The last long decade before the outbreak of the First World War was a proving ground. It tested the extent to which the British had been able to adapt their superstructure of power and influence to the more strenuous global conditions that set in during the 1880s and 1890s and reached a further peak of intensity after 1900. The judgment of historians has been variable. The Edwardian decade has sometimes been seen as the ‘high noon’ of empire, the last hurrah of a self-confident imperialism. But, usually, the view has been sterner. Indeed, the more closely the Edwardians have been scrutinised, the more they seem prone to well-merited anxieties. Far from delivering a new security, their abandonment of ‘splendid isolation’ brought the uncertain liabilities of the Triple Entente and an uneasy dependence on Japan in East Asia. The cost of defending their naval supremacy was a furious arms race with Germany, and ended in a strategic withdrawal from the Mediterranean Sea. The Edwardian economy lost ground on productivity, and real incomes stagnated – one cause of large-scale industrial unrest in the last years of peace. The scale of mass poverty revealed by contemporary inquiry was an indictment of both ‘national efficiency’ and social justice. Domestic stability was threatened by fierce divisions over tariffs, taxation and the constitution. The revival of the Irish Question after 1910 highlighted the failure of parliamentary government to resolve the future of Ulster and raised the spectre of civil war in the British Isles.