Liberal Worlds

The intellectual biography of a Victorian Liberal polymath James Bryce (18381922) was a leading figure in Britains Liberal Party and a distinguished historian, a versatile scholar-politician who moved seamlessly between academia and politics. He was, among many other things, a cabinet minister and a popular ambassador, an expert on American politics and on Roman law, an advocate for the Armenian people and an architect of the League of Nations, a world traveller and a climber of Mount Ararat. In Liberal Worlds, Stuart Jones offers an intellectual biography of Bryce, tracing a Scots-Ulster Presbyterians assimilation to the increasingly multiconfessional Victorian state, and a late Victorian Liberals encounter with the wider world. Jones shows how a polymathic intelligence grappled with a dizzyingly wide range of concerns and issues, including the challenges of democracy and race relations, the rise of modern universities and the reconstruction of the international order after World War I. In tracing the evolution of Bryces thought, Liberal Worlds illuminates the international intellectual networks and the many places across the globe that shaped his thinking. Jones considers, for example, why a man who had a lifelong revulsion against slavery seemed to accept racial segregation in the American South; how a vigorous activist for girls and womens education became a tenacious parliamentary critic of womens suffrage; and why, over the objections of his Ulster Presbyterian family, he backed Irish home rule. Above all, Jones rescues Bryceimmensely influential in his time, now little rememberedfrom being consigned to a historical pigeonhole, restoring him to the centre of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over the nature of democratic politics.