Browse

‘Die Politik’, Bismarck is reputed to have said, ‘ist die Lehre von Möglichen’. Translated as ‘politics is the art of the possible’, this phrase captures neatly the pragmatism that has been at the heart of modern British approaches to the art of government. It is not as though ideology has not, occasionally, loomed large in political debate. Conviction certainly has a respectable pedigree in explaining the attachments, destinies and ultimate fate of some politicians. But success in British politics has come most readily to those who have been flexible, responsive to the shifting mood of the electorate of the day, able to anticipate how social and economic changes may reconstitute the terms of debate, and how through their own words and writings they themselves may help to constitute political meaning. This volume explores some of the major transitions, opportunities and false dawns of modern British political history. Chronologically its span runs from the first general election to be conducted under the terms of the Third Reform Act, with an extensive (if still incomplete) adult male electorate, through to the 1997 referenda in favour of devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. This was the period in which British politicians most obviously addressed a mass, British-wide electorate, seeking national approval for policies and programmes to be enacted on a UK-wide basis. In covering this period and this theme the volume as a whole engages with the scholarly legacy of Duncan Tanner.

Drawing on images that shaped the popular perception of British towns between 1780 and 1880, Beyond the Metropolis challenges enduring misconceptions about urbanization, its representation, and interpretation throughout the long nineteenth century. Over the past century, historical reality has merged seamlessly with mythology, literature, and caricature, to create a dramatic, but utterly misleading representation of our urban past. Dark satanic mills, cobbled streets, and cholera have become common shorthand for the nineteenth-century British town. Yet, there is little to suggest that the Urban Renaissance identified by Peter Borsay ended in 1770, or that every town in Britain experienced the same topographical consequences of expansion. Using engaging and diverse evidence, including souvenirs, pocket panoramas, and ceramics, this book investigates the relationship between pictorial convention, visual innovation, and urban identity. In contrast to myriad publications that address London exclusively, it examines images that reflect the growing political, social, and cultural significance of British provincial towns in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Covering locations from Bristol to Leeds, Glasgow to Birmingham, and Manchester to Swansea, it reveals a complex and compelling new narrative of British urbanisation. Subjects that currently enjoy the attention of historians, planners, and politicians alike, including public space, popular protest, civic identity, and residential development, are approached from unfamiliar vantage points provided by hitherto under-researched sources. The result is a timely and persuasive re-evaluation of the British city, its changing form, representation, and impact.

On 23 February 1820 a group of radicals were arrested in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. They were within 60 minutes of setting out to assassinate the British cabinet. Five of the conspirators were subsequently executed and another five were transported for life to Australia. The plotters were a mixture of English, Scottish and Irish tradesmen, and one was a black Jamaican. They were motivated by a desire to avenge the ‘Peterloo’ massacre and intended to declare a republic, which they believed would encourage popular risings in London and across Britain. This volume of essays uses contemporary reports by Home Office spies and informers to assess the seriousness of the conspiracy. It traces the practical and intellectual origins of the plotters’ willingness to use violence; describes the links between Irish and British radicals who were willing to take up arms; makes a contribution to early black history in Britain; examines the European context to events, and follows the lives and careers of those plotters exiled to Australia. These well-written essays will find an appreciative audience among undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of British and Irish history and literature. The book will be of interest to those interested in black history, as well as the related fields of intelligence history and Strategic Studies. A significant contribution to our understanding of a particularly turbulent period of British history.

This book seeks to bring coherence to two of the most studied periods in British history, Caroline non-conformity (pre-1640) and the British revolution (post-1642). It does so by focusing on the pivotal years of 1638-1644 where debates around non-conformity within the Church of England morphed into a revolution between Parliament and its king. Parliament, saddled with the responsibility of re-defining England’s church, called its Westminster assembly of divines to debate and define the content and boundaries of that new church. Typically this period has been studied as either an ecclesiastical power struggle between Presbyterians and independents, or as the harbingers of modern religious toleration. This book challenges those assumptions and provides and entirely new framework for understanding one of the most important moments in British history.

This book is unique in adopting a family history approach to Irish migration in nineteenth century Britain. Historians of the Irish in Britain have almost totally ignored the family dimension, but this study shows that the family was central to Irish peoples’ lives and experiences. It was the major factor influencing the life choices and identity of the migrants and their descendants. The book documents for the first time a representative sample of Irish immigrant families and uses the techniques of family and digital history to explore their long-term fate. To do this it examines the Irish in Stafford in the West Midlands, a town that was a microcosm of the broader Irish experience in England. Central to the book is a unique body of evidence about the lives of ordinary families. They were united by their Irish ethnicity and by living in the same town, but there the similarity ended. In the long term they diverged in different directions. Many families integrated into the local population, but others ultimately moved away whilst some simply died out. The case studies explore the reasons why the fate of these families proved to be so varied. The book reveals a fascinating picture of family life and gender relations in nineteenth-century England. Its provocative conclusions will stimulate debate amongst scholars of Irish history, genealogists, historians of the family and social historians generally. The book also offers some valuable historical parallels to the lives of contemporary immigrant families in Britain.

This book places death squarely at the centre of war. Focused on Second World War Britain, it draws on a range of public and private sources to explore the ways that British people experienced death, grief and bereavement in wartime. It examines the development of the emotional economy within which these experiences took place; the role of the British state in planning for wartime death and managing and memorialising those who died, and the role of the dead in the postwar world. Arguing that cultures of bereavement and the visibility of grief in wartime were shaped by the Great War, the book traces the development of cultures of death grief and bereavement through the first half of the 20^th century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers, magazines and government papers, it considers civilian death in war alongside military death, and examines the ways that gender, class and region shaped death, grief and bereavement for the British in war.

This book is about the transformation of England’s trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. During the English Civil War a small group of merchants quickly achieved an iron grip over England’s trade, dictated key policies for Ireland and the colonies, and financed parliament’s war against Charles I. These merchants were the Adventurers for Irish land, who, in 1642, raised £250,000 to send a conquering army to Ireland but sent it instead to fight for parliament in England. The Adventurers elected a committee to represent their interests that met in secret at Grocers’ Hall in London, 1642–60. During that time, while amassing enormous wealth and power, the Adventurers laid the foundations for England’s empire and modern fiscal state. Although they supported Cromwell’s military campaigns, the leading Adventurers rejected his Protectorate in a dispute over their Irish land entitlements and eventually helped to restore the monarchy. Charles II rewarded the Adventurers with one million confiscated Irish acres, despite their role in deposing his father. This book explains this great paradox in Irish history for the first time and examines the background and relentless rise of the Adventurers, the remarkable scope of their trading empires and their profound political influence. It is the first book to recognise the centrality of Ireland to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

This book explores welfare provision in Ireland from the revolutionary period to the 1940s, This work is a significant addition to the growing historiography of twentieth-century Ireland which moves beyond political history. It demonstrates that concepts of respectability, deservingness, and social class where central dynamics in Irish society and welfare practices. This book provides the first major study of local welfare practices, policies, and attitudes towards poverty and the poor in this era. This book’s exploration of the poor law during revolutionary and independent Ireland provides fresh and original insights into this critical juncture in Irish history. It charts the transformation of the former workhouse system into a network of local authority welfare and healthcare institutions including county homes, county and hospital hospitals, and mother and baby homes. This book provides historical context to current day debates and controversies relating to the institutionalisation of unwed mothers and child welfare policies. This book undertakes two cases studies on county Kerry and Cork city; also, Irish experiences are placed against the backdrop of wider transnational trends. This work has multiple audiences and will appeal to those interested in Irish social, culture, economic and political history. This book will also appeal to historians of welfare, the poor law, and the social history of medicine. It also informs modern-day social affairs.

The Experience of Suburban Modernity explores how the adoption of new forms of private transport transformed inter-war suburban London. It shows how London’s suburban middle classes used their newly found disposable income to enjoy driving, motorcycling and flying. The Experience of Suburban Modernity demonstrates that these new practices were welcomed by many, but met resistance to change from those who were dismayed by the accidents that resulted from increased mobility and the aesthetic and cultural changes that were the consequence of Americanization and suburban development. The book is divided into three sections. The first considers each of the private transport technologies in turn: the car, the bicycle and motorcycle, and the aeroplane and shows how they contributed to a sense of suburban modernity. The second section examines the infrastructure that supported these technologies and shows how they were interpreted in contested visions of the meaning of Englishness. The final section describes a set of journeys that demonstrate a condition of suburban modernity. These include the roadhouse, a site of Americanisation and transgression, new mobile practices of consumption, the embodied experiences of driving in a modern way, and the disastrous consequences of air and car accidents.

Very large numbers of people began to depart the British Isles for the New Worlds after about 1770. This was a pioneering movement, a rehearsal for modern international migration. This book contends that emigration history is not seamless, that it contains large shifts over time and place, and that the modern scale and velocity of mobility have very particular historical roots. The Isle of Man is an ideal starting point in the quest for the engines and mechanisms of emigration, and a particular version of the widespread surge in British emigration in the 1820s. West Sussex was much closer to the centres of the expansionary economy in the new age. North America was the earliest and the greatest theatre of oceanic emigration in which the methods of mass migration were pioneered. Landlocked Shropshire experienced some of the earliest phases of British industrialisation, notably in the Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale district, deep inland on the River Severn. The turmoil in the agrarian and demographic foundations of life reached across the British archipelago. In West Cork and North Tipperary, there was clear evidence of the great structural changes that shook the foundations of these rural societies. The book also discusses the sequences and effects of migration in Wales, Swaledale, Cornwall, Kent, London, and Scottish Highlands. It also deals with Ireland’s place in the more generic context of the origins of migration from the British Isles. The common historical understanding is that the pre-industrial population of the British Isles had been held back by Malthusian checks.

On Monday 19 September 1803, the most significant trial in the history of Ireland took place in Dublin. At the dock stood a twenty-five-year-old former Trinity College student and doctor's son. His name was Robert Emmet and he was standing trial for heading a rebellion on 23 July 1803. The iconic power of Robert Emmet in Irish history cannot be overstated. Emmet looms large in narratives of the past, yet the rebellion which he led remains to be fully contextualised. This book repairs this omission and explains the complex of politicisation and revolutionary activity extending into the 1800s, detailing the radicalisation of the grass roots, their para-militarism and engagement in secret societies. Drawing on a range of sources, the book offers a comprehensive insight into a relatively neglected period of history.

In the twenty years after Ireland joined the UN in 1955, one subject dominated its fortunes: Africa. The first detailed study of Ireland's relationship with that continent, this book documents its special place in Irish history. It describes the missionaries, aid workers, diplomats, peacekeepers, and anti-apartheid protesters at the heart of Irish popular understanding of the developing world. It chronicles Africa's influence on Irish foreign policy, from decolonisation and the end of empire, to apartheid and the rise of foreign aid. Adopting a fresh, and strongly comparative approach, this book shows how small and middling powers like Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and the Nordic states used Africa to shape their position in the international system, and how their influence waned with the rise of the Afro-Asian bloc. O’Sullivan details the link between African decolonisation and Ireland's self-defined post-colonial identity: at the UN, in the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Biafra – even in remote mission stations in rural Africa. When growing African radicalism made that role difficult to sustain, this book describes how missionaries, NGOs, and anti-apartheid campaigners helped to re-invent the Irish government's position, to become the ‘moral conscience’ of the EC. Offering a fascinating account of small state diplomacy and identity in a vital period for the Cold War, and a unique perspective on African decolonisation, this book provides essential insight for scholars of Irish history, African history, international relations, and the history of NGOs, as well as anyone interested in why Africa holds such an important place in the Irish public imagination.

This work sets out to delineate the history of identity formation in the Irish context, as this unfolds from the middle ages to the present. Not only is the question of identity made complex by repeated invasions of Ireland it was compounded by the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation. From that time Catholicism was often embraced as a badge of resistance to the English and British Protestant presence in Ireland. This gives rise to questions of identity formation as an historical construct to meet contingent political realities, which are then read back into the historical narrative for political or propaganda purposes. The fluidity of Irish identity historically is witnessed by the incorporation into the culture of those arriving from other parts of Europe, who then became stakeholders in Irish society. However, from the sixteenth century what became paradigmatic was the struggle against English and Protestant influence. Given this was the labelling process of ‘Irish Catholic’ simply a negative construct? If so did this remain as the delimiting model for identity from the Reformation to the present? These and cognate questions, having given due weight to other processes at work in earlier stages of Irish history, form the context for the chapters in this volume. The subject is explored from historical, literary, and theological perspectives.

The key to understanding the emergence of the independent Irish state lies in the history of Home Rule. This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) at Westminster during the years of John Redmond’s chairmanship, 1900-18. The IPP were both the most powerful ‘third party’ and the most significant parliamentary challengers of the Union in the history of the United Kingdom up until the emergence of the Scottish National Party. The book covers the party’s re-unification in 1900 after a decade of division; the dashed hopes of Home Rule in 1912-14; the First World War; 1916 Rising; and concludes with the IPP’s electoral annihilation at the hands of Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election. Fresh insights into the nature of power and leadership of the party are provided, showing how an inner circle came to dominate the party and how their evolving friendships and alliances impacted upon the efficacy and policy direction of the party. Original research into the collective behaviour of the party both in House of Commons division votes and at question time is provided. This puts the Irish party’s behaviour into a British context by comparing their work and activity to the other parties then in the House of Commons. This book will be of interest to readers of both Irish and British history. It contributes to the history of Ireland’s revolutionary decade as well as providing insights that will instruct those interested in modern Irish party politics.

This volume offers a series of new essays on the British left – broadly interpreted – during the First World War. Dealing with grassroots case studies of unionism from Bristol to the North East of England, and of high politics in Westminster, these essays probe what changed, and what remained more or less static, in terms of labour relations. For those interested in class, gender, and parliamentary politics or the interplay of ideas between Britain and places such as America, Ireland and Russia, this work has much to offer. From Charlie Chaplin to Ellen Wilkinson, this work paints a broad canvass of British radicalism during the Great War.

The question of land in Ireland has long been at the heart of political, social and cultural debates. In eleven essays a group of authors including some of the most influential historians and social scientists of modern Ireland, and up-and-coming scholars, explore Ireland's land questions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which presents the current state of our understanding of the issue of land in Ireland in two survey essays that cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book's second section presents a series of reflections in which historians and social scientists look back on how they have approached the topic of land in Ireland in their earlier writings. A third section presents some innovative new research on various aspects of the Irish land question.

What role does memory play in migrants’ adaption to the emotional challenges of migration? How are migrant selfhoods remade in relation to changing cultural myths? This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Based on richly contextualised case studies addressing experiences of emigration, urban life, work, religion, and the Troubles in England, chapters illuminate the complex and contingent relationship between politics, culture and migrant identities, developing a dynamic view of the lived experience of British-Irish relations after 1945. Where memory is often regarded as a mechanism of antagonism within this relationship, Life History shows how migrants’ ‘recompose’ memories of migration as part of ongoing efforts to adapt to the transition between cultures and places. As well as shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants and the circumstances which formed them, Life Historythus illustrates the cultural and personal dynamics of subjective change over time: migrants located themselves as the subjects of a diverse and historically-evolving repertoire of narratives, signalling adaption, difference and integration as co-articulating features of the Irish experience in post-1945 England.