Structures and Transformations in Modern British History 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. david feldman teaches history at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti- Semitism. He has written on Jewish history as well as on the history of migration, immigration and emigration in early modern and modern Britain. He is the author of Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840 1914 (1994) and co-editor of Paths of Integration: Migrants in Western Europe 1880 2004 (with Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer, 2006). jon lawrence lectures in modern British history at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He has written widely on the social, political and cultural history of modern Britain, and is the author of Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867 1914 (1998) and Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (2009).
Structures and Transformations in Modern British History Edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence
cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Information on this title: /9780521518826 # Cambridge University Press 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Structures and transformations in modern British history / edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-521-51882-6 (Hardback) 1. Great Britain Politics and government 19th century. 2. Great Britain Politics and government 20th century. 3. Great Britain Politics and government 21st century. 4. Great Britain Social conditions 19th century. 5. Great Britain Social conditions 20th century. 6. Great Britain Social conditions 21st century. 7. Great Britain Intellectual life 19th century. 8. Great Britain Intellectual life 20th century. 9. Great Britain Intellectual life 21st century. I. Feldman, David, 1957 II. Lawrence, Jon. III. Title. DA530.S87 2011 941.08 dc22 2010028673 ISBN 978-0-521-51882-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Structures and transformations in modern British history: essays for Gareth Stedman Jones
Contents List of figures Notes on contributors page ix x Introduction: structures and transformations in British historiography 1 david feldman and jon lawrence 1 Coping with rapid population growth: how England fared in the century preceding the Great Exhibition of 1851 24 e. a. wrigley 2 The urban renaissance and the mob: rethinking civic improvement over the long eighteenth century 54 emma griffin 3 Forms of government growth, 1780 1830 74 joanna innes 4 Family formations: Anglo India and the familial proto-state 100 margot finn 5 The commons, enclosure and radical histories 118 alun howkins 6 Engels and the city: the philosophy and practice of urban hypocrisy 142 tristram hunt 7 The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain 164 jonathan parry 8 British women and cultures of internationalism, c.1815 1914 187 anne summers vii
viii Contents 9 Psychoanalysis, history and national culture 210 daniel pick 10 Labour and the politics of class, 1900 1940 237 jon lawrence 11 The dialectics of liberation: the old left, the new left and the counter-culture 261 alastair j. reid 12 Why the English like turbans: multicultural politics in British history 281 david feldman Index 303
Figures Figure 1.1 Annual rates of growth of population and of a real wage series. page 27 Figure 1.2 The geographical distribution of hundreds grouped by the size of population growth between 1791 and 1831. 41 ix
Notes on contributors david feldman is Professor of History and Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck, University of London. Gareth Stedman Jones taught him as an undergraduate and also supervised his doctoral thesis on Jewish immigration to the East End of London. Together with Stedman Jones he co-edited Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (1989) and he is the author of Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840 1914 (1994) He has been an editor of the History Workshop Journal since 1996. margot finn is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. Her 1987 Columbia University doctoral dissertation benefited from supervision provided by Gareth Stedman Jones during his visiting professorship at that institution. Finn is the author of After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848 1874 (1993) and The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740 1914 (2003). She is currently writing a book on the families of the East India Company. emma griffin is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of East Anglia. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Gareth Stedman Jones, was published as England s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660 1800 (2005). She has published two further books: Blood Sport. A History of Hunting in Britain (2007) and A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (2010). She is currently working on a study of working-class autobiography and life-writing. alun howkins is Professor Emeritus of Social History at the University of Sussex. He first met Gareth Stedman Jones through politics in the late 1960s and has worked with him in History Workshops and the History Workshop Journal ever since. His main publications include Poor Labouring Men (1985), Reshaping Rural England (1991) and The x
Notes on contributors xi Death of Rural England (2003). He is currently working on commons and commoners after 1845. tristram hunt is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. He read history at Trinity College, Cambridge before a year s postgraduate fellowship at the University of Chicago. He returned to Cambridge to undertake his PhD on Victorian civic pride with Gareth Stedman Jones. His main publications include Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (2004) and The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary life of Frederich Engels (2009). He is a regular broadcaster, a Trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund and was elected MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central in May 2010. joanna innes was an undergraduate, graduate student and research fellow at Cambridge 1972 1982, and for several years co-organised the Cambridge Social History Seminar with Gareth Stedman Jones. She has been a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford since 1982. A collection of essays pulling together her work on British social policy in the eighteenth century was published in 2009, under the title Inferior Politics. She is now working on a study of changes in the modes and objects of social policy in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain: Enlightenment, War and Social Policy. jon lawrence teaches modern British history at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Gareth Stedman Jones taught him as an undergraduate and supervised his PhD on popular politics in Wolverhampton (1989). His main publications are Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867 1914 (1998) and Electing our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (2009). He is currently working on a history of class and self-identity in Britain since the 1880s. jonathan parry is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Cambridge, where he has been a colleague of Gareth Stedman Jones since 1992. He is a Fellow of Pembroke College, and author of four books on nineteenth-century British history, including The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830 1886 (CUP, 2006). He is currently writing about Henry Layard. daniel pick is Professor of History at Birkbeck College and is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. His doctoral research in the History Faculty, Cambridge, supervised by Gareth Stedman Jones, was the basis for his book Faces of Degeneration (1989). Other publications
xii Notes on contributors include Svengali s Web (1993), Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (2005), and, as co-editor (with Lyndal Roper), Dreams and History (2004). He is an editor of the History Workshop Journal. alastair j. reid is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge where he teaches modern British social history. Gareth Stedman Jones supervised his PhD on the division of labour and politics in the British shipbuilding industry. His principal publications are United We Stand: A History of Britain s Trade Unions (2005) and The Tide of Democracy: Shipyard Workers and Social Relations in Britain, 1870 1950 (2010). He is currently working on aspects of counter-culture in Britain since 1945 and is a co-founder and editor of History and Policy. anne summers is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, having retired as a Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library in 2004. She has worked with Gareth Stedman Jones as a member of the editorial collective of the History Workshop Journal since its founding in 1975. Her publications include Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854 1914 (1988 and 2000) and Female Lives, Moral States: Women, Religion and Public Life in Britain 1800 1930 (2000). She is currently researching relations between Christian and Jewish women in Britain, 1840 1940, with support from the British Academy. sir tony wrigley was formerly Professor of Economic History in Cambridge; Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and President of the British Academy. His books include Population and History (1969), People, Cities and Wealth (1987), Continuity, Chance and Change (1988) and (with R. S. Schofield) The Population History of England (1981). Energy and the English Industrial Revolution is currently in press.