The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1915

The years between the 1860s and the First World War transformed Britain more swiftly and more profoundly than any other comparable era. British society became urbanised and suburbanised, secularised and democratised; general assumptions about social relationships and politically legitimate behaviour shifted from the basis of vertical hierarchic community groupings to stratified classes: in a word it became `modern.' Shannan begins his account with the death of Palmerston in 1865 and ends with the first major botch of British war operations on the Gallipoli beaches in 1915...