Examination of debate within the Conservative party over the principles of free trade. The complex and troubled relationship between protectionism and Conservatism in nineteenth-century Britain is the focus of this book. It looks at how the developing free-trade orthodoxy was challenged within Conservatism, and offers new perspectives on the intellectual controversies which precipitated the Conservative party's split of 1846 and the intricate denouement of 1846-52. In contrast to traditional accounts, it also seeks to explore the intellectual character of opposition to the evolving mid-Victorian consensus framed around free trade, laissez-faire and sound money, revealing how Conservatives debated key aspects of economic policy. Through an exhaustive reading of Conservative journals, pamphlets and contributions to parliamentary debates, the author is able to expose an alternative set of ideas about the direction of British economic and social change and the role of government in moulding it. Dr ANNA GAMBLES is lecturer in modern British history, University of Kent at Canterbury.

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world. Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.