If historians​ are remembered posthumously, it tends to be for their book titles, while the books themselves gather dust. James Bryce is mostly known today for his surveys of two of history’s great federations: The Holy Roman Empire and The American Commonwealth. He admired both. In some quarters, he retains a more substantial reputation, as a powerful advocate of Anglo-American friendship before the First World War, articulating the liberal constitutional values that both countries seemed to share, and a proponent during the war of a League of Nations which would promote these values around the world. He achieved this by means of his books and articles, his talent for networking among politicians and academics on both sides of the Atlantic, and his position as Britain’s ambassador to the United States for six years. Some present-day proponents of an ‘Anglosphere’ can be found admiring his vision, while critics of Anglo-American liberal imperialism occasionally berate his prejudices. Historians such as Frank Prochaska and Hugh Tulloch have portrayed him as a believer in the Anglo-Saxon racial mission.

In truth, no one has pushed these partisan readings very far, because Bryce was too fastidious a writer to scatter wild generalisations through his writing. On the contrary, he was committed to exploding them, to an extent which has frustrated biographers looking for simple explanations of his beliefs. Stuart Jones has now tackled the problem with an intellectual biography based on a thorough reading of Bryce’s large output, which succeeds admirably because Jones is such a fastidious historian himself. Primarily a contextual study of Bryce’s political thought, it is scrupulously fair without turning a blind eye to those opinions which grate on modern sensibilities, particularly as relating to race. Indeed, Bryce turns out to be much more interesting when his imperfections are taken into proper account.

Bryce’s close-knit Presbyterian family were lowland Scots with strong links to Ulster, where he was born in 1838. He inherited their belief in God, integrity, inquiry and hard work, as well as their family pride – he memorialised his grandfather and father in the Dictionary of National Biography. His personal religion was undogmatic, but he worshipped consistently throughout his life, usually in Presbyterian churches. His schoolmaster father, a devoted geologist and botanist, taught him to observe the beauties of the natural world, believing that revelation and natural science were God’s complementary ways of communicating his love for mankind. He was killed in a rockfall while exploring above Loch Ness.

Bryce’s upbringing left him politely but steadfastly antagonistic to church establishments and privileges. Yet he also shared the common Scottish assumption that talented students of humble background should be able to secure worldly success by educational attainment: hence the ‘democratic intellect’ of Jones’s subtitle. Bryce enrolled at Glasgow University at sixteen, but could not resist applying to Oxford despite its Anglican connections. It meant the chance of prizes and a London professional career. There followed a telling episode when, having won a scholarship to Trinity College in 1857, he declined to meet the president’s unenforceable request that he declare his conformity to the Church of England (religious tests at matriculation having been abolished in 1854). The fellows supported Bryce. Five years later, after winning three firsts and several university prizes, a similar issue arose when he won a fellowship at Oriel. Again he declined to make the declaration of conformity, without any adverse consequences, and took up the position knowing that he could hold it for eight years before being required to take a higher degree, the MA, which would oblige him to subscribe to the 39 Articles. This problem also disappeared: when he was appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law in 1870, convocation simply conferred the necessary higher degree (the DCL) on him. Oxbridge’s remaining Anglican restrictions now seemed so threadbare that in 1871 Gladstone’s government was able to abolish them without difficulty.

In 1862, the examiners of the university’s Arnold Historical Essay Prize chose the Holy Roman Empire as its topic. Bryce claimed to be daunted by the prospect of mastering more than a thousand years of history but submitted his essay all the same, reasoning that no entry could hope to be adequate to the ‘grandeur’ of the subject. Of course he won, and the resulting book, published in 1864 when he was 26, gave him lifelong fame. It celebrated the ambition and continuity of a grand idea transcending borders and races. It emphasised the legacy of Roman law – which became one of Bryce’s specialist subjects – and the idea of ordered rule also inherited from Rome. It lamented the collapse of Central Europe after 1648 into small, squabbling and badly governed principalities, and it appealed to liberals who saw German unification and the survival of the Union in North America as urgent contemporary projects which would revive good government on a grand scale.

One fruit of the book was Bryce’s appointment as Regius Professor of Civil Law. Yet even with Oxford’s Anglican prejudices in retreat, Bryce was not keen to live there. He preferred the intellectual life of the cities in the North-West. He had got to know the leading educational philanthropists of Lancashire during a stint inspecting its secondary schools in 1865-66 for a royal commission seeking to increase public access to their historic private endowments. He also practised law on the northern circuit, and lectured for the Liverpool Law Society. Progressive Manchester and Liverpool Unitarian social circles offered intelligent young men and women relaxed opportunities for mingling and debating, and provided Bryce with most of his women friends (including his future wife, Marion, whom he married in 1889 after a lengthy bachelorhood). These Unitarian connections led to his appointment to teach law at the tertiary-level Owens College in Manchester from 1867, for which he later drafted a constitution. His constitution was founded on the principle that higher education was a matter of public interest, and specified a strong local lay element in the governing body. Bryce’s emphasis on local lay governance was replicated when the college was reincarnated as Victoria University in 1880 (it later became the University of Manchester), and replicated further in most of the civic universities established in the following decades.

Bryce’s constitution illustrated his vision of an active citizenry promoting the public interest, a concept Jones persuasively places at the heart of his worldview. It owed a lot to classical republican thinking, and to the lay-dominated governance structure of Presbyterianism. Bryce’s republicanism underpinned his admiration for the egalitarian dynamism of the US, which he first visited in 1870. His idealism about public service, and his thirst for deserved fame, also made him hanker after a career in British politics, as the highest calling of the learned patriot. In any case, he failed throughout the 1870s to make a great success of the bar. He was trying to juggle legal practice with too many lecturing commitments and too many intellectual interests. In Manchester legal circles he was thought of as a dilettante.

Bryce had a mania for geographical, historical and scientific information. He travelled zealously in search of material on local laws, customs and natural phenomena. In 1872 he spent a formative two months in Iceland, where he marvelled at its ‘raw bleakness’ and its rich legal and constitutional history going back to the sagas and its tenth-century law court. His historicism made him realise that not all small nations could be assimilated in grand cross-border projects, however progressive the latter might seem, and he became a supporter of home rule for Iceland, then under Danish sovereignty. In 1876 he visited Armenia, again combining exhilarating open-air tramps with historical investigation. He climbed Mount Ararat in mist without a guide – a feat that led to his election to the Alpine Club. He also realised how severely the rich traditions of the Armenian nation were being threatened by Ottoman oppression, and advocated the cause of the Armenians in a letter to the Times in 1878.

Politically, this was a timely gesture, connecting Bryce to the intense agitation on behalf of the Ottoman Christians that Gladstonian Liberals had taken up in opposition to Disraeli’s government. He became a Gladstonian loyalist and MP for Tower Hamlets at the 1880 election which returned the Liberals to power. The ‘virtuous passion’ the Liberals aroused over the ‘Eastern Question’ had a great impact on him, as on several other academics. It gave him faith that democratic public opinion, properly led, could realise constructive political ends. This strengthened his confidence that politics could be an uplifting pursuit.

He was to need all this confidence in the next few years, as his experience at Westminster jarred with his high-minded ideals. Since he was still writing history and journalism at a furious pace, he came to hate the ‘petty distractions of parliamentary life’. He found the workload as MP for Tower Hamlets unmanageable, and escaped to a smaller constituency, Aberdeen South, in 1885. His speeches were far too academic and discursive to please the Commons: Joseph Chamberlain called him a ‘snivelling professor’.

Above all, Bryce was depressed by the obstruction campaign mounted by the Irish Nationalist MPs, which occupied vast amounts of parliamentary time and disrupted the government’s legislative timetable. In the great crisis over Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule over 1885-86, Bryce dismayed his greatest friend, A.V. Dicey, and surprised many others by supporting Gladstone’s volte face – primarily on the pragmatic grounds that the Nationalists would make any other option unworkable. Bryce thought Dicey’s unionist aspirations a fantasy: already in 1882 he had realised that a British democracy could not consistently impose coercive legislation on an Irish democracy. In genuinely representative polities, large forces could not oppress small minorities for ever. Irish resistance to British rule had become too ingrained, and some experimental concession of self-government was the only way forward. But the same logic applied to Ulster Protestants within a self-governing Ireland and in 1886, stimulated by family pressure from Belfast, Bryce urged Gladstone to consider separate arrangements for Ulster (something, curiously, that Jones does not mention). Bryce’s loyalty to Gladstone raised his political profile, in that he sat on the front bench of the much depleted party for the rest of his career, but this was of little immediate benefit, since the Liberals were out of power for most of the next twenty years.

Some Liberals of an intellectual bent, Bryce not among them, sought to rationalise Home Rule by mooting the federalisation of the UK, or ‘home rule all round’, for Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland. This was not practical politics, but it reflected widespread interest in the principle of confederation, which might consolidate large territories under a united and ambitious government while preserving local freedoms. Canada had gone down this road in 1867, while liberal-minded people were increasingly praising the US for the same reason. Admiration for American political stability was a relatively new argument. In the 1830s, Tocqueville had given what most Europeans considered to be a very ambivalent account of American democracy. The Civil War had subsequently shown up its structural as well as its ethical weaknesses. It was Bryce’s achievement, in 1888, to replace Tocqueville and to give the world an apparently scientific and mostly complimentary study of the American political system. The American Commonwealth was the book that did most to validate liberals’ emerging confidence that a republican US could promote the peaceful development of global constitutionalism.

Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his ‘genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains’). Bryce’s boast here, as in his political career, was that intensive travel and research gave him a superior expertise, and that this expertise was the best way of solving political dilemmas. His account celebrated America’s success in combining purposeful federal government and local patriotism, and argued that cultural factors were largely responsible for this success. Tocqueville had been wrong to suggest that a democratic constitution had determined American political culture, rather than the environment, the economy and racial factors. The American constitution was less flexible than Britain’s, being more rigidly constrained by law. But the historian should not infer that one set of arrangements would always provide better outcomes than the other. In both countries, political mechanisms were delicate; they worked because political actors were accustomed to making them work. American and British political outcomes were the consequence not of abstract legalities but of local political and social realities, as well as the impact of public opinion over time. And though each constitution drew inspiration from the same legal tradition, in practice the differences mattered much more than the common ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage which so many writers at the time, and since, have chosen to emphasise.

So Bryce challenged several existing interpreters – not just Tocqueville but also, for example, Henry Maine, who had suggested introducing a supreme court in Britain as a barrier against excessive democracy. Bryce pointed out that the American court was supreme only in relation to its responsibility to interpret a written constitution, not because courts should be above democracy. Later, Bryce challenged Moisei Ostrogorski, who worried that British democracy would develop the same caucus spoils system that had infected some American cities. Bryce denied that caucuses were an unavoidable aspect of democratic politics. Instead, he traced their development to the political culture in those particular cities, especially the social function played by party networks in close-knit immigrant communities. This contextual argument did not make Bryce complacent about the way that democratic party systems were developing, in Britain or the US. On the contrary, he hoped that The American Commonwealth would publicise the worst elements of big city corruption so that public opinion could be led to demand reform.

Bryce’s careful contextualism was now his trademark. He had used it in 1867, in a way that exaggerated his radicalism. Together with other young Oxbridge fellows, he had contributed to a celebrated book, Essays on Reform, published at the height of that year’s controversy over parliamentary reform. His essay had attacked anti-democrats such as Robert Lowe for using historical analogies from ancient Greece to justify their opposition to franchise extension, since the social and political circumstances of modern Britain were entirely different. Compared to Lowe, Bryce’s instincts were democratic, but it soon became clear that he did not support a dramatic extension of the franchise. He always insisted that the franchise was not a right; it should be restricted to those with the ‘intellectual capacity’ and ‘moral zeal’ necessary for them to understand and promote the public interest. In lectures at Yale in 1908, he blamed the ‘deficiencies’ of the modern world’s ‘free governments’ on ‘the failure of the citizens to reach the needed standard of civic excellence’. For Bryce, the ‘intellect’ that should shape the national political conversation was in fact ‘meritocratic’ more than ‘democratic’.

Jones supplies his own careful contextualism to illuminate Bryce’s writings on race, arguing that they were animated less by racialism or ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ than by his rigidly cerebral Presbyterian republicanism. Bryce argued forcefully that it had been a mistake to enfranchise the emancipated African Americans en masse after the Civil War. They lacked the education and political interests necessary to be independent voters. They were easy prey for demagogues and corrupt forces, and so the large expansion of the electorate in Southern states after 1865 was bound to weaken political institutions. This argument hardly suggested deep sympathy or familiarity with Southern Black culture. But Bryce was similarly unrepentant about his opposition to women’s suffrage, on the same grounds. He acknowledged that his own women friends in progressive Unitarian circles discussed political issues judiciously, but insisted that they would remain a minority, given the poor state of women’s education. So mass female enfranchisement was bound to lead to the driving out of reasoned opinions by unprincipled hucksters exploiting ignorance.

Before the 1890s, Bryce generally downgraded the role of race in politics, insisting, for example, that racial tensions had played little part in the expansion of ancient Rome, and that race feeling was only one of several elements inspiring modern nationalist movements. But he became more preoccupied with the topic, initially because of his visit to India in 1888-89, which exposed him to the ingrained racial prejudices of Anglo-Indian elites. He lamented their general unwillingness to engage with Indian culture, which meant that Britain had learned nothing from conquest, ‘except a taste for certain kinds of carpet’. The visit seems to have convinced him that similar antagonisms would continue to bedevil American race relations. This led him into trouble in 1902, when he gave the Romanes Lecture on the relation between ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ races, and relied, as usual, on interviews for much of his content. Having collected the opinions of many separatist whites in the American South, he pointed out that their hostility to racial intermingling was an inescapable political fact, and that some black leaders also favoured separate development. It seemed that he was condoning apartheid. Thereafter he wisely stuck to platitudes. When The American Commonwealth was revised in 1910, he hoped race antagonism might decline under the influence of ‘the application of the principles of the Gospel’.

The period between 1898 and 1905 was painful for someone of Bryce’s beliefs. The Tory government led Britain into the Boer War, which he opposed. (His view that the Boers’ Orange Free State was one of very few ‘successful democracies’ hardly strengthens his reputation for racial sensitivity.) The Tories then won a thumping majority by playing the jingo card at the election of 1900. The US also followed an imperialist agenda with its defeat of Spain and acquisition of the Philippines. In 1903, Chamberlain, who had played a key role in promoting the Boer War, launched a campaign for the return of protection. Bryce loathed this ‘intolerably selfish’ idea – a reversion to the politics of vested interests – as well as the ‘moral deterioration’ of British politics that Chamberlain had engineered.

Of course, Bryce was far from alone in these opinions; academic circles on both sides of the Atlantic mobilised against the new populism, and sought spokesmen to defend the old liberal verities. Bryce’s high profile and seniority, together with his genuine interest in people and ideas, meant that he was an obvious candidate for such roles. Offices, honours and lecture invitations fell into his lap, irresistible for someone who had always sought prizes. In 1907 the Liberal government made him ambassador to the US, in order to signal its belief in good relations and free trade (and to remove him from his cabinet post as chief secretary to Ireland, after his Irish Councils Bill antagonised Nationalist MPs). For the next six years, he was constantly in demand for lectures, commencement orations, addresses to religious associations (warning society against excessive materialism) and environmental organisations. He declined a peerage on his appointment, on the grounds that Americans would have more respect for an untitled man, but accepted the Order of Merit instead, and a viscountcy when he returned. As president of the British Academy from 1913 to 1917, he had a platform to celebrate the importance of the humanities, a phrase he helped to make fashionable during the war in response to alarms about the impact of carnage, technology and materialism on the human spirit. By his death he had received honorary degrees from 31 universities.

Bryce’s intellectual achievement in his later years was much less impressive. Ever since the multiple crises posed by the Boer War and tariff reform, he had been preparing the book that finally appeared as Modern Democracies in 1921. It was a grandiose study in comparative political science. The plan was to look at the modern democracies ‘in a dispassionately scientific spirit’, to see in what respects they had developed differently, with the hope of persuading the leaders of public opinion in each state to learn from best practice elsewhere. While ambassador in Washington, he visited Canada (and South America, leading to a separate volume). He also travelled to Australia and New Zealand, and drew on his experiences and networks in France and Switzerland. Yet the task proved beyond him, the volumes too bitty, the conclusions too hesitant, the project unsuited to the very different circumstances of the postwar world. The book’s subject matter also offered an unfortunate reminder of the political shortcomings of Bryce and his contemporaries. During his 27 years as an MP, he had never succeeded in shaping democratic public opinion himself. Even the most skilful of his political colleagues had found it difficult to mobilise a ‘virtuous passion’; instead the initiative had passed to demagogues such as Chamberlain and Lloyd George, both of whom Bryce disliked. And the Armenians were still suffering.