The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the origins of the book and its relationship to the companion volume by the historian David Fitzpatrick, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925 (2020). The chapter sets out the volume’s use of the term Americanisation and the value of applying this framework for examining Irish society in the decades after the Great Famine. It considers the question of race and the multicultural American identity and briefly discusses the scholarship on whiteness and Irish identity. Returned migration is a key aspect of the influence of the United States of America on Irish culture and the chapter provides information on the extent and exceptionalism of Ireland’s returned migration trends. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography of the phenomenon and of Ireland’s relationship to America. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, emphasising the thematic and interdisciplinary approach.

Exploring the pivotal role of oil in the social and economic development of Iran between two World Wars, the era was marked by the establishment of a modern state aimed at ensuring territorial integrity and creating a homogeneous society within defined geographical borders. Such transformative efforts led to the collapse of the Qajar dynasty and the ascent of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s centralised and authoritative government. During this period, extensive social and economic development policies radically transformed the fabric of Iranian society, notably through the state’s substantial role in industrial investment, which significantly increased the number of industrial workers. Despite these broad changes, operations in the oil industry continued as initially established, resulting in dissatisfaction among both Iranian and Indian workers. This discontent gave rise to a series of labour strikes in the 1920s, underscoring the workers’ capacity to influence the shaping of civil society. Concurrently, the imperative for oil revenue coupled with the Iranian government’s insistence on employing local labour precipitated the cancellation of the D’Arcy Agreement and the signing of a new contract in 1933. A crucial term of this contract was the ‘Iranianisation’ of the workforce, which gradually increased the presence of skilled Iranian workers within the industry. This strategic shift not only redefined employment and living conditions but also facilitated the expansion of oil towns, where policies of ethnic and employment segregation were widely implemented, reflecting the broader national goals of integration and societal standardisation.

This chapter discusses an anonymous article titled ‘Tamthīl,’ which appeared in Afghanistan’s first newspaper, Shams al-Nahār (‘The Morning Sun’) in the late 19th century. The article was commissioned by the Afghan ruler Amīr Shayr ʿAlī Khān (r. 1863-65, 1868-78) and was likely written by Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Qādir Khān, the Amīr’s private secretary. It seems to have been based on a speech delivered by the Qāḍī to members of the Afghan military, arguing for the need for Westernising military reforms, but was in any case written for a broader audience. The article borrows many arguments from Khayr al-Dīn al-Tūnisī’s Arabic work Aqwam al-Masālik fī Maʿrifat Aḥwāl al-Mamālik (The surest means to knowing the conditions of kingdoms) published in 1867.

The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010 ushered in the idea of a new Conservative Party, repairing both image and electoral prospects. However, this chapter will examine to what extent that change occurred, and how much the Conservatives were united or divided by the same older questions of policy and ideology – particularly on Europe and the economy. The chapter will also analyse the development of the party’s structures, power and personnel, and contemplate what effects any change may have had.

Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

When Wagner was born in 1813, Germany did not exist. Saxony was part of Napoleon’s ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, a collection of puppet-states. By the time he died, the German Empire was the most powerful and prosperous state in continental Europe. This sensational transformation was marked by periodic domestic upheaval (the revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9), a demographic explosion, an industrial revolution and three victorious wars for Prussia (against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870). The accompanying political, social, and cultural changes were on a commensurate scale. Nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and political Catholicism all emerged as mass movements, responding to radical changes in the public sphere driven by urbanisation, mass literacy and a communications revolution. By the time Wagner died in 1883, Germany had changed more than during the previous millennium.

The country the different prime ministers have led and the political system over which they have presided have been vastly different. In this chapter, we explore some of the more momentous technological, political, cultural, and social changes that impacted on the office over the 300 years. Only by appreciating these factors, which have been perhaps under-considered in the literature on the office to date, can a rounded appreciation of the office’s survival it be achieved. The sheer pace and extent of these changes makes the continuity and survival of the office of prime minister over the full 300 years, and the adaptability of the individuals involved, even more remarkable.

Chapter 3 tackles a gendered interpretation of ‘modernisation’, which never became widespread but had a discernible influence on both the left’s intellectual scene and Labour’s development. In the 1970s, while feminism was making a mark on the labour movement, its proponents did not claim that their demands would ‘modernise’ the party. Over the 1980s and 1990s, this began to change. Prominent and closely networked feminists in the socialist media and think tank scene suggested that the ‘modern economy’ was increasingly reliant on paid female labour and that family models were pluralising in ‘modern society’. These arguments were taken up by influential Labour politicians, especially Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. They used them to argue that a crucial aspect of Labour’s ‘modernisation’ must be policies for gender equality. Their arguments never became central to New Labour. However, they did shape the New Labour project as it emerged in the 1990s, and thus some of its policies. Perhaps more importantly, the ‘modernisation’ element of these arguments may have unintentionally diluted the case for a more disruptive gender politics.

Chapter 5 traces the rise of arguments for ‘modernising the constitution’. While the 1970s left repeatedly engaged in British constitutional debates, their arguments were rarely conceived in terms of modernisation. However, the challenge of Thatcher’s rule, along Scottish nationalism, perceptions of sociological change, European integration, and geopolitical developments led to the ascendancy of new constitutional reforms (such as a bill of rights and devolution) in agendas for ‘modern socialism’. A pivotal development was the creation of the campaign group Charter 88; also important was the spreading New Left argument that European continental structures were more ‘modern’ than the ‘Westminster Model’. The political strength of constitutional modernisation arguments peaked in the early 1990s, under the leadership of John Smith and with public support from rising stars Blair and Brown. Momentum for reform later stalled under Blair. Nevertheless, Scottish and Welsh devolution and a Human Rights Act were locked into Labour’s platform by 1997, facilitating one of the most disruptive periods of British constitutional change in the contemporary era.

Chapter 6 traces the meaning of ‘modernisation’ in Labour’s economic policies. ‘Modernising the economy’ to achieve sustainable growth was a consistently crucial idea for Labour from Wilson to Blair. Notwithstanding the abandonment of nationalisation, the endurance of state-led ‘modernisation’ in Labour’s economic imaginary reveals a continuing strategic role for the state, even for New Labour. After establishing this continuity, the chapter highlights a crucial change. In the 1970s and 1980s, Labour policymakers assumed that manufacturing was the key sector to ‘modernise’. Yet, under the influence of deindustrialisation, ideas of ‘post-Fordism’, and New Keynesianism, by the early 2000s manufacturing had been usurped by ‘human capital’. For New Labour, education and training became the new ‘commanding heights’ and the foremost economic priority for the active state. These developments show the ongoing influence of technocratic, social-democratic thought worlds, and thus expose the inappropriateness of shoehorning New Labour into ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. But they also speak to important, and ambivalent, shifts in British political economy by the twenty-first century.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

Chapter 2 recovers a distinct interpretation of ‘modern socialism’ that focused on diffusing power to producers, consumers, and communities. Over the 1970s and 1980s, several left-wing thinkers and politicians championed redistributing economic and social power through industrial democracy or consumer and community empowerment. These explorations were fuelled by critiques of the post-war state, trade union assertiveness, corporatist experiments, municipal socialism, and market socialism. In the 1980s, they were championed as ‘modern socialism’, mainly as a response to Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policies like popular share ownership and the ‘right to buy’ a council house. Drawing on maverick academics and Eurocommunist journalists, ambitious Labour MPs argued that a ‘modern socialism’ needed to diffuse power through schemes like employee share ownerships. They embraced socioeconomic democracy as ‘modernisation’. However, while some decentralist ideas remained influential, the popularity of diffusing economic power peaked in the late 1980s. This helped scotch subsequent attempts to make the ‘stakeholding economy’ a foundation of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’.

This chapter explores how ‘globalisation’ became a common frame of reference about the ‘modern world’ and the rise and fall of both nationalist and pan-European socialist responses. It is widely recognised that the ‘discourse of globalisation’ was a lynchpin of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’, and some scholars also argue that it drove the party’s capitulation to ‘Thatcherism’. However, this chapter reconstructs an overlooked source of the idea of globalisation in Labour: the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), which underpinned the 1983 manifesto. It traces how, from the 1970s, Labour policymakers diagnosed a powerful new force – ‘multinational’ production and finance – which placed novel constraints on the socialist state. Over the 1980s, these policymakers went from attempting to reassert the British state’s sovereignty to trying to transcend it through European integration. The AES collapsed after the 1983 electoral catastrophe, while Eurosocialism failed to decisively shape Labour. Yet, these ideas show that the spreading idea of ‘globalisation’ as an unavoidable feature of modernity had many parents in Labour and originated from the party’s left as well as its right.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the importance of ‘modernisation’ for left-wing debates in the second half of the twentieth century. After recapping the key staging posts of Labour’s trajectory from the 1970s to the 1990s, it then argues that existing histories obscure the diverse meanings and appeal of ‘modernisation’ through their current use of the term. I suggest that this hinders our understanding of both New Labour and many of their left-wing critics, and too readily accepts a teleological reading of history. Following a brief discussion of the method of the book, the introduction touches on the wider historical significance of this revised understanding of Labour’s ideological debates. It questions the idea of an ‘age of neoliberalism’ and introduces other themes of the late twentieth century of comparable significance to market liberalism: the challenge to the nation state from above and below; the rise of post-1968 ‘liberation movements’; deindustrialisation; and constitutional agitation. It ends by outlining the chapters.

Chapter 4 explores a more marginalised interpretation of modernisation, which foregrounded race and multiculturalism. Throughout the late twentieth century, the left wrestled with a growingly multiracial society and the rise of both the far right and a more self-confident anti-racist movement in post-colonial Britain. This profoundly shaped the Labour Party, which this chapter illustrates by exploring the 1980s ‘Black Sections’ controversy. Yet, there were only scattered arguments that linked either antiracism or multiculturalism to ‘modernisation’. This chapter explores some isolated explorations of antiracism as modernisation, notably by Ken Livingstone, and explains their intellectual context. However, it also explains why they stalled, stressing institutional and electoral factors, but also the growing discomfort among anti-racist movements with concepts like modernisation. Thus, ‘modernisation’ only became consistently linked with ‘multiculturalism’ in the 2000s, and even then, this association was hotly contested. The implications for Blair’s governments of this absence of race and multiculturalism in 1990s discourses of modernisation are explored at the end of the chapter.

No western country experienced as protracted a debate on contraception as Ireland. The longstanding ban on contraception has commonly been seen as the consequence of Catholic church teaching and the near-universal religious observance by Irish Catholics. But the Irish debate went far beyond Catholic teaching. The merits of large families and the laws banning contraception (as well as prohibition of divorce and abortion) came to be seen as a symbol of Ireland’s national identity; the Irish approach to contraception was intimately bound up with ideas of Irishness. The logic of opposition to the use of contraception shifted over the decades. Initially, the belief that ‘artificial’ contraception was contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church was the engine that drove state policy and broader opposition. By the 1970s this argument was being abandoned, in favour of claims that permitting contraception would destroy the fabric of the family and society. The battle to protect Irish society from the “menace” of contraception, abortion and divorce continued into the present century in the face of falling fertility, many single mothers, and a significant abortion trail to Britain.

This chapter examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focusses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. The chapter argues that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and explores how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa.

This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.

This chapter assesses the importance of educating royal heirs in the nineteenth century. It traces the development of ideas of princely education and explains how this topic moved from being an internal, dynastic matter to being a political issue of public concern and public debate – another weapon in the arsenal of monarchical adaptation and self-defence. The chapter leads to a comparison between the educational programmes imposed upon the several generations of royal heirs in nineteenth-century Britain and Prussia/Germany.