ABSTRACT
There is, perhaps, something rather odd in the suggestion that a contribution on the ‘formation of the United Kingdom’ should begin with that hallowed date in old-style political/electoral history-namely 1832. This is certainly not the place at which to embark on a fundamental reappraisal of the ‘Great Reform Act’, yet the date selected as the starting-point is not the product of an arbitrary whim. Since this contribution considers the period down to 1922that is to say to the partition of Ireland and the end of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland-it points to the central problem in the nineteenth century of an ‘imperial and multinational polity’. I take that problem to be the reconciling of ‘democratic’ internal pressures on the one hand, and ‘imperial’ and external aspirations on the other. Our consideration of these matters ends, in time, with the paradox (at least on the surface) of a British government which is apparently forced to ‘let go’ in Ireland just at the time when ‘victory’ has been achieved in the Great War and the British Empire has expanded, through the mandates, to an even greater extent.
