Chamberlain, Joseph

Chamberlain, Joseph (1836–1914). Radical and imperialist. Chamberlain made his fortune as a screw manufacturer, which enabled him to retire at the age of 38. He dedicated the rest of his life to politics, first on the Birmingham city council, where he rose to be mayor in 1873–5, and then as a Birmingham MP. He was an advanced social reformer, clearing slums, building houses for the poor, setting up free public libraries and art galleries, and taking the gas, water, and sewage systems of Birmingham into municipal ownership. He also had sharp views on the aristocracy, which he regarded as useless (‘they toil not, neither do they spin’). He rose to cabinet rank in 1880. But he was not comfortable in the Liberal Party, because of his patriotic views on national issues. These were sorely tested by Gladstone's limp policies on South Africa and Egypt, which caused him to break formally with the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule in 1886. The new Liberal Unionist group he attached himself to never made it up with the rest of the Liberal Party, and eventually allied with the Conservatives, providing Chamberlain with his next major platform, as colonial secretary in Salisbury's government of 1895.

As colonial secretary Chamberlain proved as radical as he had on the domestic scene, advocating the development by central government of what he called Britain's ‘imperial estates’. He also believed in their extension, particularly in southern Africa, where he was instrumental in trying to bring the Afrikaner republics to heel, first clandestinely (the Jameson Raid)and then by helping to provoke the second Boer War. But he was an unusual imperialist. He sought to extend the empire, but worried about its over‐extension. With this in mind in 1898 he tried to fix a protective alliance with Germany behind Salisbury's back. He also wished to consolidate the colonies. In 1903 he came out publicly in favour of imperial preference as a means of achieving this, resigning from the cabinet in order to press it at the next election (1906). The result was to split the Conservative Party, and give the Liberals a landslide victory. He may have been right. In July 1906, however, he suffered a disabling stroke. Without his energy behind it the tariff reform campaign wilted.