Joseph Chamberlain

Biography

Joseph Chamberlain was a British businessman and statesman who shaped both the Liberal and Unionist politics of his era. Born in London and schooled at University College School, he moved to Birmingham at eighteen to join the family's screw-making firm, Nettlefold and Chamberlain, which made him wealthy enough to retire from business in his late thirties.

As mayor of Birmingham from 1873 he bought out the gas and water companies, cleared slums and rebuilt the town centre, making the city a model of municipal improvement. He entered Parliament in 1876 as a radical Liberal and joined Gladstone's cabinet in 1880 as President of the Board of Trade, and briefly in 1886 as President of the Local Government Board. He broke with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule and led the Liberal Unionists in helping defeat the 1886 bill.

The Liberal Unionists later allied with the Conservatives, and from 1895 Chamberlain served as Colonial Secretary. He was a leading figure in the Second Boer War period and the 1900 "khaki" election, backed the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897, and offered land in East Africa for Jewish settlement in 1903. That year he resigned to campaign for tariff reform and imperial preference, a cause that split the Unionists. A stroke in 1906 ended his active career, and he died in 1914.