Balfour's World

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Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930) was born toward the beginning of Queen Victoria's long reign. At her death in 1901, he was a year away from becoming the first prime minister of the Edwardian era. In the quarter century after his entry into political life in the 1870s, Britain experienced material changes and a sense of intensifying human interactions as dramatic to his generation as the forces of globalization are today. Aristocrats watched anxiously as gifted boys from the middle classes rose to the top in professional life. Culture wars over male and female behaviours erupted at home, as small wars of empire proliferated overseas. Politicians came to terms with electioneering among the masses and with a boisterous print culture that prefigured the mass media of the next century. The first great era of advanced, international capitalism affected every segment of British and imperial society, including the rarefied domain of Arthur Balfour. That changes of the magnitude that Balfour's generation faced would demand different skills, career paths or political alignments is not surprising.0.