The lure of violence examines how the British Right responded to the challenges of democratisation and, more generally, to the national crisis of confidence that permeated the Edwardian years (1901-1914). It explores the mobilization of a variety of different nationalist organisations, citizen policing groups, private military associations, and paramilitary formations, which conferred on themselves the right to protect Britain from its internal and external enemies.
Academic historians have examined the surge of right-wing extremism within and outside the Tory Party in the prewar years. However, how this 'rebellion on the right' produced a culture of violence in the most reactionary and intransigent sectors of British conservatism has often been overlooked. Drawing on a vast array of documentary sources, this book explores the distinctive kind of belief system and the practices of those right-wing actors, which variously pursued the goals of military preparedness, 'racial regeneration' and imperial unity. While differing in their primary aims, they were all guided by the principle that all citizens owed a duty of service to the country and had the right to endorse any movement believed to be beneficial to the nation and its interests. The volume reveals their proclivity for violent means to suppress any type of political, social, or cultural deviance that might imperil the organic nature and vigour of the national community.
The book is of special interest to historians and scholarly researchers as it brings back into focus a largely forgotten network of organisations bound together by deep fears of national decadence and social disintegration. It also sheds light on those powerful tensions and authoritarian reflexes which traversed conservative imaginaries in the volatile Edwardian days.
