Abstract:
On 24 August 1898, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia proposed an unprecedented international conference: the first called in a time of peace to discuss the amassing of armaments and the maintenance of international stability. News of the rescript spread quickly. In Britain, as elsewhere, it evoked an enormous public response. This thesis examines the British public petitioning movement that emerged in response to the Tsar’s proposal. Within one week of the rescript’s circulation British groups began sending memorials, resolutions and petitions to their Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, all expressing their overwhelming support of the Tsar’s proposal. This thesis examines how the British public engaged with the idea of the conference during the nine months between the rescript’s issuance and the first Hague Peace Conference’s opening in May 1899 by analysing the 1,406 petitions and resolutions Britons sent in its favour. It contends that the idea of a conference of peace and disarmament was alluring to many Britons. Those Britons grappled with questions about the practical applications of a conference ‘of peace’ and questioned the value of the principles contained in the Tsar’s proposal. Altogether, the thesis argues that the petitions sent in response to the rescript were not only an important form of political lobbying–and one that has been largely ignored in the literature–but that historians need to expand their reading of this lobbying’s relevance. The petitioning was not limited to known pacifists and nor was it, as so many historians of peace activism maintain, solely fuelled by the actions of newspaper magnate W. T. Stead. Rather, the Tsar’s rescript compelled Britons to consider the proposed conference’s potential implications for their place in the increasingly internationalised nineteenth-century world.
