining the identity of St. Eustatius with its economic, demographic and social features, its peculiar role in the eighteenth-century West Indies and its emblematic meaning in the historical literature of the Enlightenment as a symbol of the virtues of commerce and of economic liberty. It goes on to analyse the facts of the military conquest in 1781 and the ensuing occupation realized by Admiral George Rodney and Major-General John Vaughan, particularly as this affected the “poor Jews at St. Eustatius” (as Burke himself qualified them in his second speech on 4 December 1781), with the subsequent reactions of the Dutch and especially the British Atlantic world. We then examine Edmund Burke’s reasons for taking up this affair, including the political and ideological motives and the sources of arguments he used in the two parliamentary speeches he made on the topic during 1781, relating this to Burke’s ideas on international relations and imperial government during the 1770s and 1780s. We end by pointing to cultural links between Burke’s positions and a wider political, commercial and civic culture emerging in the British Atlantic world which reflected some of the most typical European Enlightenment values and ideological commitments.

Por la vida y el honor: el Presbítero Félix Varela en las Cortes de España, 1822-1823 (review)

Reviewed by Mark Lawrence University of Liverpool Por la vida y el honor: el Presbítero Félix Varela en las Cortes de España, 1822-1823. By Manuel Pablo Maza Miquel, S.J. (Santo Domingo, Domincan Republic: Instituto Pedro Francisco Bonó. 2000. Pp. 358.) In Por la Vida y el Honor, Maza Miquel traces the parliamentary career of the Cuban priest and liberal deputy of the 1822-1823 Spanish Cortes, Félix [End Page 680] Varela. This premise highlights Varela's contradictory vocation. He was an ecclesiastic who nevertheless condemned the priest-led, anti-liberal insurrections which ravaged Spain throughout his tenure. He supported the Cortes in its removal of rebellious bishops, yet defended the right of the Papacy to nominate successors. A committed defender of the Constitution of 1812, he nonetheless represented Cuba, a Spanish colony ruled by varying degrees of autocratic special measures throughout the nineteenth century. The author thus recounts the life of a discerning, moderate liberal, for whom there were principles above the dominant ideologies of the age. In so doing he has made a nuanced contribution to a historiography which is still largely dominated by the partisan historians of the field, Alberto Gil Novales (a wholehearted sympathizer with the radical-liberals of the 1820-1823 Triennium), and José Luis Comellas (a conservative critic of radicalism). Maza Miquel begins by outlining the context of the 1814-1820 period of absolutism. In this analysis he gravitates towards two key points. The first refers to the view that the 1814-1820 Spanish Church was bloated and shedding its moral authority due to its virulent support for absolutism. This conforms to the traditional view (José Manuel Cuenca, 1971) that the Church would never become entirely reconciled with liberalism, with the result that by the mid-nineteenth century the institution was living in a ghetto of its own making. The second point refers to the revisionist view (Leandro Alvarez Rey, 1998) that the radicals who conspired in the Masonic and secret societies had a lesser impact than has traditionally been thought, the revolution of 1820 being enacted by liberal army elites with marginal popular support. From the liberals' point of view, this circle could be squared by instructing priests to tutor their flocks in classes of constitutional catechism, in order to instil them with amor a la Constitución. The dead-hand union of "throne and altar" absolutism would thus be swept aside by the liberal alliance of "Constitution and altar." Insofar as this debate is concerned, Varela was clearly in the second camp. However, the policy was a demonstrable failure; the clerical-royalist insurrection of 1821-1823 enjoyed an organic popular support which the opposing liberal armies and militia could not muster. Maza Miquel provides clues as to the popular disillusionment with liberalism but fails to develop them. In 1821, the Cortes decreed the halving of tithe payments throughout Spain, a policy mooted to be extended to Cuba the following year. Varela resisted this policy because he deemed such stringency could not adequately fund even the colonial Church. More significant for the Spanish masses, however, was the fact that the half-tithe had to be paid in cash instead of kind, a massive burden for a peasantry unaccustomed to a cash economy at a time of low agricultural prices. In 1823 Varela urged the establishment of representative town-halls in Cuba, despite so few of the island's settlements consisted of the "twenty-five houses forming roads" which the Constitution demanded as a precondition. Varela's concern might have been informed by an analogous geographical quandary in Spain, as the populous and compact settlements of southern Spain lent themselves to close control [End Page 681] by liberal town-halls, whereas the isolated and strung-out villages of the Basque lands and of parts of Navarre and Aragón were the hotbed of reaction. Nevertheless, these qualifications merely suggest scope for...

Demotion and Dissent in the Canadian Liberal Party

Those who have not witnessed the making of a government have reason to be happier than those who have. It is a thoroughly unpleasant and discreditable business in which merit is disregarded, loyal service is without value, influence is the most important factor and geography and religion are important supplementary considerations.The Borden Ministry was composed under standard conditions, and was not, therefore, nearly as able, honest, or as industrious an administrative aggregation as could have been had from the material available … There were some broken hearts – in one instance, literally. In others, philosophy came to the rescue, but the pills were large and the swallowing was bitter.Paul BilkeyPrime ministers can typically rely on ideological agreement and norms of loyalty to deliver them a modicum of party cohesion. Beyond that, they have at their disposal a variety of institutional tools with which to enforce discipline. The powers to invoke the confidence convention and to dissolve parliament are the most well known and powerful of these tools, but these heavy-handed measures are ill-suited for securing unity on an on-going basis. The prime minister's monopoly over the distribution of preferment is a far more reliable means of ensuring members' loyalty. The rules of the game are simple: if the member of parliament (MP) wishes to climb the parliamentary career ladder, he or she must toe the party line. The prime minister's power over MPs' parliamentary careers is not without limit, of course. Some MPs must be brought into cabinet because they are too powerful and dangerous to leave on the backbench where they can openly challenge the prime minister.

Women in the Queensland Parliament

Women won the right to vote in Queensland in 1905, but had to wait until 1915 and the election of the first Labor government to govern in its own right before they became eligible to stand for Parliament. It was then another 14 years before the first woman, Irene Maud Longman, was elected. She, however, lasted only one term as she had won a safe Labor seat, Bulimba, in the anti-Labor swing of 1929 as a Country–National candidate. When Labor returned to power in 1932, her parliamentary career was terminated. It was to be another 34 years until the second woman, Vi Jordan, was elected. She won Ipswich West for Labor in 1966, and held it until defeated in the strong anti-Labor swing of 1974, having served eight years. Although she was anxious to reclaim the seat in 1977, an internal ALP power struggle saw pre-selection go against her in favour of David Underwood. Thereafter, Labor did not have another successful female candidate until 1983, when Anne Warner won the former Liberal seat of Kurilpa. Meanwhile, Rosemary Kyburz had won the then ALP seat of Salisbury for the Liberals in 1974; she held it until beaten in 1983 by the future Labor premier, Wayne Goss. Vikki Kippin had meanwhile become the first woman to represent a Far North Queensland, seat when, also in 1974, she won Mourilyan for the Nationals, losing it in 1980 to Labor. There was a strong indication that, had she won in 1980, she would have become the first woman Cabinet minister (Reynolds, 2002a). Another six years elapsed before that occurred, when Yvonne Chapman entered the ministry.

The imperial vision of Halford Mackinder

From 1899 to 1939, Halford Mackinder was active in imperial affairs. In 1899, the same year he climbed Mount Kenya, he set out the case for free trade. Rapidly he converted to imperial protectionism, left the Liberal Party and joined the Conservatives. Mackinder, along with his associates in the Conservative Party, Leo Amery and Lord Milner, promoted the cause of imperial unity and imperial preference in trade. During the period 1899–1903, Mackinder's evolving ideas about empire helped shape the Pivot paper, and he spelt out a prescription to avoid imperial decline: bind Britain and the Dominions into a League of Democracies with one fleet and one foreign policy, and encourage economic growth within the empire by a system of tariffs that promoted imperial trade. In Mackinder's parliamentary career (1910–22), his party was never in power and the Liberals retained free trade. Only after World War I, at the end of his parliamentary career, did Mackinder become active in imperial policy as chair of the Imperial Shipping Committee and the Imperial Economic Committee.