Description
Book SynopsisThis book makes an original contribution to international relations and British politics. It identifies for the first time the dominant pre-modern theory of international relations, which fatalistically assumed that war was beyond human control. It then shows how this theory was undermined from the 1730s onwards, with the consequence that a debate began about how best to prevent war in which a vocal minority argued that war as an institution for settling disputes could be abolished. Britain led the way in this repudiation of fatalism and exploration of pacific alternatives: it produced the world''s first peace movement (which appeared in the mid-1790s as a response to the French wars) and the first enduring national peace association (the Peace Society, founded in 1816 and active for nearly a century); and it was the first country to allow peace thinking (for example, as expounded by Richard Cobden) to enter its political mainstream. This book, the first to make use of the Peace Societ
Trade ReviewMartin Caedel has done us a great favour by this meticulous study of the Peace Society ... and its antecedents ... an excellent study of those who started to organise English peace activity, nearly two hundred years ago. * Challenge, Vol. XXXVII no.3, May/June 1997 *
... an important and impressive piece of research ... * New Routes, Vol.2 No.2 1997 *
No recent British writer has done more than Martin Ceadel to clarify concepts and terminology in our thinking about war and peace...His latest, and most ambitious, book unites in one volume both the "theoretical" and the "historical" approaches which have been characteristic of his work... This gives his chapters on the decades after 1816 an authority and comprehensiveness achieved by no previous writer. Taken in the round...this book is not likely to be surpassed. - Keith Robbins. War in History 1999.
