Irish nationalism:

The rise of Irish nationalism, dating to the 18th century, had produced a parliamentary political movement focused on diminishing of the apparatus of British government in Ireland and replacing it with Irish self-government, or home rule.

Some more radical nationalists wanted an inde-pendent Irish republic, although many would have settled for home rule under the British Crown, as an equal of Britain.

Others, such as Charles Stuart Parnell (1846–91), a Protestant and a landlord, were interested in pushing for home rule as a stage in the process for independence.

Still, many of the English ruling class hated the possibility of Irish home rule.

Reasons:

• traditional anti-Catholicism;

• the fears of Irish landowners, many of whom were English aristocrats or connected with English aristocratic families, that their property would be lost in home-rule Ireland;

• the belief that an independent Ireland would set a precedent for the dissolution of the British Empire all played a role in British resistance.

Liberals were more sympathetic to home rule, and many of the aristocrats of the traditional Whig families left the Liberals for the Conservatives in order to defend English rule in Ireland. The greatest English supporter of home rule was Gladstone, but his strongest efforts resulted only in failure.

The Irish issue was complicated by divisions among the Irish themselves, principally on regional and sectarian lines. The majority of the Protestants of the north, many of them descended from Scottish settlers in the 17th century, hated the cause of Irish independence, which they felt would put them under the authority of the hated Catholics— “Home Rule means Rome Rule” was a slogan they used effectively.

Like the Catholic “Home Rulers,” the Irish Protestants, or Orangemen, were represented in the Westminster parliaments, and they combined par- liamentary activity with extra-parliamentary action and alliances with English unionists.

The British Empire under Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) was at its zenith of power and prestige. The empire included the legacy of British victories in the wars against France in the 18th and early 19th century and the new conquests that had been made since then. It was also the product of Britain’s world-leading industrial economy and unrivaled navy.

The major points of the british external policy are:

• The queen’s assumption of the title Empress of India on January 1, 1877, was an assertion both of British splendor and of the central- ity of India in the empire. Much British colonial activity, such as the acquisition of control over the Suez Canal in 1875, was driven by the need to secure India. Britons argued that it was only the possession of India that made their nation a first-rate power. The Indian rebellion of 1857, also known as the Indian Mutiny as it involved Indian troops in British service, briefly seemed to threaten the British position, but it was quickly and brutally suppressed.

• Britain was also an avid participant in what was known as the “Scramble for Africa,” the process from about 1880 to 1900 by which all of Africa, with the two exceptions of Ethiopia and Liberia, was divided among European colonial powers. Britain came out with more territory than any other power, including Nigeria, most of East Africa, and domination over Egypt.

• After the Crimean War, British governments carefully avoided the possibility of engagement in European wars. Adopting a policy of “splendid isolation”, Britain shunned formal Continental alliances that might have drawn it into war with European great powers.

• there were also tensions and clashes between Britain and the United States, again the British avoided war, increasingly deferring to the United States in affairs of the Western Hemisphere.

• Britain’s main worldwide colonial rival was France, possessor of the world’s second-largest colonial empire, but the two powers only came close to war once, in the Fashoda Incident of 1898, when a small French military force coming northeastward from central Africa met British troops coming south from Egypt near the Sudanese town of Fashoda. Viewing their colonial empire as decidedly secondary to their European concerns, the French backed down rather than risk conflict with Britain.

• By the end of the century, many Britons viewed the principal foreign threat as Germany, only recently formed into a united nation in 1871. Germany was a rising power both economically and militarily, and its leaders, particularly Victoria’s grandson, the bombastic kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941; r. 1888–1918), occasionally made noises about challenging Britain for world leadership.