Order In Britain Research Articles

New Times or new circuits: recovering Sivanandan’s political economy

In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled ‘The hokum of New Times’, which took aim at Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques’ theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan’s decade-long tracing of the ‘new circuits of imperialism’ that had been engendered by a new global division of labour and hierarchies of production, technological change and the domestic fall-out of such processes in forms of British state racism and racialised forms of exploitation. Although Hall’s work has diffused into the field of international political economy, Sivanandan’s take has largely been neglected. This article, developed from a presentation at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College, London, October 2022, will briefly return to the Hall and Sivanandan debate to help foreground Sivanandan’s international political economy and also highlight how it took racism and imperialism to be integral to the neoliberal order in Britain and beyond. It will show how Sivanandan’s anti-racist and anti-imperial international political economy can help us to frame and understand the current crisis of neoliberalism from the vantage points of ‘over here, and over there’, and how thinking with and through international political economy must be at the heart of contemporary anti-racism’s address of the current crisis of capital.

Contagion and the Body Politic: De Quincey on the 1830 Revolution in France.

Writing in the fall of 1830, in the period immediately following France's révolution de juillet, Thomas De Quincey predicts the imminent breakdown of social order in Britain. In his political writing for Blackwood's Magazine over the course of this period, he consistently frames the threat of French-style revolution in terms of the body politic and its vulnerability to contagion, often playing on the meaning of a country's "constitution." In 1831, upon the introduction of the Reform Bill, his worst fears appear to have been confirmed, and he now presents the upcoming revolution almost as a fait accompli. De Quincey's dire predictions fit into a larger framework of nineteenth-century alarmism surrounding contagion, "sympathy," and the collective action of the mob. This article examines the presence and influence of these concepts in De Quincey's political writing for Blackwood's over the period of 1830 to 1832, the year the Bill was successfully passed.

Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

Or Rosenboim. The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950.

Or Rosenboim. The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950.

The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950. By Or Rosenboim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 352p. $37.50 cloth.

The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950. By Or Rosenboim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 352p. $37.50 cloth. - Volume 16 Issue 2

Communities of Remembrance: Religious Orders and the Cult of Thomas de Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford (1275-82)

In the chronological list of posthumous miracles attributed to St Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford (1275-82, canonized 1320), there are eleven explicit references to religious order in Britain. This article explores some of the themes of these miracle stories as recorded in the surviving contemporary account, Oxford, Exeter College MS 158, and examines their potential to inform our understanding of aspects of monastic life. These accounts allow historians to re-date or extend some abbacies of heads of religious houses, observe the performance of visitations and the care for the sick, and highlight how religious houses were vehicles for communal remembrance and could influence lay dedication to particular cult centres. In order to make these accounts accessible to a wide audience for future use, the article includes the monastic miracles in a fully transcribed and translated appendix with relevant historical notes.

Book Review: Or Rosenboim: The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950

Book Review: Or Rosenboim: <i>The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950</i>

Sterling, Bretton Woods, and Social Democracy, 1968–1970

Following the November 1967 sterling devaluation, the British Labour government of Harold Wilson struggled to defend the new exchange rate of £1 = $2.40. Sterling's travails continued throughout 1968 and well into 1969 despite growing evidence that the external balance was moving into the black. Its problems arose from external difficulties, notably from the growth of footloose balances of foreign currencies—especially Eurodollars—within the international economy and from instability caused by the decline of the Bretton Woods system. Labour was determined to protect the new exchange rate, since a new devaluation or even a float would have led to a run on the pound, the collapse of its economic strategy, and the failure of its attempt to build a social-democratic order in Britain. It was successful in the end thanks to growing confidence in its policies and to belated international co-operation designed to salvage the Bretton Wood regime.

Skills Inequality, Adult Learning and Social Cohesion In The United Kingdom

ABSTRACT In this article we argue that the legitimacy and stability of the social and political order in Britain is undermined by persistent inequalities of skills and opportunities. We first contend that British society is characterised by a liberal regime of social cohesion. Crucial to such a regime is the belief in individual opportunity and rewards based on merit. We demonstrate, through comparative analysis, that skills inequality is actually higher and social mobility lower in Britain than in other western countries. Also the perception of equal opportunities is lower. In Britain there is thus a mismatch between the cherished ideal of meritocracy and the reality of a stratified society, both objectively and perceived. This, we postulate, is likely to contribute to the political alienation of disadvantaged groups. We argue that in theory adult learning could reduce the skills gap but that in reality it only magnifies skills inequality since in Britain the well educated and people in work have higher participation rates than the poorly educated and unemployed.

Keishin INABA, Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain, University Education Press, 2004, 234p, \3,800+tax.(Book Review-Rejoinder)

Keishin INABA, Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain, University Education Press, 2004, 234p, \3,800+tax.(Book Review-Rejoinder)

書評へのリプライ(Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain)(書評とリプライ)

書評へのリプライ(Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain)(書評とリプライ)

Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain Lisa M. Budreau Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. By Janet S. K. Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83153-9. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $70.00. Another book on Britain and Great War memory? No, not quite. This revisionist work represents the latest in the Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series under the editorial leadership of memory historian Jay Winter. In her somewhat provocative study, Janet Watson uses an exhaustive supply of published and unpublished texts (diaries, letters, poetry, public and private narratives) to challenge numerous claims concerning the war experience. Most significantly, she suggests that the disillusionment connected with the First World War was a postwar phenomenon, one gradually produced through the publication and popularity of memoirs and novels after the Armistice. "The war itself was overwhelmingly popular, and the nation came together to a remarkable degree [End Page 584] despite critical differences that reflected the nature of divisions in English society," she suggests (p. 2). This controversial stance is supported by an innovative two-part approach in which the author considers her evidence of wartime accounts as a lived experience separately in the first section, then examines retrospective accounts and postwar writings in the second half. Though primarily a study of gender and class dynamics, the analysis is comparative in several key ways. Watson looks at both women and men side by side, with special attention paid to families where both brothers and sisters were active in the war effort. Then, she examines two groups who brought different attitudes to wartime efforts: those who viewed participation as work and those who saw it as service. People brought a wide variety of attitudes to their efforts during wartime as the meaning of patriotism was constantly redefined. For example, professional soldiers and trained nurses, while patriotic, saw their efforts as work with a view toward career advancement. Munitions workers, by contrast, saw an opportunity for better wages and working conditions. For some, theirs was a job that had to be done while others believed king, honor, and glory were their supreme duty. Perceptions of class position played a crucial role in the way different types of war work were viewed, according to Watson. These views, in turn, were grounded in convictions about the preservation of social order in Britain's wartime class society. Interestingly, Watson concludes that people who had seen their wartime participation in terms of service were most likely to remember it as a story of disillusionment. Some aspects of Watson's argument are bound to provoke. She states, for example, "Without diminishing the terrors of trench bombardment or the total horrifics of mass advance into direct machine gun fire (though this was not fortunately, a frequent occurrence), we must acknowledge and give credence to other portrayals of the war experience which are not uniformly negative" (p. 50). Granted, most conventional histories begin with idealistic volunteers and end with shattered veterans and names on memorials. But, what about perspectives during the war? The author asks us to consider where the shift occurred from valuable contribution of soldiers during the war years toward the attitude of useless sacrifice? Without minimizing the considerable effort that has gone into this study, perhaps the book's greatest contribution to First World War scholarship is its ability to bring such questions of memory to the forefront of traditional military history enquiry. All credit to a work that is freshly researched and can genuinely be said to contribute so significantly to the field. Similarly, I applaud the Journal for its range and diversity by eliciting this new and distinctive historiographical genre for review. Lisa M. Budreau St. Antony’s College, Oxford University Oxford, United Kingdom Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Social Control in Victorian Britain

There is nothing particularly new about the observation that the social order in Britain was subjected to immense strains by the processes of urbanization and industrialization. It threatened at times to disintegrate into anarchy through the disruption of social ties and institutions, and the emergence of frighteningly large masses of apparently masterless men. And it was transformed in the course of the nineteenth century without suffering the collapse, or revolution, which many contemporaries from right and left, from Martineau to Marx, and Eldon to Engels, had anticipated with dread or relish. Neither is there anything particularly new in observing that those who have power, authority, and influence seek to use these to protect and preserve the state of things which gives them power, and to maintain the peaceful, and preferably contented, subordination of those less comfortable than themselves. What is new is that in the last decade many social historians have approached a whole range of the activities of powergroups as exercises in devising mechanisms of social control which conditioned and manipulated the propertyless masses into accepting and operating the forms and functions of behaviour necessary to sustain the social order of an industrial society. Such efforts at social control are seen as playing an important, conceivably decisive, role in the formation and underpinning of bourgeois capitalist society. In such a view the success of social control in taming and civilizing the working classes in moulds shaped to fit the needs of bourgeois society must take its place alongside the iron disciplines of wage labour, and the coercive power of the state, as a key factor in the shaping of modern society. In many ways this is a curious view, placing the working classes perpetually on the receiving end of outside forces and influences, and portraying them as so much putty in the hands of a masterful and scheming bourgeoisie, a remote and powerful state, and a set of technological imperatives. It allows little for the possibility that the working classes themselves generated their own values and attitudes suited to the requirements of life in an industrial society, and imposed their own forms on middle-class institutions. The tables might be turned on

The Retreat from Reason

The Retreat from Reason Bertrand H. Bronson LeST I STUMBLE, and because the time is short, I will state at once the propositions I would try to illustrate in what follows. As generalities, they are unlikely to excite disagreement, and the interest must lie in the fluctuations of thought and feeling that dif­ ferentiate those generations, chronologically viewed. 1. At the opening of the eighteenth century there is a weakening of conviction of the importance of man’s personal relation to God the Father. 2. There is a depersonalizing of external nature, from the cooper­ ative universal Mother to universal, unalterable physical laws. 3. There is a shrinkage of assurance of the potency of man’s ra­ tional powers, no longer seen as ’'infinite in faculty,” yet a keener sense of reliance on them. As the century passes its meridian, values are gradually rescaled and redefined, roughly as follows: 4. Nature in a "state of nature” is preferred to nature domesti­ cated. 5. Irregularity enforces a lawless appeal that surpasses rational ordering. 6. Sudden irrational conversion and conviction of salvation by faith returns to religion. 7. Emotional assurance tends to supplant the appeal to reason as expressed in logical trains of thought. It may be laid down as an axiom, as Dr. Johnson would say, that everything had already begun before we realized. In the con­ text of the moment, this truth if pursued would take me back straightway into the seventeenth century, where I have no wish to 225 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century go, further than to acknowledge that the beginnings are there, Pyrrhonism and all. About 1700 there was an unusually pervasive sense of the open­ ing of a century as a true beginning: almost the birth of a ’’brave new world.” The shadows and superstitions of the past were being dispersed by Newton’s universal light, swept away like ghosts: ’Tis well an Old Age is out, And time to begin a New.1 As Newton had disclosed the laws of celestial mechanics, Locke had found a key to the inner world, which could open the mechan­ ics of the mind—or a clue, a method, if not a key. The new revela­ tions, fortunately, did not require the sacrifice of cherished beliefs. Locke and Newton were devout. God was still Creator and Lord of all, and the natural universe bore witness to His power and glory: ’’The works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity,” declared Locke. "The spangled heavens proclaim their great Original,” sang Addison. But now the old ideal system of orders, each hierarchically ascending, and bound’together in mu­ tual cooperative obedience to divine command, needed reformula­ tion in less spiritual terms—the political order in Britain having al­ ready been reconstituted by the simple stroke of an ax. The new world-view still assumed a Divine Author, but shifted the focus of attention, in Tuveson’s phrase, from why to how He did it. The prevailing optimism of the age rested in the conviction that the physical universe was based on natural laws which could be discovered—gradually—by man, and understood as being fixed, regular, unalterable procedures; not beyond the capacity of human mentality to grasp as principles, though too vast to be compre­ hended as a whole, and too complicated to be known except piece­ meal; but not supernatural, not outside or alien to intellectual pro­ cess as we know it. Underlying this confidence is faith—faith in the Creator, faith in the stability of Nature, and faith in rationality as humanly conceived. The supreme expression of this confidence is paragraph IX of the first Epistle of Pope’s Essay on Man, begin­ ning: 226 Symposium*. The Retreat from Reason All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. Because of its very lack of philosophical originality, Pope’s state­ ment is a paradigm of its century’s characteristic attitude toward the Cosmos; it was so widely accepted as to be translated into twenty languages, and into some of them many times. Catholics, Protestants, and deists could join in adopting it, punctuating or footnoting to suit themselves. But when God said, "Let...