Manchester’s Moment

Boyd Hilton

• Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 by Anthony Howe
  Oxford, 336 pp, £45.00, December 1997, ISBN 0 01 982014 3
• The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854 by Martin Ceadel
  Oxford, 587 pp, £55.00, December 1996, ISBN 0 19 822674 8

Everybody agrees mat the British, and especially the English, are suffering from an identity crisis. The standard explanation is loss of Empire and failure to find an alternative role. And yet in many ways it was the Empire which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties.