Introduction

Abstract

How should historians think about people’s attitudes—positive and negative—to modernity? This chapter provides an answer that avoids essentialising some people as ‘modern’ and others as backward or atavistic, and instead concentrates on what it meant to have a modern identity. Drawing on ideas from colonial history, it argues that we need to understand the language and practice of modern as a ‘claims-making device’ (Lynn Thomas). In doing so, people like mountaineers and ramblers who vociferously criticised urban, industrial society emerge not as anti-modern individuals, but self-consciously modern ones, who went into nature in order to be more modern.