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Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 An Isle Now Vulnerable -- Launching the Navy League -- Definition of a Public Role -- Anatomy of the Navalist Movement -- The Discordance of Political Action -- 2 National Inefficiency: Diagnosis and Prescription -- Military Necessity and National Service -- Economic Necessity and Tariffs -- Political Necessity in the Constituencies -- Fiscal Fictions and Factions -- Anatomy of the Tariff Movement -- 3 In the Wake of Disaster -- Fisher and the Fissuring of the Navalists -- Enforcing Fiscal Orthodoxy -- The Language of Tariff Reform -- The Sudden Urgency of Anti-Socialism -- 4 Revolt From the Right -- Repercussions of the 1909 Naval Scare -- The Constriction of Conscription -- People's Budget Versus Tariff -- The Dilemmas of Defeat -- 5 Disintegration -- The Popular Dimensions of Navalism -- Tariff Reform's Change of Course -- Adjusting to Ambiguity -- Are We All Anti-Socialists Now? -- The Challenge of the Great War -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

Lord Hugh Cecil, commenting in 1912 on the British Conservative party's staying power, said the party's success was largely a matter of temperament, 'recruited from ... the natural conservatism that is found in almost every human mind.' The Conservatives regarded the parties of the left as faddists or federations of pressure groups. Frans Coetzee argues that the emphasis is misplaced, for it obscures the extent to which Conservative pressure groups forced their party to adapt in Edwardian England. His book explores the Conservatives in transition during the two decades preceding the First World War, a period marked by the foundation of an unprecedented number of conservative pressure groups. The British Navy League, Tariff Reform League, Anti-Socialist Union, and myriad other groups changed the face of British conservatism, though not without much internal party conflict.