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Since the 2007-8 financial crisis and its aftershocks, international capitalism has once again been in crisis. The crisis has been particularly marked in the UK and its outcome is currently unclear. Based upon a wealth of sources, from newspapers, journals, government, political party and polling organisation publications, as well as archival and secondary material, Neville Kirk examines the systemic crisis facing the nations of the UK. The book traces the crisis from the period following the 2016 EU referendum up to 2022, a period during which the crisis intensified and became more widespread. Kirk covers the elections of 2017 and 2019, political fragmentation, Scottish nationalism, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, continuing economic problems and conflicts around class, gender, race and nation. Finally, the book considers competing pathways out of the current impasse. Through his thorough examination of the UK's main political parties and players, Kirk offers the reader a new and original understanding of how we reached the present situation.
In most studies of British decolonisation, the world of labour is neglected, the key roles being allocated to metropolitan statesmen and native elites. Instead this volume focuses on the role played by working people, their experiences, initiatives and organisations, in the dissolution of the British Empire, both in the metropole and in the colonies. How central was the intervention of the metropolitan Left in the liquidation of the British Empire? Were labour mobilisations in the colonies only stepping stones for bourgeois nationalists? To what extent were British labour activists willing and able to form connections with colonial workers, and vice versa? Here are some of the complex questi...
This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, it makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and ‘British world’ history. The book offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in both countries than suggested by ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revisionists’ alike. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars in history and politics and all those interested in and concerned with the past, present and future of Labour politics in Britain, Australia and more generally.
This book reflects on popular politics in Britain during the turbulent period of industrialization, focusing on how political meanings were produced and sustained. It is also a spirited series of responses to the changing terrain of historical studies. It takes as its starting point the goal of defining a middle ground between E. P. Thompson’s concept of cultural materialism and the postmodern view of culture as a system of signs and codes (with emphasis on the linguistic grounding of experience). The first part of the book evaluates and critiques the work of two of the most influential proponents of the linguistic turn in British historical writing: Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. The second part contains four case studies: the first two treating British political culture in the age of the French Revolution, the third dealing with the role of space in historical reasoning, and the fourth assessing the role of gentleman leaders within popular movements.
A pioneering study of the neglected transnational activities and influences of two important, connected socialists, British-born Tom Mann (1856-1941) and Australian-born Robert Samuel ‘Bob’ Ross (1873-1931)
Anti-Catholic sentiment was a major social, cultural, and political force in Victorian England, capable of arousing remarkable popular passion. Hitherto, however, anti-Catholic feeling has been treated largely from the perspective of parliamentary politics or with reference to the propaganda of various London-based anti-Catholic religious organizations. This book sets out to Victorian anti-Catholicism in a much fuller and more inclusive context, accounting for its persistence over time, disguishing it from anti-Irish sentiment, and explaining its social, economic, political, and religious bases locally as well as nationally. The author is principally concerned with determining what led ordinary people to violent acts against Roman Catholic targets, violent acts against Roman Catholic petitions, joining anti-Catholic organizations, and reading anti-Catholic literature. All too often, English history, and even British history, turns out to be the history of what was happening in the West End. One of the special distinctions of this book is that it shows the interplay between national issues and their local conditions. The book covers the period ca.
Susan Whyman draws on a hidden world of previously unknown letter writers to explore bold new ideas about the history of writing, reading and the novel. Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, The Pen and the People will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people. Based on over thirty-five previously unknown letter collections, it tells the stories of workers and the middling sort - a Yorkshire bridle maker, a female domestic servant, a Derbyshire wheelwright, an untrained woman writing poetry and short stories, as well as merchants and...
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of academic and popular interest in the issue of social identity. Yet the subject areas of regional and sub-regional identities, and historical engagements between ’the regional’, ’the local’ and ’the national’, remain very neglected. Seeking to make a contribution towards redressing these areas of neglect and to further advancing our knowledge and understanding of the general issue of social identity, this volume of essays offers the reader an exploration of some of the rich and varied, historical interpretations of ’the North’ and ’Northernness’. The focus rests mainly, but not exclusively, upon the North of England. Taken as a w...
This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of language in relation to the subject of history. The British and American contributors put forward the idea that language is a broadly based means of communication with contested and consensual meanings, and that such meanings must be revealed and evaluated by precise historical contextualisation of language and proper attention to established rules of historical method. The essays contend that the connections between the linguistic and the social must be rethought. The book aims to move beyond the unproductive fragmentation and relativism, the narrow textual range and the literal and anti-realist readings of the postmodern 'linguistic turn' to offer a rigorous approach to the study of language and the subject of history.
Speaking for the People, first published in 1998, draws our attention to the problematic nature of politicians' claims to represent others, and in doing so it challenges conventional ideas about both the rise of class politics, and the triumph of party between 1867 and 1914. The book emphasises the strongly gendered nature of party politics before the First World War, and suggests that historians have greatly underestimated the continuing importance of the 'politics of place'. Most importantly, however, Speaking for the People argues that we must break away from teleological notions such as the 'modernisation' of politics, the taming of the 'popular', or the rise of class. Only then will we understand the shifting currents of popular politics. Speaking for the People represents a major challenge to the ways in which historians and political scientists have studied the interaction between party politics and popular political cultures.