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View Rights PortalThis book offers an original interpretation of Britain's relationship with Europe over a 25 year period: 1959-84 and advances the argument that the current problems over EU membership resulted from much earlier political machinations. This evidence based account of the seminal period analyses the applications for EEC membership, the 1975 referendum, and the role of the press. Was the British public misled over the true aims of the European project? How significant was the role of the press in changing public opinion from anti, to pro Common Market membership? Why, after over 40 years since Britain became a member of the European community, does the issue continue to deeply divide not only the political elite, but also the British public? These, and other pertinent questions are answered in this timely book on a subject that remains topical and highly controversial.
This book focuses on British efforts to suppress the traffic in female slaves destined for Egyptian harems during the late-nineteenth century. It considers this campaign in relation to gender debates in England, and examines the ways in which the assumptions and dominant imperialist discourses of these abolitionists were challenged by the newly-established Muslim communities in England, as well as by English people who converted to or were sympathetic with Islam. While previous scholars have treated antislavery activity in Egypt first and foremost as an extension of earlier efforts to abolish plantation slavery in the New World, this book considers it in terms of encounters with Islam during a period which it argues marked a new departure in Anglo-Muslim relations. This approach illuminates the role of Islam in the creation of English national identities within the global cultural system of the British Empire. This book would appeal to those with an interest in British imperial history; Islam; gender, feminism, and women's studies; slavery and race; the formation of national identities; global processes; Orientalism; and Middle Eastern studies.
Tears of laughter' examines the interactions of comedy and drama in three vital thematic strands of British cinema during the 1990s: comedies exploring issues of class, culture and community in British society, 'ethnic' comedy-dramas engaging with complex issues of identity and allegiance in modern Britain, and romantic comedies featuring characters searching (somewhat desperately or frantically) for a suitable and desirable long-term or short-term partner. Films to be discussed in detail include 'Brassed Off' (1996), 'The Full Monty' (1997), 'East is East' (1999), 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' (1994), 'Notting Hill' (1999) and a post-1990s romantic comedy, 'Love Actually' (2003). The study discusses these specific films and a range of other 1990s British comedy-drama films within the context of community-orientated Ealing comedy classics, contentious situation comedies treating race relations as both a laughing matter and a site of conflict ('Till Death Us Do Part' and 'Love Thy Neighbour'), and romantic comedies set and produced in Britain. It is aimed at film studies academics, students and film enthusiasts.
This book is the first major attempt to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture. The sheer range of subjects discussed, from the satire boom of the 1960s to the worlds of sport and the arts, demonstrates how profoundly decolonisation was absorbed into the popular consciousness. Offers an extremely novel and provocative interpretation of post-war British cultural history, and opens up a whole new field of enquiry in the history of decolonisation.
This unique collection of essays is the first book to explore the many relationships that developed between Wales and the British overseas empire between 1650 and 1830. Written by leading specialists in the field, the essays explore economic, social, cultural, political, and religious interactions between Wales and the empire. The geographical coverage is very broad, with examinations of the contributions made by Wales to expansion in the Atlantic world, Caribbean, and South Asia. The book explores Welsh influences on the emergence of 'British' imperialism, as well as the impact that the empire had upon the development of Wales itself. The book will be of interest to academic historians, postgraduate students, and undergraduates. It will be indispensable to those interested in the history of Wales, Britain, and the empire, as well as those who wish to compare Welsh imperial experiences with those of the English, Irish, and Scots.
Drawing on the everyday experiences of 43 British-Bangladeshi Muslims living in East London, this book explores stories of migration and belonging vis-à-vis dress and language. In narrating those stories, the book is framed within the broader socio-political conversations happening regarding Muslims in Britain and their 'place' in this society. Recent work on Muslims focuses on their religious identity and its formation, not paying attention to the role of dress and language. With the former, much of it tends to, obsessively, focus on Muslim women only. This book, alternatively, explores religious identity formation in addition to examining the British-Bangladeshi Muslim community's relationship with their ethnic identity vis-à-vis dress and language. As such, the analysis provides a rich, bottom-up analysis of the community, and readers will be able to understand a community holistically, away from the over-sensationalised community within broader socio-political context.
Country houses and the British empire, 1700-1930 assesses the economic and cultural links between country houses and the Empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Using sources from over fifty British and Irish archives, it enables readers to better understand the impact of the empire upon the British metropolis by showing both the geographical variations and its different cultural manifestations. Barczewski offers a rare scholarly analysis of the history of country houses that goes beyond an architectural or biographical study, and recognises their importance as the physical embodiments of imperial wealth and reflectors of imperial cultural influences. In so doing, she restores them to their true place of centrality in British culture over the last three centuries, and provides fresh insights into the role of the Empire in the British metropolis.
An incidental pleasure of watching a film is what it tells us about the society in which it is made. Using a sociological model, The British working class in postwar film looks at how working-class people were portrayed in British feature films in the decade after the Second World War. Though some of the films examined are well known, others have been forgotten and deserve reassessment. Original statistical data is used to assess the popularity of the films with audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach and the avoidance of jargon, this book seeks to broaden the approach to film studies. Students of media and cultural studies are introduced to the skills of other disciplines, while sociologists and historians are encouraged to consider the value of film evidence in their own fields. This work should appeal to all readers interested in social history and in how cinema and society works.
This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. At a time when payment is claiming a greater place than ever before within the NHS, this book provides the first in-depth investigation of the workings, scale and meaning of payment in British hospitals before the NHS. There were only three decades in British history when it was the norm for patients to pay the hospital; those between the end of the First World War and the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. Payment played an important part in redefining rather than abandoning medical philanthropy, based on class divisions and the notion of financial contribution as a civic duty. With new insights on the scope of private medicine and the workings of the means test in the hospital, as well as the civic, consumer and charitable meanings associated with paying the hospital, Gosling offers a fresh perspective on healthcare before the NHS and welfare before the welfare state.
British culture after Empire is the first collection of its kind to explore the intertwined social, cultural and political aftermath of empire in Britain from 1945 up to and beyond the Brexit referendum of 2016, combining approaches from the fields of history, English and cultural studies. Against those who would deny, downplay or attempt to forget Britain's imperial legacy, the various contributions expose and explore how the British Empire and the consequences of its end continue to shape Britain at the local, national and international level. As an important and urgent intervention in a field of increasing relevance within and beyond the academy, the book offers fresh perspectives on the colonial hangovers in post-colonial Britain from up-and-coming as well as established scholars.
The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature.
Islamophobia is one of the most misunderstood and pernicious forms of racism in Britain. But how do those committed to challenging Islamophobia understand it? And what does this mean for their practices 'on the ground'? Islamophobia, anti-racism and the British left combines first-hand accounts from activists and community workers across two British cities with sociological theory, critically interrogating Islamophobia's relationship to 'race', racial capitalism and other modalities of racism. Setting this discussion against some of the most pertinent political shifts in Britain in recent years - from the resurgence of left nationalism to Black Lives Matter - the book assesses the limits of recent attempts to think about and tackle Islamophobia, and considers the possibilities of an alternative approach from and for the anti-racist left.
In 1841, the Welsh sent their first missionary, Thomas Jones, to evangelise the tribal peoples of the Khasi Hills of north-east India. This book follows Jones from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth and now one of the most Christianised parts of India. As colonised colonisers, the Welsh were to have a profound impact on the culture and beliefs of the Khasis. The book also foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. Its themes are universal: crises of authority, the loneliness of geographical isolation, sexual scandal, greed and exploitation, personal and institutional dogma, individual and group morality. Written by a direct descendant of Thomas Jones, it makes a significant contribution in orienting the scholarship of imperialism to a much-neglected corner of India, and will appeal to students of the British imperial experience more broadly.
This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession's elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews. The book explores the changes in the refugees' status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.
Migrant architects of the NHS draws on forty-five oral history interviews and extensive archival research to offer a radical reappraisal of how the National Health Service was made. It tells the story of migrant South Asian doctors who became general practitioners in the NHS. Imperial legacies, professional discrimination and an exodus of UK-trained doctors combined to direct these doctors towards work as GPs in some of the most deprived parts of the UK. In some areas, they made up over half of the general practitioner workforce. The NHS was structurally dependent on them and they shaped British society and medicine through their agency. Aimed at students and academics with interests in the history of immigration, immigration studies, the history of medicine, South Asian studies and oral history. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about how Empire and migration have contributed to making Britain what it is today.
This is the first book-length study to focus primarily on the role of class in the encounter between South Asians and British institutions in the United Kingdom at the height of British imperialism. In a departure from previous scholarship on the South Asian presence in Britain, 'The better class' of Indians emphasizes the importance of class as the register through which British polite society interpreted other social distinctions such as race, gender, and religion. Drawing mainly on unpublished material from the India Office Records, the National Archives, and private collections of charitable organizations, this book examines not only the attitudes of British officials towards South Asians in their midst, but also the actual application of these attitudes in decisions pertaining to them. This fascinating book will be of particular interest to scholars and general readers of imperialism, immigration as well as British and Indian social history.
A riveting history of the 'Ten Pound Poms', a wave of British citizens who migrated to Australia and New Zealand after the Second World War. Between the 1940s and 1970s, more than a million Britons migrated to Australia. They were the famous 'Ten Pound Poms' and this is their story. The authors draw on a vast trove of letters, diaries and personal photographs, as well as hundreds of interviews with former migrants, to offer original insights into key historical themes. They explore people's motivations for emigrating, gender relations and family dynamics, the clashing experience of the 'very familiar and awfully strange', homesickness and the personal and national identities of both settlers and returnees. Filled with fascinating testimonies that shed light on migrant life histories, 'Ten Pound Poms' will engage readers interested in British and Australian migration history and intrigued about the power of migrant memories for individuals, families and nations.
With well over 6,300 articles, including over 500 new entries, this fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of British Film is a fully updated invaluable reference guide to the British film industry. It is the most authoritative volume yet, stretching from the inception of the industry to the present day, with detailed listings of the producers, directors, actors and studios behind a century or so of great British cinema. Brian McFarlane's meticulously researched guide is the definitive companion for anyone interested in the world of film. Previous editions have sold many thousands of copies and this fourth edition will be an essential work of reference for enthusiasts interested in the history of British cinema, and for universities and libraries.