Vision Of Britain Research Articles

‘Like aid given by a mother to her young’: The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and the marketing of economic development 1948–1965

This paper locates Britain’s nationalised airline, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), in the political discourse of colonial development. Between 1939 and 1974 BOAC connected Britain to destinations across the globe for business and leisure. However, the vast majority of people in Britain could scarcely afford the luxury of flight: BOAC had the task of convincing its shareholders, of whom were paying for a product they did not use, that it served an important national purpose. This paper explores BOAC not as an airline, but as a marketer: at the heart of BOAC’s communications was a vision of Britain and its place in the world. It sought to promote its services by using the language of economic development to encourage and justify increased business abroad. In so doing, it shows how BOAC used marketing to justify its operations using political, rather than economic, messages.

The people's broadcasters

The people's broadcasters

Education, Culture and the British Position in the Arabian Gulf: Establishing the British Council in Kuwait, 1952–1955

Connections between Great Britain and the countries of the Arabian Gulf during the era of the Cold War and decolonisation have been the subject of close examination by historians in recent years. However, no historian has addressed with any profundity the cultural dimension of Britain's dealings with the Gulf states. The intent of this article is to confront this question and to show that cultural change in the Arabian Gulf was a major preoccupation of the UK government, particularly when it was associated with the expansion of education then unfolding across the region, most intensely in Kuwait. There was especial anxiety that Arab Nationalism and anti-Western sentiment were penetrating local societies and thus undermining an already precarious British influence in the region. The British Council was widely championed as the best instrument at Britain's disposal to counter this threat. It was envisaged that the Council would allow increased cultural contact between Arabs and Britons, offer an alternative vision of Britain to Gulf residents and provide an additional channel through which Britain could influence Gulf governments.

The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE By Robin Fleming. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2021. Pp. 303. $45. ISBN 978-0-8122-5244-6 (cloth).

<i>The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE</i> By Robin Fleming. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2021. Pp. 303. $45. ISBN 978-0-8122-5244-6 (cloth).

Rhetoric and audience reception: An analysis of Theresa May’s vision of Britain and Britishness after Brexit

This article demonstrates the value of rhetorical audience studies for analysing constructions of ‘the nation’ and national identity. A key strength of this approach is its recognition of the interplay between the rhetorical situation, the text of the speech, and the audience’s responses to that rhetoric. Using the historical method for investigating rhetoric and its reception, the article examines Theresa May’s efforts to bring the nation together after the 2016 referendum and to offer an inspiring vision of post-Brexit Britain. A textual analysis shows that her rhetoric of Britishness was constructed around an imagined audience of Leave voters, and thus excluded Remainers from her conceptions of Britain and ‘the British people’. The audience reception study supports this finding, as it reveals two competing myths of ‘the nation’ which in turn constituted rival subject positions. In short, May’s epideictic failed to unite the country behind her conception of a strong, cohesive Global Britain.

Spaces, Places, Features and Units: Web-Enabling Historical Geography

Although the UK research assessment system initially mainly prioritised traditional academic outputs, more recently it has also promoted non-academic impact and engagement, which historical geography research is well suited to achieving provided detailed local knowledge can be widely disseminated, only possible via the world wide web. However, this is best done not via online GIS (geographical information systems) but through geo-semantic systems, supporting web pages about named entities linked by explicit relationships. Although the resulting systems are in some senses gazetteers, they differ from most existing gazetteers by focusing not on landscape features but on administrative units defined in law, and on “places” which are defined through the study of place naming. The final section of the paper briefly describes the Great Britain historical GIS and the web site based on it, A Vision of Britain through Time, and then presents data on how it performs in placename-based Google searches.

Introduction: visions of Britain

ABSTRACTThis introductory essay situates Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), Michael Drayton’s vast chorographical and historical poem of England and Wales, in terms of its development as a poetic project, its structural choices, and its reception by early readers. It sets the tension in the text between the local and the national against the backdrop of a more fundamental seventeenth-century shift from national to regional description. By exploring the text’s depiction of the ancient Picts, it also considers some of the difficulties that Drayton might have faced, had he managed to extend his poem north to Scotland.

Steppingstones to Imperial Unity? The British West Indies in the Late-Victorian Imperial Federation Movement

Formed in 1884, the Imperial Federation League sought to promote the idea of imperial unity, based on a vision of Britain and its colonies consolidating as a single polity. Consideration of the place of the British West Indies in a federation scheme served to highlight the divisions within the empire and the differences in understandings of imperial citizenship. Federationists were inconsistent about whether the West Indies should form part of the self-governing empire, based largely on different assumptions about race and the capacity for self-government. This failure to clearly define the nature of imperial community highlighted the tensions and inconsistencies of late-Victorian imperialism.

From Hanover to Gibraltar: Cato’s Letters (1720–23) in International Context

SUMMARYOriginally composed as a series of polemical essays to a weekly newspaper called The London Journal, appearing from November 1720 to July 1723, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon's Cato's Letters (1724 in book form) had a lasting influence on the development and evolution of Country ideology. It was, as is well known, one of the most widely read and influential books in Revolutionary America. Because of the enduring influence it had on the dissemination of the civic humanist tradition from Britain to North America, Cato's Letters has been more often than not taken out of historical context. This article revisits Cato's Letters by placing it against the background of the War of the Quadruple Alliance of 1718–20. What Trenchard and Gordon strove to do was to construct a distinctively Whig vision of Britain's maritime future that in a fundamental way rested on the Hanoverian Succession of 1714 and justified the conduct of foreign policy under George I and, more especially, the controversial alliance with France in 1716. The focal point of Cato's foreign-policy platform was Gibraltar. But were it not for the timely burst of the Mississippi Bubble in 1720, Trenchard and Gordon could not have retrained their civic humanist association of libertas and imperium with such assurance and confidence.

Extreme Empiricism: John Howard, Poetry, and the Thermometrics of Reform

This essay examines an outpouring of printed poems and biographical publications in the 1780s and 1790s that sought to shape the public image of the celebrated prison reformer John Howard. These materials, we argue, reveal the ways in which reform, empiricism, and Christian charity reinforced each other in late eighteenth-century popular imagination, and how this conjunction provoked a new vision of Britain’s empire and a backlash against mixing the scientific and the miraculous. As we show, Howard used the language of temperature to turn empirical data into evidence for the necessity of prison reform. This same thermometric language underwrote panegyric poems that represented Howard as global emissary of British benevolence—the icon of a new kind of empire whose power was symbolized by nearly miraculous capacity to temper inhospitable climates. This body of exuberant poetry transmuted data-based reform and technological advances in ventilation into proselytical triumph, a conjunction that was met, after Howard’s dramatic, self-inflicted death, with charges of overheated religious enthusiasm. As a result, Howard’s medical acquaintance and collaborators posthumously defended the temperateness of Howard’s empirical methods while also labeling him an amateur data collector, the lowly helpmeet of the professional man of science. By tracing Howard’s appearance in printed poetry and periodical writing, this essay illuminates the uneasy yet potent imbrication of reform culture, colonialism, medicine, and discipline formation in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Populist Crane: A Reconsideration of Melodrama in &lt;i&gt;Maggie&lt;/i&gt;

Stephen Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is replete with images of popular entertainment. Some of these might justifiably be said to depict working-class New Yorkers of the fin de siecle as in pursuit of escapism. Early in the novel, for example, Maggie—a young woman growing up in the working-class Bowery neighborhood of Lower Manhattan—goes to “a gr eat green-hued hall” with her boyfriend, Pete, where they watch “[a]n orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men” perform “a popular waltz” (Crane 30). Next “a girl” wearing “a pink dress with short skirts” (31) entertains the audience with a song-anddance routine that ends with “grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town” (31). As a result, “the Bowery public” enjoys “the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates” (32). The show also features a ventriloquist; a minstrel performance; “some verses which described a vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting her bonds” (32); and “a small fat man” who “began to roar a song and stamp back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast” (32). In response to the evening’s entertainment, Maggie, who works in a sweatshop making collars, “drew deep breaths of pleasure” (33), and “[n]o thoughts of the atmosphere of the collar and cuff factory came to her” (33). Clearly, this is escapism. Maggie works at a job that is exploitive and unfulfilling, and a night of Bowery entertainment allows her to forget her troubles. Pete and Maggie also r egularly attend melodramas, one of which Crane describes in some detail. In general, Crane critics have tended to regard melodrama as a similar form of escapist entertainment, and Crane’s portrayal of it as merely parodic. But I would argue that Crane’s representation of melodrama is more complex than critics have recognized, and that melodrama as a cultural formation in the second half of the nineteenth century resists reduction to mere escapism. While it does contain a measure of irony, Crane’s portrayal of Bowery theater suggests that

A Vision of Britain through Time

A vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001, including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions. web address = http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk Click on Organisation below to go to the website

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. By Chris Otter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+382. $65.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).

<i>The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910</i>. By Chris Otter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+382. $65.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910. By Chris Otter (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. ix plus 382 pp. cloth $65.00, paper $25.00)

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910. By Chris Otter (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. ix plus 382 pp. cloth $65.00, paper $25.00)

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. By Chris Otter (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008) 382 pp. $65 cloth $25 paper

<i>The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910</i>. By Chris Otter (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008) 382 pp. $65 cloth $25 paper

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (review)

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (review)

&lt;em&gt;Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Corey Keller&lt;br/&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910&lt;/em&gt;, by Chris Otter

&lt;em&gt;Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Corey Keller&lt;br/&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910&lt;/em&gt;, by Chris Otter

Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City; Legg, Stephen. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities; Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910

Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Pp. 276. Illustrations, photographs, maps Legg, Stephen. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Pp. 254. Maps Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 382. Illustrations, photographs

The Victorian eye: a political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800-1910

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture?To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society.The Victorian Eye's innovative interdisciplinary approach - and generous illustrations - will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.

&lt;i&gt;Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation Sally Bushell Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation. By James M. Garrett. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 214. ISBN 978 0 7546 5783 5. £55. In the introduction to this study, James Garrett provides a helpful outline of his New Historical enquiry, situating himself well in terms of other related work and the Wordsworthian canon. Garrett's aims are multiple and complex, if rather familiar in their Foucauldian tendencies. He seeks to use early nineteenth-century structures for imposing systematic order upon the nation (through census, map and museum archive) to explore issues of national representation and self-identity as exemplified in 'the literary institution named Wordsworth'. Garrett does, however, reflect intelligently upon the dangers of drawing an over-simplistic analogy between larger cultural activities and literature, acknowledging that 'I appear to be treading dangerously close to what Alan Liu has called the "embarrassment of New Historicism"'. Instead, he seeks to explore the complex contradictions, which are intrinsic to such nation-building structures at a larger level, and to Wordsworthian poetics and national ambitions. A tension between 'English liberalism' and 'cultural nationalism' returns us to the Wordsworthian 'system' by means of Alison Hickey's account of a 'conflict between an incorporating or systematic impulse and the resistance to it' (quoted by Garrett). Garrett's aim then is to 'recenter Wordsworth's career not on a particular work or poetic project but on a particular goal, that of the writing of the nation'. This aim also has the secondary canonical effect of placing the book's emphasis on the later self-classifying Wordsworth ('active in the creation of his own self-image'), rather than on an earlier one. In Chapter 1 Garrett makes good use of the imposition of the census upon the populace from 1800 onwards, which exemplifies his argument by analogy – that the power of the census as a disciplinary structure at a nationwide level (one that also works to create a subclass of those who 'do not count') corresponds to the desired controls of the Wordsworthian imagination. Such ideas are explored through Wordsworth's articulation of the mind's 'abstracting' power in relation to the leech gatherer and (more historically) 'Gypsies'. In his second chapter, Garrett further develops his analogy between the creation and imposition of the census and Wordsworth's creation of a systematic classification for his poems. In both cases, it is argued, the structure works to create an abstract unified body that eradicates difference. Garrett gives an interesting account of Wordsworth's creation of a 'textual self' and there is more interesting work on the recontextualising of texts within the new schema, although I would have liked more detailed analysis of some of the changes of meaning produced. This chapter suffers slightly from a lack of engagement with Frances Ferguson's excellent work on Wordsworth's classification (in her 1977 book, Language as Counter Spirit) as well as being a point where both the strengths and the limits of the underlying methodology are made manifest – with repeated claims that the census is 'a similar attempt at absolute control' to that of Wordsworth. At times the analogy seems to stretch further than it should. Another example of this occurs with the discussion in Chapter 3 of Wordsworth's desire for a 'prospect view' alongside the development of the Ordnance Survey. Garrett claims that Wordsworth, like contemporaries involved in the national mapping project, 'sought to create a map of the nation that transcended local differences by subjecting the landscape to the "prospect view," the abstract imperial gaze available from the mountain summit'. Here, the idea of the 'prospect view' is approached from one direction only, with no reference to other significant contexts such as the preceding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary contexts of the prospect poem or the philosophical model of epicurean withdrawal from the world. [End Page 82] Chapter 4 addresses the tensions and difficulties inherent in Wordsworth's desire to represent the entire nation and traces a withdrawal from the larger view back to the local: 'the unending prospect of imperial Britain is only one possible vision of Britain, one that has proven too susceptible to...