History of Our Own Times From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880, Volume IV

The fourth and final volume of McCarthy's landmark history captures the most tumultuous quarter-century in modern British politics, when democracy was born not through revolution but through a series of daring legislative leaps. The narrative opens with the bloody suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, a brutal episode that exposed the moral bankruptcy of colonial rule, then sweeps forward into Disraeli's legendary 1867 Reform Act - the 'leap in the dark' that transformed the British electorate from hundreds of thousands into millions. McCarthy, writing as both historian and participant in the politics he describes, traces the rise of the Fenian movement and Irish nationalism, traces Gladstone's astonishing reform ministry that dismantled the Anglican establishment in Ireland and flooded Parliament with bills transforming education, the army, and poor relief, and concludes with Disraeli's final imperial triumph at the Berlin Congress, where the aging statesman brokered peace while Britain's empire expanded toward the sun. This is history written at white heat - urgent, opinionated, and alive with the conflicts that made modern Britain.