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  3. Structures and Transformations in Modern British History
  • Cited by 13
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2011
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9780511973901
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973901
Subjects:
British History after 1450, History, Politics and International Relations, Comparative Politics
Information

Book description

This major collection of essays challenges many of our preconceptions about British political and social history from the late eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, twelve leading scholars explore both the long-term structures - social, political and intellectual - of modern British history, and the forces that have transformed those structures at key moments. The result is a series of insightful, original essays presenting new research within a broad historical context. Subjects covered include the consequences of rapid demographic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the forces shaping transnational networks, especially those between Britain and its empire; and the recurrent problem of how we connect cultural politics to social change. An introductory essay situates Stedman Jones's work within the broader historiographical trends of the past thirty years, drawing important conclusions about new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.

Reviews

"...extraordinary collection of essays..." -Sonya O. Rose, Victorian Studies

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Coping with rapid population growth: how England fared in the century preceding the Great Exhibition of 1851
    pp 24-53
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The population history of England as a whole has been charted in detail from 1541 onwards. This chapter calls attention to the scale of the achievement implied in coping with an unprecedented rate of population growth. The period running from c.1760 to c.1840 is described as the classic period of the Industrial Revolution. The occupational structure mirrored changes in the structure of aggregate demand. In an organic economy it was normal for about three-quarters of the labour force to be engaged in agriculture. Rising real incomes and a change in the structure of aggregate demand is, of course, only a necessary but not a sufficient cause of escape from the constraints of an organic economy. There is suggestive evidence that as growth rates reached a peak the strain became severe, but overall the scale of the achievement in coping with rapid population growth was striking.
  • 2 - The ‘urban renaissance’ and the mob: rethinking civic improvement over the long eighteenth century
    pp 54-73
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Few concepts in urban history have been so influential in recent years as that of the urban renaissance. The urban renaissance thesis is not wrong: the physical appearance and cultural life of towns were enhanced during the eighteenth century, and the concept of improvement continues to inform the understanding of the eighteenth-century town, and indeed of the eighteenth century more widely. The history of the eighteenth-century market-place clearly demonstrates the emergence of a divergence between plebeians and elites concerning the legitimate uses of public spaces. Urban improvement certainly involved the harmonious enhancement of civic life, but it also triggered conflicts over the proper uses and rightful owners of public spaces. Clearly, it is only by considering the actions of the mob that a proper appreciation of the nature and extent of the urban renaissance will ever be gained.
  • 3 - Forms of ‘government growth’, 1780–1830
    pp 74-99
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter probes some of the conceptual problems involved in assessments of government growth, with special reference to the case of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It returns to questions which interested welfare-state historians of the 1960s and 1970s, and offers some thoughts on the limited and specific, but nonetheless important ways in which the role of government on the domestic front could be said to have grown both during the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and beyond. The business of government is generated by the choices both of officials and of private persons. Pre-modern states were sometimes able to achieve surprising things with relatively little official involvement and next-to-no public spending. Hilton equates liberalism broadly with the desire to reduce, or enlighten people as to the necessary limits of, government's role, activities and impact.
  • 4 - Family formations: Anglo India and the familial proto-state
    pp 100-117
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter uses the marital histories of a prominent governing class family in early nineteenth-century India to explore the British family's function at the interface between the public and the private sphere in a colonial setting. Loyalty to kin had functional and symbolic importance, Margaret Hunt has argued of eighteenth century England, for it helped people to make sense of a society in which bureaucratic structures were few, authority was for most intents and purposes lodged in households, and social valuations at all levels of society were often more related to blood and ancestry than to individual. By examining the marital fortunes of a prominent imperial kin network, the chapter illuminates British governing-class families' accommodation of the social, cultural and economic demands and opportunities of empire. It explores the imperial family fortunes of Gilbert Elliot, the first Earl of Minto, who served as Governor General of India from 1806-1813.
  • 5 - The commons, enclosure and radical histories
    pp 118-141
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the enclosure of the common or waste and its effect on the labouring poor. Neeson's Commoners of 1993, based on detailed studies of the South Midlands, argues that common rights, and especially common rights on the waste, were a central part of the political economy of the rural poor for as long as the lands lay unenclosed. As Turner and Wordie have shown, the vast majority of land enclosed in the modern period was enclosed between c1720 and 1830, the period of 'Parliamentary Enclosure by Private Bill'. The amount of common land left in England in 1845 was a matter of dispute. After 1876, enclosure of commons or waste in the classic sense came to an end. After 1845 the organization of much opposition to enclosure was urban and middle class, as opposed to rural and plebeian.
  • 6 - Engels and the city: the philosophy and practice of urban hypocrisy
    pp 142-163
  • View abstract

    Summary

    One can read clear echoes of Friedrich Engels's work in the 1920s Chicago School of urban theorists with their concentric zone theory or in any number of modern university courses on cultural criticism and social geography, with their derivative Henri Lefebvre influenced focus on the production or archaeology of space. Engels's initial literary response to the state of Manchester was not the Condition. It was a far more considered work of early Marxist thought which sought to move Feuerbach's materialism further on from the idealistic Young Hegelian remnants which still enveloped it. Proudhon's stress on the correlation of labour with ownership, alongside his conviction that political equality necessitated the abolition of private property, struck an immediate chord with the young Engels. In post-industrial Manchester and post-imperial London, the hypocritical gaze which, for all his simplifications, Engels so brilliantly elucidated, still manages to codify, conceal and even dictate the urban edifice.
  • 7 - The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain
    pp 164-186
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the long-drawn-out Reform crisis of 1830-1832, there had been much radical criticism of the Tory leanings of the Church, manifest in the bishops' overwhelming opposition to the Reform Bill in the Lords, and evangelical attacks on its bloated and complacent internal state. The 1848-1851 period was a major watershed in British history, in which the 'Old Corruption' argument finally lost its potency. The changed political atmosphere not only bolstered the institutions of state; it also altered attitudes to the role of interests in politics. The main reason for the waning of interest in institutional reform was, rather, the growing acceptance of the notion that politics itself was no longer controlled by an unrepresentative elite, but was open to popular influence. The Whig-Liberal tradition of measured constitutional reform did a good deal to improve the representativeness, reputation and remit of Parliament and strengthen popular confidence in the state.
  • 8 - British women and cultures of internationalism, c.1815–1914
    pp 187-209
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Writing on British women's international interests in the nineteenth century has tended to focus on three areas: pacifism; links between national feminist movements; and the relationship between feminists and women subjects of the British empire, particularly India. Christianity was British women's main vehicle for activity outside the private realm. Women's responses to the East, the Balkan areas under the Ottoman caliphate which included substantial Orthodox Christian communities, have been described in the context of their pacifist initiatives. The Englishwoman's Review drew the moral that only the recognition of women's right to equal partnership with men in political life could mitigate the horrors of war. By the start of the twentieth century, British women's growing sense of confidence in their claims to citizenship was reinforced by their leading role in international women's organisations: the International Council of Women (ICW) and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA).
  • 9 - Psychoanalysis, history and national culture
    pp 210-236
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter analyzes why very few historians in twentieth-century Britain engaged with psychoanalytic theories of the mind. It also examines why most celebrated Marxist historians paid so little attention to Freud. Psychoanalysis, of course, has a diverse history; thus, for its serious critics it represents something of a moving target. As is well known, the social, political, cultural and psychological convulsions of World War I and its aftermath coincided with and, in part, stimulated the expanding theoretical and clinical vocabulary of the Freudian movement. Early twentieth-century history was not fertile soil for psychoanalysis. In the decades after World War II no major British historian declared psychoanalysis to be the new frontier. The chapter considers a striking pattern wherein psychoanalytic ideas are nonchalantly dismissed or occluded. Psychoanalysis transforms the way of conceptualising psychic organisation, as well as its relationship to the unconscious 'logic' that informs and skews political choices and allegiances.
  • 10 - Labour and the politics of class, 1900–1940
    pp 237-260
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Britain was written deep into the fabric of pre-1914 British society and culture. Class feeling intensified amidst the social and industrial turmoil of the immediate post-war years. Labour explicitly based its arguments for a better life for the workers on the claim that the workers make the wealth which is the food, clothing, houses, railways, motors and banks of the country. The ancien régime of privilege and class prejudice bred a democratic politics in which the left sought to overthrow class politics and class rule. In most of Britain, social space was more complicated and heterogeneous, and vernacular understandings of social difference more difficult to mobilize behind a unifying politics. Labour's inclusive strategy had appeared to meet with remarkable success during the economic upswing of 1919. By falling in with the construction of a National Government in 1931, Baldwin and his allies sought to underscore Labour's identity as 'un-National'.
  • 11 - The dialectics of liberation: the old left, the new left and the counter-culture
    pp 261-280
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The parliamentary old left was widely seen as confronting a serious crisis of social change and political realignment as a result of the affluence associated with the long period of economic growth after 1945. The second great proposition to consider is that of the new left, understood as referring to a range of views considering organised labour as having become too incorporated to remain a progressive force and looking instead to new, youthful and largely middle-class, movements to bring about a liberation of social institutions from traditional authoritarian and alienated forms. The third great proposition to consider is that of the counter-culture. For many of those who took part, the Dialectics of Liberation Congress had a paradoxical outcome: what had been intended as a critical inquiry into the social and psychological roots of violence had turned into a celebration of the use of violent means in pursuit of progressive ends.
  • 12 - Why the English like turbans: multicultural politics in British history
    pp 281-302
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The ban on Wolverhampton bus crews wearing beards and turbans initiated a two-year-long dispute that reverberated far beyond the town itself, in Britain and India. In 1983, following a long legal struggle, the House of Lords established the right of Sikh pupils to wear a turban at school. It is in the light of these consistent outcomes that we can ask why it is that the English like turbans. The idea that people of colour were out of place in Britain was neither the only nor the most significant obstacle to pluralist policies in post-war Britain. Assimilation provided the language with which ministers in both Conservative and Labour governments justified new immigration controls. Institutional pluralism was not only a Liberal enthusiasm but became convenient for Conservatives too following partition. The outcomes of the Sikhs' campaigns demonstrate that policies which sanctioned cultural pluralism predate the drive to multiculturalism in the 1980s.

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