F. S. Oliver

Frederick Scott Oliver, or F.S. Oliver (1864–1934), was a prominent Scottish political writer and businessman who advocated tariff reform and imperial union for the British Empire. He played an important role in the Round Table movement, collaborated in the downfall of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s wartime government and its replacement by David Lloyd George in 1916, and pressed for "home rule all round" to resolve the political conflict between Britain and Irish nationalists.

Born in February 1864 to Scottish parents, Oliver was raised in Scotland’s border region with England and attended Edinburgh University. He then went to Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he became a lifelong friend of Austen Chamberlain and his imperial-minded father, Joseph Chamberlain. Oliver practiced law for three years, but he abandoned this career to marry Katharine Augusta M’Laren. He subsequently joined the linen drapery firm of Debenham & Freebody, becoming a partner in 1904.

A lifelong Unionist Party (UK) member, Oliver expressed his political leanings in a series of books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. In one of his first pamphlets, The Statesman and the Bishop, he came out in favour of Imperial Federation, saying that: "… the union of the British race, the firm and effective federation of our people in all quarters of the earth, appears to me to be of such transcendent importance as a matter of both morals and of politics, that if the achievement of it required a sacrifice instead of a gain, I should be prepared to make it.

"The desire for union, the grand Federal Idea, comes first, and a long way first among my motives."

In 1906 Oliver published the biography Alexander Hamilton, which used the example set by the federalists of the early United States to argue for a federal arrangement for the British Empire. The book came to the attention of Lord Alfred Milner and the members of "Milner's Kindergarten," who were then engaged in the reconstruction of South Africa following the Boer War of 1899-1902. According to Leo Amery, a friend of the kindergarten, "Alexander Hamilton became the Bible of the young men of Milner’s Kindergarten." In 1934 The Times asserted, "The book had probably more influence than any other political book of the decade." Novelist John Buchan, another friend of the Kindergarten, believed that Oliver had "a real and enduring influence on political thought."

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