Twentieth-century British History Research Articles

Teaching twentieth-century British History to French undergraduates.

Teaching twentieth-century British History to French undergraduates.

Introduction: Marking Race in Twentieth Century British History.

How might historians narrate Britain's past if we centre imperial racial formation and its contestations? The thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation provided an opportunity for a new generation of scholars to consider the frameworks of race in British history. In 1987, Gilroy challenged Marxist approaches that treated race as secondary to or even a mechanistic expression of class inequality. He showed that the failure to account for race and empire positioned racialized subjects as perpetual outsiders. Taking up Gilroy's analysis as a point of departure, this thematic issue brings together analyses of the state, institutions, and individuals to propose new periodizations, geographies, and methodologies for understanding twentieth-century British history. In this introduction, Marc Matera, Radhika Natarajan, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Camilla Schofield, and Rob Waters describe the five-year conversation that led to this thematic issue, introduce their respective essays, and explain why race must be understood not as a descriptive category but as an analytical framework for understanding Britain's past.

Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain: Making Difference across the Political Spectrum. By Paula Bartley

Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain introduces a wonderfully diverse range of campaigns, protests, and political engagement women undertook as they sought to bring about change at a local, national, and international level during the twentieth century. Activism occurred through formal and informal organizations or even individually, like Mrs Roberts, a mother of two who in the 1960s chained herself to a noticeboard at the council offices because she needed a council house. The many areas discussed in the book are a real indication not only of Bartley’s research but also of the seismic growth of women’s history and resources available to historians of women in the last 40 years. Taken as a whole, this book thus broadens the reader’s understanding of the scope of women’s activism and makes an argument for its importance to twentieth-century British political history. The introduction opens with a discussion of the Anglo-Indian social reformer Olive Malvery, whose writing exposed the: ‘lives of women and the sharp end of exploitation: factory and ship workers, waitresses, barmaids, costermongers and seamstresses’. [P1] She is one of the many women who lifted the lid on the unseen exploitation women experienced in the workplace. Indeed, this volume has a strong focus on Labour and working-class histories, including women’s industrial action during the First and Second World Wars. This is to be expected from a historian whose recent publications have included books on Ellen Wilkinson and Labour Cabinet Ministers. However, as Bartley explains there were multiple different reasons why women took action such as redressing injustice, creating a better world, or even a response to loss. Thus, this book’s scope is not limited to campaigns around women’s issues; for example, Women against Pit Closures and Lilian Bilocca, who led a huge protest again poor safety standards on Hull trawlers in which her sons and husband worked. Overall, these women’s campaigns for the lives and livelihoods of their men also find a place in the text.

Decolonizing Britain: An Exchange.

Beginning in January 2021, Twentieth Century British History asked a group of scholars to reflect on what decolonization means to the field of British history. Twentieth Century British History co-editor Erik Linstrum (University of Virginia) posed questions over email for three rounds of discussion which concluded in December 2021. Stuart Ward (University of Copenhagen), Vanessa Ogle (University of California, Berkeley), and Saima Nasar (University of Bristol) took part. Priyamvada Gopal (Cambridge University) offered a final comment from the perspective of postcolonial studies. Contributions have been lightly edited but the relatively conversational style and flow of ideas in the original exchange have been preserved.

The TUC and social democratic trade union leadership in twentieth century Britain: Bevin, Citrine and after.Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by AndrewAdonis, Biteback, London, 2020.Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress, by Dr JimMoher, JGM Books, London, 2021.

Trade unions and industrial relations (IR) are central to twentieth century British History and the larger political conflicts of the Cold War. Yet, biographies of major trade union leaders are few and far between these days. Indeed, there is a danger that political historians lose the entire, now arcane industrial language of collective bargaining (shop stewards, industry bargaining, unofficial strikes and so on); without which it becomes impossible to understand an IR and political world that has largely passed. So, it is very welcome to have these two new studies. For Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine, seen together, are crucial to understanding the rise of British trade unions to national prominence, between 1918 and 1945. ‘They were the two most remarkable leaders that the British trade union movement has ever produced’, according to Hugh Clegg (1994, p. 113; see too 1985, p. 551). And they made their decisive contribution to a distinctive and pioneering British social democratic IR long before the election of the 1945 Labour Government.

Black Women's Groups, Life Narratives, and the Construction of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

AbstractBlack British women's centres and groups evolved out of black women's combined exclusion from male-dominated anti-racist activism and the resurgent feminist movement of the late 1960s. And yet, despite their stable presence in many of Britain's inner cities, black women's centres and groups, and the lives of the women who forged them, have evaded historical interrogation. This article explores how black women's centres provided women with the space and time to nurture their personal experiences of sexism and racism, achieve a sense of self-sufficiency, and celebrate their heritage, which placed every member on a path towards self-discovery. This centring of the black female self was not, as black male activists believed, set on undermining the Black liberation movement, but was considered as a vital tool in the overarching mission to defeat white global supremacy. Drawing on a collection of oral history interviews, this article explores how black female activists constructed a sense of self that turned away from the homogenizing white gaze of post-war Britain. Teasing out the complexities around black female activism, selfhood, and memory, this article contributes substantially to the growing body of literature on late twentieth-century black British history.

Researching and Teaching with British Newsreels.

Following the free online publication of several digitized newsreel collections, this article seeks to articulate a place for newsreels as a primary source base in twentieth-century British history, and to provide some basic guidance for students, teachers, and researchers who might wish to integrate newsreels into their work. It briefly traces the history of the newsreel industry in Britain, the conditions of newsreel production and distribution, and newsreels' audience. It discusses how a digital newsreel archive came to be constructed and how it has been used in the past for both academic and pedagogical purposes. It argues that researchers and teachers can overcome scepticism about newsreels' unreliability as primary sources, engaging with the sources critically to a variety of ends. It demonstrates these claims with a case-study about films of inter-war university 'rag' festivities, and with a variety of practical suggestions about how to incorporate newsreels into undergraduate teaching.

'Dear Dr K': Mobility, Sex, and Selfhood in Alfred Kinsey's British World Correspondence, 1948-58.

‘Dear Dr K’: Mobility, Sex, and Selfhood in Alfred Kinsey’s British World Correspondence, 1948–58 Ruby Ray Daily Ruby Ray Daily Northwestern University rubydaily@u.northwestern.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 24–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwaa013 Published: 20 August 2020

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

The new urban social history? Recent theses on urban development and governance in post-war Britain

The New Urban Social History? urban development and governance in post-war Britain is a survey article about emerging work on the new urban social history of Britain in the post-war and deals with thesis and the latest scholarship on the period and its importance for the wider field of twentieth-century British history.

Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit. By Jim Tomlinson

This is a particularly interesting, if not crucial, point in Britain’s history to be assessing the economy and its entanglement with politics, politicians, and public rhetoric—especially while Brexit looms large. In Managing the Economy, Managing the People, Jim Tomlinson has produced an invaluable volume of economic history which helps to illuminate the current situation. Tomlinson has published a significant amount of insightful work on the British economy in several previous volumes and through numerous influential journal articles, and his book is in part an amalgamation of some of the latter output. Readers of Twentieth Century British History may be familiar with many of the topics included—especially the ongoing debate on ‘Declinism’. Here this debate and others are synthesized into a broader view and a longer term look at not just how politicians and civil servants have attempted to manage the economy but how they have presented perceived problems and contemporary issues to the voting public.

Protestant Sectarianism in Twentieth-Century British Labour History: From Free and Labour Churches to Pentecostalism and the Churches of Christ

The British educated classes have long worried and fantasized about working-class religious belief and unbelief. Anglican churchmen feared Methodist “enthusiasm” in the eighteenth century, radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and urban, industrial irreligion after the 1851 Religious Census on churchgoing. In a mirror image of these old anxieties, most labour historians have wished away Christianity in the twentieth century. The long-standing shared socialist teleology of Marxists and Fabians leads to the modern, socialist labour movement. In this Marxian take on secularization theory, a new, more cohesive proletariat or singular “working class” forms, with an anti-capitalist, “socialist” consciousness reflected in the political, trade union, and co-operative institutions of the “labour movement”. Suddenly, economic, social, and political history find a single, unified subject. At the level of belief, socialism displaces those old Victorian pretenders for working-class hearts and minds: conservatism, liberalism, and Christianity. Sometime between 1914 and 1918, the Christian religion disappears from ordinary lives, as in Selina Todd's recent, The People, where popular religious faith is barely worth talking about.

Deindustrialization, the Linwood Car Plant and Scotland's Political Divergence from England in the 1960s and 1970s.

Scotland's political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote share of Conservative and Unionist candidates was lower in Scotland than in England. From the late 1960s onwards there were also ambitions for constitutional change. This article breaks new conceptual and empirical ground by relating these important markers of political divergence to popular understanding among Scottish workers of deindustrialization. A Thompsonian moral economy framework is deployed. Expectations were elevated by industrial restructuring from the 1950s, with workers exchanging jobs in the staples for a better future in assembly goods. Labour governments earned a reputation in Scotland as better managers of this process than Conservative governments. The 1979 general election showed that Labourism was growing in popularity in Scotland just as its appeal faded in England. At Linwood moral economy expectations were compromised, chiefly by intermittent redundancy and recurrent threat of closure, which was averted in 1975 by Labour government intervention. When the plant was shut in 1981 criticisms of UK political-constitutional structures and Conservativism were intensified.

John Macmurray and the politics of rationality in interwar Britain

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a new approach to understanding the interwar work of the philosopher John Macmurray. Because Macmurray stood outside the main currents of twentieth-century British philosophy and cultural critique, scholars have sometimes struggled – as did many of his contemporaries – to assess his significance as a thinker. This article suggests that we can understand much of Macmurray’s work as a sustained exercise in the ‘politics of rationality’. That is, he was attempting to shift public understanding of the nature of reason itself, as part of a broader effort to address the roots of modern social ills. When we approach Macmurray’s work in this way he begins to seem a much less idiosyncratic figure, and we can situate him in the context of broader concerns about an escalating crisis of reason. Moreover, the notion of a politics of rationality helps reframe how we appraise key themes of twentieth-century British intellectual history, allowing us to see Macmurray as part of an important but under appreciated tradition that aimed to integrate the intellectual and emotional aspects of human personality in order to revive and fortify British democracy.

King Caz: Cazenove, Thatcherism, and the 1980s financial revolution.

This article shows how elite stockbrokers Cazenove and Co. responded to the 'Big Bang' deregulation of the financial sector in 1986, using social networks and inherited practices to navigate an ostensibly technical and modernizing revolution. The Thatcher administration's reform of the London Stock Exchange was an economic enterprise intended to end restrictive practices and open the City to competition. A more open meritocratic financial sector marked the 'death of gentlemanly capitalism' and coalesced with a political agenda for entrepreneurialism and popular capitalism. Yet this case study shows how Cazenove's culture drove its strategy, that privilege and hierarchy were sustained by influential cross-sector networks, and that there was resistance to change, even though technological change and new financial instruments were embraced as part of a strategy which mixed innovation with tradition. Essentially, elite networks persisted in the 1980s deregulated economy, as established relationships were used to optimum effect and became more important after Big Bang. A more mutually supportive relationship between finance and industry than has hitherto been imagined is also demonstrated. By showing how a modernizing revolution was navigated using social networks and traditions, this article restores the role of culture to financial history. It also contributes to a body of work in twentieth-century British history which challenges the perception that neoliberal ideas were consistently applied under Thatcherism and complicates the notion of a coherent Thatcherite project.

True North: Essential Identity and Cultural Camouflage in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England

True North: Essential Identity and Cultural Camouflage in H.V. Morton’s <em>In Search of England</em>

Working-Class Ideas and Experiences of Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Britain: Regionalism as a Category of Analysis.

This article will explore region as a category of analysis for understanding gender, sexual cultures, and the expression of same-sex desire. In unpicking the notion of regional difference in both its tangible and intangible forms, it outlines the corresponding impact on how sexual cultures developed and were experienced in twentieth-century Britain. By recognizing that the area in which an individual lived could have as much impact on their sense of self and their sexual experiences as issues of race, gender, and class, a new and fruitful avenue of interpretation is opened up for the history of sexuality and twentieth-century British history more broadly. Such a methodology has the potential to add a new dimension to all histories of non-state-sanctioned sexual experience such as illegitimacy, premarital sex, extramarital affairs, and prostitution. In using regional case studies and interrogating ideas of sexual taboo, this article offers a unique interpretation of sexual experience that destabilizes current London-centric narratives and offers a more democratic and nuanced history of sex.

British labour movement solidarity in the 1913-14 Dublin Lockout

While most accounts of the Dublin Lockout of 1913–1914 consider it primarily as an event in Irish history, it was also one of the most important struggles in twentieth-century British history. It was influenced by, and was an integral part of the great ‘labour unrest’ that swept over Britain in the years 1911–1914 and had tremendous repercussions in Britain as well as Ireland. This article provides much neglected analysis of the nature, extent and dynamics of the solidarity campaign that was generated on the British mainland for the Lockout (probably the only other comparable event was the national miners’ strike of 1984–1985), the reasons why such widespread support was forthcoming and its broader implications for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of militant trade unionism in Britain during this period. It provides a comprehensive re-examination of the historical record and offers a critical analysis of existing predominant historiographical interpretations of the dispute. In the process, the article provides new insights into the potential and limits of Jim Larkin’s campaign to secure sympathetic industrial action inside the British labour movement, the refusal of the Trades Union Congress to support such an initiative and the inability of rank-and-file and socialist militants to overcome the entrenched resistance of the official union leadership.

‘Manufacturing Capitalists’: The Wider Share Ownership Council and the Problem of ‘Popular Capitalism’, 1958–92

‘Manufacturing Capitalists’: The Wider Share Ownership Council and the Problem of ‘Popular Capitalism’, 1958–92

Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Leo Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+245.

<i>Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture</i>. Leo Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+245.