Abstract
The influence of the City of London on British politics has been a focus of controversy among historians. Likewise, the ‘death of liberal England’, during the years in which Liberals governed in the run-up to the First World War. The Economist, as the City’s leading liberal weekly, allows us to explore the connection between these themes, in ways that challenge scholarly assumptions about both. Under Francis Hirst, its editor and an influential New Liberal thinker in his own right, The Economist acted as a bridge between the realms of finance capital and political practice, at just the moment that a serious conflict appeared to divide them—over the new taxes and social reform measures in the People’s Budget of 1909–10. This article deploys Hirst and his tenure at The Economist—including his ejection in 1916 for supporting a negotiated peace during the First World War—to argue that finance and politics were deeply intertwined in liberal understandings of free trade, empire, and social reform by the turn of the twentieth century; in addition, it suggests that the conflicts that emerged at this time, over the interests of the City and how and if these were compatible with other economic, social, or political aims or actors, prefigured later, better-known clashes that have recurred in Britain down to the present.
