In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on ...which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.
What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well ...competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in contemporary Britain.
Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With ...the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to the arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.
This important new book is a comparative study of social mobility based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain. It addresses the key issue in stratification ...research, namely, the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction. Drawing on interviewee accounts of how parents mobilised economic, cultural and social resources to help them into professional careers, it then considers how the interviewees, as parents, seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Middle-class parents may try to secure their children's social position but it is not an easy or straightforward affair. With the decline of the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labour market since the 1970s and 1980s, the reproduction of advantage is more difficult than in the affluent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The implications for public policy, especially public investment in higher education, are considered.
Reclaiming Social Work is a thought-provoking and innovative book which examines how social work′s commitment to social justice has been deepened and enriched by its contact with wider social ...movements. It explores the tensions between social work values and a market-driven agenda, and locates new resources of hope for the social work profession in the developing resistance to managerialism.
This book is the first comprehensive history of consumerism as an organised social and political movement. Matthew Hilton offers a groundbreaking account of consumer movements, ideologies and ...organisations in twentieth-century Britain. He argues that in organisations such as the Co-operative movement and the Consumers' Association individual concern with what and how we spend our wages led to forms of political engagement too often overlooked in existing accounts of twentieth-century history. He explores how the consumer and consumerism came to be regarded by many as a third force in society with the potential to free politics from the perceived stranglehold of the self-interested actions of employers and trade unions. Finally he recovers the visions of countless consumer activists who saw in consumption a genuine force for liberation for women, the working class and new social movements as well as a set of ideas often deliberately excluded from more established political organisations.
In these two volumes of original essays, scholars from around the world address the history of British colonial cinema stretching from the emergence of cinema at the height of imperialism, to moments ...of decolonization andthe ending of formal imperialism in the post-Second World War.
Moral Capital Brown, Christopher Leslie
12/2012
eBook
Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the
late eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown challenges
prevailing scholarly arguments that locate the roots of
abolitionism in ...economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism.
Brown instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to
changing views of empire and nation in Britain at the time,
particularly the anxieties and dislocations spurred by the American
Revolution.
The debate over the political rights of the North American
colonies pushed slavery to the fore, Brown argues, giving
antislavery organizing the moral legitimacy in Britain it had never
had before. The first emancipation schemes were dependent on
efforts to strengthen the role of the imperial state in an era of
weakening overseas authority. By looking at the initial public
contest over slavery, Brown connects disparate strands of the
British Atlantic world and brings into focus shifting developments
in British identity, attitudes toward Africa, definitions of
imperial mission, the rise of Anglican evangelicalism, and Quaker
activism.
Demonstrating how challenges to the slave system could serve as a
mark of virtue rather than evidence of eccentricity, Brown shows
that the abolitionist movement derived its power from a profound
yearning for moral worth in the aftermath of defeat and American
independence. Thus abolitionism proved to be a cause for the
abolitionists themselves as much as for enslaved Africans.
Working Lives McDowell, Linda
2013, 2013-04-22, 2013-07-19
eBook
Full of unique and compelling insights into the working lives of migrant women in the UK, this book draws on more than two decades of in-depth research to explore the changing nature of women's ...employment in post-war Britain. * A first-rate example of theoretically located empirical analysis of labour market change in contemporary Britain * Includes compelling case studies that combine historical documentation of social change with fascinating first-hand accounts of women's working lives over decades * Integrates information gleaned from more than two decades of in-depth research * Revealing comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in the lives of immigrant working women in post-war Britain * Features real-life accounts of women's under-reported experiences of migration
