Structures and Transformations in Modern British History

Cambridge University Press, 1/28/2011
EAN 9780521518826, ISBN10: 0521518822

Hardcover, 344 pages, 23.5 x 16 x 2 cm
Language: English

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.

Introduction
structures and transformations in British historiography David Feldman and Jon Lawrence
1. Coping with rapid population growth
how England fared in the century preceding the Great Exhibition of 1851 E. A. Wrigley
2. The 'urban renaissance' and the mob
rethinking civic improvement over the long eighteenth century Emma Griffin
3. Forms of 'government growth', 1780–1830 Joanna Innes
4. Family formations
Anglo India and the familial proto-state Margot Finn
5. The commons, enclosure and radical histories Alan Howkins
6. Engels and the city
the philosophy and practice of urban hypocrisy Tristram Hunt
7. The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain Jonathan Parry
8. British women and cultures of internationalism, c.1815–1914 Anne Summers
9. Psychoanalysis, history and national culture Daniel Pick
10. Labour and the politics of class, 1900–40 Jon Lawrence
11. The dialectics of liberation
the Old Left, the New Left and the counter-culture Alastair J. Reid
12. Why the English like turbans
a history of multiculturalism in one country David Feldman.