Yet, in context, we can read the Henderson photograph differently from the way Kirk wants us to. Another photograph from the 1926 visit not in the book shows Henderson sitting with the marquess of Salisbury, separated only by the mayor of Townsville in a white suit and natty bow tie (they were in Queensland, after all). Salisbury was then Lord Privy Seal in Baldwin’s government and leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords, and thus deeply implicated in the defeat of the General Strike earlier in the year – hardly fit company for a class-conscious labour man.

Salisbury and Henderson were in Australia as part of a large Empire Parliamentary Association Delegation from all parties and many parts of the empire. Henderson could just as well be seen as a representative of the empire in its always boisterous and occasionally fractious dependency, as of fraternal labour in a country that was leading the way in social reform. ‘Englishmen’, the Frenchman Edmond Marin La Meslée observed on his visit here in 1883, ‘think of the colonials as an inferior race’, which the colonials reciprocate by wasting ‘very little love on Englishmen, even though they are their first cousins’. The proud Australians, he went on, ‘cordially detest the affected fops who, lispingly and inordinately accentuating their vowel sounds, strut the Sydney streets with yellow gloves, cane and monocle’. Within a handful of years of Henderson’s visit, his erstwhile colleague and redoubtable proletarian Jimmy Thomas, who had succeeded Salisbury as Lord Privy Seal in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 Labour government but was now a Labour renegade in his mainly conservative National Government, was trying to persuade Australians not to quit the empire merely because the aristocratic Douglas Jardine was battering the ribs of Don Bradman and his teammates.

The place of nation and empire in the politics of Britain and Australia from the end of the nineteenth century is Kirk’s main theme. His purpose is to show that we cannot understand the electoral successes and failures of labour in politics in Britain and Australia by concentrating on domestic and, in particular, bread-and-butter issues, as he alleges historians have done hitherto. Kirk thinks allegiance to nation and empire, what he calls ‘the politics of loyalism’, was fundamental in both countries to the way the major political parties defined themselves and their political enemies, and thus to the outcome of elections. But his argument stumbles on the two key terms of his assertion. He fails to tell us what nation has meant in Anglo-Australian politics, or how its meanings were coloured by being coupled with empire. Whatever these were, and however they changed, they were certainly not the same in Britain and Australia, and that difference matters.

An Australian example from his book illustrates the problem. Kirk assumes that, when Labor figures invoked the nation, they had in mind some offshore other, much as British labour stared across the channel or the Atlantic. He notices the Australian labour movement’s strong support in the first decade after Federation for the expansion of Commonwealth powers to regulate the economy, nationalise industries, found a national bank, enforce arbitration, and guarantee the family wage. He does not notice how well these ambitions explain why the labour movement apostrophised the nation so forcefully and so often. The other here was not offshore, but the parish pump, as one labour movement paper called it, and states’ rights. Labor’s stake in Federation was profound. Only the Commonwealth, the leaders of the labour movement thought, could be relied on to underwrite the Australian way. They feared that conservative states would dismantle it, and that conservative politicians nationally wanted to give them back the power to do so. That, as much as support for White Australia, is what they meant by putting Australia first, by calling themselves nationalists. Insofar as empire had any significance in this context, it lay in the suspicion that London money was intent on winding back workers’ protections, and was pressing conservative politicians to hurry on with the task.

Empire, too, poses difficulties for Kirk’s argument. At no time in the twentieth century could a political party in either country hope to stake its fortunes on the empire over all other considerations. That was increasingly true as the empire morphed into the Commonwealth. At best it had a negative value – parties of the left, in particular, had to guard against the charge that they were hostile to empire or commonwealth. Occasionally, Labor in Australia railed against the empire, as when it saw a sinister connection between money power and the imperial system – in 1931, for instance. But the charge didn’t boost its electoral success, and wise heads in the party soon learned to mute their views on empire to ensure they did not become an electoral liability.

Nor has strident pro-imperial sentiment ever been a way to win political friends here, or, for that matter, in Britain any time since Joseph Chamberlain. Australians laughed at Robert Menzies’ extravagant love of empire and monarchy even as they voted for him, which they did for quite other reasons. Menzies knew that in the decades immediately after the war, Labor was much more vulnerable to the charge of being soft on communism than hard on empire. Kirk knows it too, and quietly jettisons his grand theme of ‘the politics of loyalism’ to nation and empire, and, in its stead, takes up what he calls ‘Cold War loyalism’.

Of course, following Indian independence, in a fine irony unremarked by Kirk, the right in Britain was much more burdened by empire than was the left. With the likes of Eden running the show, what need of leftist critics of empire? Harold Wilson’s inability to prevent Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia pales against the disasters of policy and practice in Suez, South Africa, Kenya, and Malaya, all on the Tories’ watch. Margaret Thatcher knew better than to trick out her frighteningly popular war on a barren rock in the south Atlantic in the gaudy rags of empire. The Falklands, she insisted, were a British possession, no more and no less. In his final chapters, Kirk is forced to admit to himself that the evidence no longer fitted his procrustean bed of nation and empire, if it ever did, and that, yes, it is the economy and all the aspirations and vexations that go with it that shape the politics of both nations. We are left wondering how his book got into a series on imperialism.

Manchester University Press have produced a handsome book. Errors are few, though Kirk and his publishers have over the years struggled to be consistent with that capital D in the middle of Ramsay MacDonald’s surname, no less here. But editorial control is for the most part tight; hardcover publishing isn’t dead. On one matter the publishers inexplicably lowered their gaze: the book is an armoury of quote marks around single words. It is hard to fathom the function of these tiny daggers. Are they marking actual quotations? Alerting us to key terms? Warning us of ideas Kirk thinks might be suspect? Defying us to disagree? Giving him some ironic distance from what he writes? Who knows? They even randomly attack people’s names: thus we get ‘Billy’ Hughes and ‘Ted’ Heath, but also Bob Hawke and Tony Blair.