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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2025England’s military heartland
Preparing for war on Salisbury Plain
by Vron Ware, Antonia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar, Alice Cree
A considered investigation of a long-standing army base's impact on the British countryside. What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? Beyond the barracks provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, the Salisbury 'super garrison' offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? Beyond the barracks investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Popular imperialism and the military, 1850-1950
by John M. MacKenzie
Colonial war played a vital part in transforming the reputation of the military and placing it on a standing equal to that of the navy. The book is concerned with the interactive culture of colonial warfare, with the representation of the military in popular media at home, and how these images affected attitudes towards war itself and wider intellectual and institutional forces. It sets out to relate the changing image of the military to these fundamental facts. For the dominant people they were an atavistic form of war, shorn of guilt by Social Darwinian and racial ideas, and rendered less dangerous by the increasing technological gap between Europe and the world. Attempts to justify and understand war were naturally important to dominant people, for the extension of imperial power was seldom a peaceful process. The entertainment value of war in the British imperial experience does seem to have taken new and more intensive forms from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Themes such as the delusive seduction of martial music, the sketch of the music hall song, powerful mythic texts of popular imperialism, and heroic myths of empire are discussed extensively. The first important British war correspondent was William Howard Russell (1820-1907) of The Times, in the Crimea. The 1870s saw a dramatic change in the representation of the officer in British battle painting. Up to that point it was the officer's courage, tactical wisdom and social prestige that were put on display.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2025England’s military heartland
Preparing for war on Salisbury Plain
by Vron Ware, Antonia Lucia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar, Alice Cree
What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? England's military heartland provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, the Salisbury 'super garrison' offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? This book investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2013The House of Lords
by Donald Shell
The House of Lords has undergone significant change in recent years. The exclusion of the great majority of the hereditary peers in 1999 was intended as the first step in a two-stage reform process. But further reform has proved difficult to achieve and remains a matter of considerable controversy. Meanwhile, the present House has become more assertive, and is now widely recognised as making a substantial contribution to the overall work of parliament. This book, available in paperback for the first time, examines the role of the contemporary House. Who are the peers, and who among the total of over 700 are the active peers? How does the House work, and how effective is it in revising legislation and in scrutinising the work of government? Why has fundamental reform of the House been so long delayed, and what are the main arguments about reform today? These are among the questions discussed in this timely volume, which seeks to locate discussion about the House of Lords in the wider context of a clear understanding of the developing British constitution. This book will be of great value to students and academics in British politics, as well as to serious journalists and researchers. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2024‘Survival Capitalism’ and the Big Bang
Culture, contingency and capital in the making of the 1980s financial revolution
by Emma Barrett
This book about the Thatcher government and the City of London tells the compelling human story of the people and processes that made Britain's 1980s financial revolution. Fusing insider testimony with new archival discoveries, it examines high stakes and networked solutions, and uncovers new objectives that drove reforms. In so doing it demystifies a major shift in capitalism. This has implications for our understandings of government and capitalism, from the way we think about the origins of subsequent financial crises to today's growing inequalities. Survival Capitalism offers new insights into the last major restructuring of the City, disrupts myths surrounding the logics of the market, and pays attention to people and processes at a time when the City of London again faces major change as Britain seeks to find its place outside the European Union in the wake of Brexit.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2014Court and civic society in the Burgundian Low Countries c.1420–1530
by Andrew Brown, Graeme Small
This volume is the first ever attempt to unite and translate some of the key texts which informed Johan Huizinga's famous study of the Burgundian court, The Waning of the Middle Ages, a work which has never gone out of print. It combines these texts with sources that Huizinga did not consider, those that illuminate the wider civic world that the Burgundian court inhabited and the dynamic interaction between court and city. Through these sources, and an introduction offering new perspectives on recent historiography, the book tests whether Huizinga's controversial vision of the period still stands. Covering subjects including ceremonial events, such as the spectacles and gargantuan banquets that made the Burgundian dukes the talk of Europe, the workings of the court, and jousting, archery and rhetoric competitions, the book will appeal to students of late medieval and early modern Europe and to those with wider interests in court culture, ritual and ceremony.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2020
The end of the small party?
Change UK and the challenges of parliamentary politics
by Louise Thompson
For a brief moment in 2019 Britain's politics looked like it might be transformed. Just when it seemed that the divisions within and across British political parties over Brexit could not get any more intense, 7 Labour and 3 Conservative MPs broke away to form The Independent Group (TIG) - later Change UK. This is the first book to explore the meteoric lifespan of that party, within the wider context of the experiences of other small political groupings in the House of Commons. Ultimately, it shows why the party failed and disbanded after just a few months. Timely and thoroughly researched, Louise Thompson's book takes us deep inside the struggles facing MPs who leave behind the comforts of the large political parties. Drawing on interviews with current and former politicians, it explores the practicalities of being a small party MP in the Commons. What challenges face you? Who can you turn to? And just how can you make an impact? Crisply written for the non-specialist reader, this fascinating book opens a window onto the perilous world of parliamentary politics.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017
Guardians of Empire
The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, C.1700-1964
by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, David Killingray
For imperialists, the concept of guardian is specifically to the armed forces that kept watch on the frontiers and in the heartlands of imperial territories. Large parts of Asia and Africa, and the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean were imperial possessions. This book discusses how military requirements and North Indian military culture, shaped the cantonments and considers the problems posed by venereal diseases and alcohol, and the sanitary strategies pursued to combat them. The trans-border Pathan tribes remained an insistent problem in Indian defence between 1849 and 1947. The book examines the process by which the Dutch elite recruited military allies, and the contribution of Indonesian soldiers to the actual fighting. The idea of naval guardianship as expressed in the campaign against the South Pacific labour trade is examined. The book reveals the extent of military influence of the Schutztruppen on the political developments in the German protectorates in German South-West Africa and German East Africa. The U.S. Army, charged with defending the Pacific possessions of the Philippines and Hawaii, encountered a predicament similar to that of the mythological Cerberus. The regimentation of military families linked access to women with reliable service, and enabled the King's African Rifles to inspire a high level of discipline in its African soldiers, askaris. The book explains the political and military pressures which drove successive French governments to widen the scope of French military operations in Algeria between 1954 and 1958. It also explores gender issues and African colonial armies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2024
The machinic city
Media, performance and participation
by Marcos P. Dias
As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
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Business, Economics & LawJanuary 2024Welcome to the club
The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ
by DJ Paulette
In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of a thirty-year music career, with help from some famous friends. One of the Haçienda's first female DJs, Paulette has scaled the heights of the music industry, playing to crowds of thousands all around the world, and descended to the lows of being unceremoniously benched by COVID-19, with no chance of furlough and little support from the government. Here she tells her story, offering a remarkable view of the music industry from a Black woman's perspective. Behind the core values of peace, love, unity and respect, dance music is a world of exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. But, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space bursting at the seams with powerful women. Part personal account, part call to arms, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while seeking to do justice to the often invisible women who keep the beat going.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Payment and philanthropy in British healthcare, 1918–48
by George Campbell Gosling, Keir Waddington
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.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2021National perspectives on a multipolar order
by Benjamin Zala
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Child, nation, race and empire
Child rescue discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915
by Margot Hillel, Shurlee Swain, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie
Child, nation, race and empire is an innovative, inter-disciplinary, cross cultural study that contributes to understandings of both contemporary child welfare practices and the complex dynamics of empire. It analyses the construction and transmission of nineteenth-century British child rescue ideology. Locating the origins of contemporary practice in the publications of the prominent English Child rescuers, Dr Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Benjamin Waugh, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and their colonial disciples and literature written for children, it shows how the vulnerable body of the child at risk came to be reconstituted as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. Yet, as the shocking testimony before the many official enquiries into the past treatment of children in out-of-home 'care' held in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada make clear, there was no guarantee that the rescued child would be protected from further harm.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2019Managing diabetes, managing medicine
Chronic disease and clinical bureaucracy in post-war Britain
by Martin D. Moore, Keir Waddington, David Cantor
This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Through its study of diabetes care in twentieth-century Britain, Managing diabetes, managing medicine offers the first historical monograph to explore how the decision-making and labour of medical professionals became subject to bureaucratic regulation and managerial oversight. Where much existing literature has cast health care management as either a political imposition or an assertion of medical control, this work positions managerial medicine as a co-constructed venture. Although driven by different motives, doctors, nurses, professional bodies, government agencies and international organisations were all integral to the creation of managerial systems, working within a context of considerable professional, political, technological, economic and cultural change.
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Literature: history & criticismSeptember 2001The Great Exhibition of 1851
by Susan Williams
The Great Exhibition of 1851 has become a touchstone for the nineteenth century. The Crystal Palace produced a commodity world, an imperial spectacle, a picture of capitalism, a liberal dream, a vision of modern life. Historians have saturated the Great Exhibition with meanings. This collection of essays exposes how meaning has been produced around the Great Exhibition. It contains a series of critical readings of the official and popular historical record of the Exhibition. Critics and historians of art, culture, design and literature have been brought together to examine the objects, the images, the documents and the fictions of 1851. Their essays explore the determined use of industrial knowledge, the contested definitions of nation and colony, and the actual control of the space of the Crystal Palace after the Great Exhibition closed. The Great Exhibition of 1851 presents new interpretations of one of the most significant exhibitions in the nineteenth century and will be essential reading for anyone studying cultural history, design history, art history and literature.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2022Russian grand strategy in the era of global power competition
by Andrew Monaghan, Richard Connolly
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017
Unfit for heroes
Reconstruction and soldier settlement in the empire between the wars
by Kent Fedorowich
Research on soldier settlement has to be set within the wider history of emigration and immigration. This book examines two parallel but complementary themes: the settlement of British soldiers in the overseas or 'white' dominions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, between 1915 and 1930. One must place soldier settlement within the larger context of imperial migration prior to 1914 in order to elicit the changes in attitude and policy which occurred after the armistice. The book discusses the changes to Anglo-dominion relations that were consequent upon the incorporation of British ex-service personnel into several overseas soldier settlement programmes, and unravels the responses of the dominion governments to such programmes. For instance, Canadians and Australians complained about the number of ex-imperials who arrived physically unfit and unable to undertake employment of any kind. The First World War made the British government to commit itself to a free passage scheme for its ex-service personnel between 1914 and 1922. The efforts of men such as L. S. Amery who attempted to establish a landed imperial yeomanry overseas is described. Anglicisation was revived in South Africa after the second Anglo-Boer War, and politicisation of the country's soldier settlement was an integral part of the larger debate on British immigration to South Africa. The Australian experience of resettling ex-servicemen on the land after World War I came at a great social and financial cost, and New Zealand's disappointing results demonstrated the nation's vulnerability to outside economic factors.
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Children's & YAHamster Humboldt. Small and Steady Wins the Race
by Meike Betz
This intrepid hamster plunges into every adventure with full cheeks! Humboldt is a detective, adventurer and – a hamster. His size doesn’t stop him from helping the people of Villy Village out of all sorts of fixes whenever he’s not helping his owner Babs and her daughter Elli in the post office. No problem is too big for him! Only his owner’s money worries leave him flummoxed. But then Babs and Elli win the lottery and are over the moon – until they receive an anonymous postcard. Humboldt’s life is suddenly in dire straits because the unknown blackmailer wants Babs and Elli’s lottery ticket – or he’s going to hurt Humboldt. When the police refuses to get to the bottom of the case, Humboldt decides to take matters into his own paws. He’s keen to put a stop to this lottery villain’s antics! HAMSTER HUMBOLDT. SMALL AND STEADY WINS THE RACE is a detective and adventure story full of animal-entertainment for girls and boys aged 8+.
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Military historyFebruary 2017Serving the empire in the Great War
The Cypriot Mule Corps, imperial loyalty and silenced memory
by Andrekos Varnava. Series edited by Andrew S. Thompson
This book contributes to the growing literature on the role of the British non-settler empire in the Great War by exploring the service of the Cypriot Mule Corps on the Salonica Front, and after the war in Constantinople. Varnava encompasses all aspects of the story of the Mule Corps, from the role of the animals to the experiences of the men driving them both during and after the war, as well as how and why this significant story in the history of Cyprus and the British Empire has been forgotten. The book will be of great value to anyone interested in the impact of the Great War upon the British Empire in the Mediterranean, and vice- versa.
