Liberalism and Naval Strategy (1986) examines the role that liberalism played in shaping the naval strategy of the Pax Britannia. Liberalism was linked to commercial interest, and the devotion of the middle classes to peaceful commerce and their suspicion of force as government policy helped to inform critical choices. The traditional British naval strategy of the mercantilist era persisted into the early nineteenth century when the Royal Navy’s policing of the seas against piracy and the slave trade antagonized trade rivals, particularly America. By the 1850s, Britain granted immunity to neutral shipping – after much debate, with some of the century’s leading thinkers, including Mill and Marx, taking prominent parts in the naval controversies. This book examines these events, as well as the writings of contemporary naval strategists including the Colomb brothers. It also discusses the strategic posture of the Admiralty and its opponents before and during the war against Germany in 1914.

Imperialism and Social Reform (1960) examines British social-imperialism and the development of social-imperial thought: the promotion of a ‘people’s imperialism’, or the support of the working classes for the imperialist system. It looks at the social and economic background and analyses the various forms of social-imperial thought, including the vigorous strand of imperial-socialists, who asserted that the welfare of the working classes depended upon imperial strength.

The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism seeks to uncover some of the intellectual origins of the imperialism of the classic period, the sources from which later theories of imperialism were constructed, and the character of the ideology which underlay the dismantling of the old colonial system and the construction of the Victorian Pax Britannica. The author discusses the development and diffusion of a number of the central arguments of the 'science' of political economy, from the standpoint of a historian rather than an economist, which were crucial not only to the construction of theories of capitalist imperialism, but also served as a spur both to efforts at colonization, and to establishing a British Workshop of the World.

In this stimulating history of the ideas behind George Eliot's novels, Bernard Semmel explores Eliot's imaginative use of the theme of inheritance, as a metaphor for her political thinking.
Through detailed analyses of Eliot's novels and other writings, and a study of the intellectual currents of the time, Semmel demonstrates how and why Eliot's views on inheritance provided central ideas for her fiction. Semmel uncovers Eliot's intent when she wrote of the obligations of inheritance both in the common meaning of the term, as in the transfer of goods and property from parents to children, and in the more metaphoric sense of the inheritance of both the benefits and burdens of the historical past, particularly those of the nation's culture and traditions. He believes Eliot's novels dwelt so insistently on the idea of inheritance in good part because she viewed herself as intellectually "disinherited," writing as she did at a time when much of England was being transformed from a traditional community to an alienating modern society, and when, moreover, she suffered from a painful estrangement from her family.
In this thought-provoking study, Semmel dissects the politics of Eliot's novels, including Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Romola Felix Holt, and Adam Bede, and convincingly displays the relationship between Eliot's variations on the theme of inheritance and her acceptance of Britain's traditional policies of compromise and reform. All those interested in Victorian literature, history, and political thought will appreciate Semmel's George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance.