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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2025

        Spirits of extraction

        Christianity, settler colonialism and the geology of race

        by Claire Blencowe

        Spirits of extraction revisits the troubling history of socially reformist, ostensibly anti-racist, Christianity and its role in the expansion of the extractive industries, British imperialism, and settler colonialism. The book explores key moments in the history of Methodism and the evangelical movement. Colonial fears, and the attempt to 'civilise savages', were crucial to the movement's foundation in eighteenth-century industrialising Bristol, England. Through the culture of the Cornish mining diaspora of the nineteenth century, Methodism enmeshed with all the complexity of race and labour-structures of the British empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that both enable and sacralise the mining industry. Through these histories of our present, the book theorises the relation of religion and education to racism, modernity, biopower, extractivism, and the geology of race.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of religion
        July 2016

        Making and remaking saints in nineteenth-century Britain

        by Edited by Gareth Atkins

        This book examines the place of 'saints' and sanctity in a self-consciously modern age, and argues that Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonisation had disappeared, people continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Making and remaking saints in the nineteenth-century Britain explores for the first time how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group, and together they will appeal to not only historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2024

        Anti-racism in Britain

        Traditions, histories and trajectories, 1880-present

        by Saffron East, Grace Redhead, Theo Williams

        Concepts of 'race' and racism are central to British history. They have shaped, and been shaped by, British identities, economies and societies for centuries, from colonialism and enslavement to the 'hostile environment' of the 2010s. Yet state and societal racism has always been met with resistance. This edited volume collects the latest research on anti-racist action in Britain, and makes the case for a multifaceted, historically contingent 'tradition' of British anti-racism shaped by local, national and transnational contexts, networks and movements. Ranging from Pan-Africanist activism in the 1890s to mutual aid women's groups in the 1970s, from anti-racist trade union marches in Scotland to West African student groups in North East England - this book explores the continuities and interruptions in British anti-racism from the nineteenth century to the present day.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2020

        Spain in the nineteenth century

        New essays on experiences of culture and society

        by Andrew Ginger, Geraldine Lawless

        The nineteenth-century Hispanic world was shattered to its core by war, civil war, and revolution. At the same time, it confronted a new period of European and North-American expansion and development. In these essays, authors explore major, dynamic ways that people in Spain envisaged how they would adapt and change, or simply continue as they were. Each chapter title begins with the words "How to...", and examines the ways in which Spaniards conceived or undertook major activities that shaped their lives. These range from telling the time to being a man. Adaptability, paradox, and inconsistency come to the fore in many of the essays. We find before us a human quest for opportunity and survival in a complex and changing world. This wide-ranging book contains chapters by leading scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2011

        Holiday camps in twentieth-century Britain

        Packaging pleasure

        by Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Jeffrey Richards

        This book is the story of two holiday camp chains established in the 1930s that provided thousands with packaged pleasure. Warner and Butlin's commercial camps emerged at the intersection of cultural shifts that politicised working-class leisure and consumption. Entertainment fostered in the post-war camps provided a forum for popular pleasure that reinforced the idea of a 'national' culture grown from the common experience of war. Butlin and Warner, the big commercial chains of the 50s and 60s, are enmeshed in our social and cultural history. Dawson uncovers the significance of the holiday camps to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain, drawing on an impressive variety of sources, from government documents to trade journals, advertising, photographs, oral histories, literature, films and songs. This unique volume will be of interest to academics and specialists of British social history, popular culture and tourism studies whilst remaining accessible to enthusiasts. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        European Empires and the People

        Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy

        by John M. MacKenzie

        This is the first book to survey in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters, focusing on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, provide parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The international group of contributors, who are all scholars working at the cutting edge of these fields, place their work in the context of governmental policies, the economic bases of imperial expansion, major events such as wars of conquest, the emergence of myths of heroic action in exotic contexts, religious and missionary impulses, as well as the new media which facilitated such popular dissemination. Among these media were the press, international exhibitions, popular literature, educational institutions and methods, ceremonies, church sermons and lectures, monuments, paintings and much else.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2006

        Environmental policy-making in Britain, Germany and the European Union

        The Europeanisation of air and water pollution control

        by Rüdiger K. W. Wurzel, Mikael Anderssen, Duncan Liefferink, Martin Hargreaves

        Environmental policy has become an increasingly important area of European Union (EU) policy-making and the source of political conflict between Britain and Germany. This book explains why national conflicts have arisen and how they are resolved at EU level by focusing on the Europeanisation of air and water pollution control in particular. Wurzel argues that Anglo-German divergences are best explained in terms of ecological vulnerability, economic cost and capacity, political salience and environmental regulatory styles. Focusing on two very important and media-exploitable issues - car emissions and bathing water regulation - this book challenges the conventional wisdom that Britain has shown a clear preference for environmental quality objectives while Germany championed uniform emission limits. Acceptance of the concept of ecological modernisation plays a vital role in the adoption of more progressive environmental standards. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2001

        Railways and culture in Britain

        The epitome of modernity

        by Ian Carter, Jeffrey Richards

        The nineteenth-century's steam railway epitomised modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of train technology, and how this was represented in British society. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? The book's first half tests that assertion by comparing fiction and images by some canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. The second half proposes that if high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, then this does not mean that all British culture ignored this revolutionary artefact. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres. A final chapter contemplates cultural correlations of the steam railway's eclipse. If this was the epitome of modernity, then does the triumph of diesel and electric trains, of cars and planes, signal a decisive shift to postmodernity? ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2023

        The break-up of Greater Britain

        by Stuart Ward, Christian Pedersen

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2022

        Britain and its internal others, 1750–1800

        Under rule of law

        by Dana Rabin

        The rule of law, an ideology of equality and universality that justified Britain's eighteenth-century imperial claims, was the product not of abstract principles but imperial contact. As the Empire expanded, encompassing greater religious, ethnic and racial diversity, the law paradoxically contained and maintained these very differences. This book revisits six notorious incidents that occasioned vigorous debate in London's courtrooms, streets and presses: the Jewish Naturalization Act and the Elizabeth Canning case (1753-54); the Somerset Case (1771-72); the Gordon Riots (1780); the mutinies of 1797; and Union with Ireland (1800). Each of these cases adjudicated the presence of outsiders in London - from Jews and Gypsies to Africans and Catholics. The demands of these internal others to equality before the law drew them into the legal system, challenging longstanding notions of English identity and exposing contradictions in the rule of law.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 1999

        Britain in China

        by Robert Bickers, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2006

        Devolution in Britain today

        Second edition

        by Russell Deacon, Bill Jones

        Devolution in Britain today provides a comprehensive analysis of both the historical development and the current state of devolved government. Devolution is now a key element in A-level syllabuses and on most undergraduate politics courses. This book is written in a clear and accessible style for students either encountering devolution for the first time or for those who need to explore the subject area in greater detail. All of the devolved bodies in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are examined. This book is a thorough update of the first edition, written by Colin Pilkington and published by MUP in 2002. The book explains the concept and background of devolution, and indicates the constitutional implications of political devolution in the United Kingdom before providing a full and considered historical background to devolution, including an explanation of how the United Kingdom came to be united. It then examines the historical and political events that surrounded the preparation of devolution across Britain, before addressing each country in turn, assessing the relative success of devolution in that country. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2016

        Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and the UK

        Forced displacement and onward migration

        by Laura Jeffery, Alexander Smith

        The Chagos islanders were forcibly uprooted from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean between 1965 and 1973. This is the first book to compare the experiences of displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius with the experiences of those Chagossians who have moved to the UK since 2002. It thus provides a unique ethnographic comparative study of forced displacement and onward migration within the living memory of one community. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritius and Crawley (West Sussex), the six chapters explore Chagossians' challenging lives in Mauritius, the mobilisation of the community, reformulations of the homeland, the politics of culture in exile, onward migration to Crawley, and attempts to make a home in successive locations. Jeffery illuminates how displaced people romanticise their homeland through an exploration of changing representations of the Chagos Archipelago in song lyrics. Offering further ethnographic insights into the politics of culture, she shows how Chagossians in exile engage with contrasting conceptions of culture ranging from expectations of continuity and authenticity to enactments of change, loss and revival. The book will appeal particularly to social scientists specialising in the fields of migration studies, the anthropology of displacement, political and legal anthropology, African studies, Indian Ocean studies, and the anthropology of Britain, as well as to readers interested in the Chagossian case study. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2020

        Ideas of monarchical reform

        Fénelon, Jacobitism, and the political works of the Chevalier Ramsay

        by Joseph Bergin, Andrew Mansfield, Penny Roberts, William G. Naphy

        This book examines the political works of Andrew Michael Ramsay (1683-1743) within the context of early eighteenth-century British and French political thought. In the first monograph on Ramsay in English for over sixty years, the author uses Ramsay to engage in a broader evaluation of the political theory in the two countries and the exchange between them. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain and France were on divergent political paths. Yet in the first three decades of that century, the growing impetus of mixed government in Britain influenced the political theory of its long-standing enemy. Shaped by experiences and ideologies of the seventeenth century, thinkers in both states exhibited a desire to produce great change by integrating past wisdom with modern knowledge.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2017

        The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922–53

        by Jeffrey Richards, Thomas Hajkowski

        Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book is the first study that focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programs, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The BBC and national identity in Britain offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organization of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid "dual identities" characteristic of contemporary Britain.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2008

        The social context of economic change in Britain

        Between policy and performance

        by Terrence Casey

        This important book, newly available in paperback, examines a period of dramatic economic change in Britain during the Thatcher era. The Conservatives' free market policies generally improved the performance of the economy in Britain, but some parts of the country still did poorly (for example northern England). Casey argues that this was as a result of variations in social contexts - a combination of institutions, interests and economic culture. Southern England, possessing a more individualistic culture and higher levels of entrepreneurialism, has a 'market responsive' social context that can prosper under free market policies. Social context is thus a crucial intervening variable between the policies selected by decision-makers and the performance of economies, the key for enhancing prosperity is the proper match between economic policies and the context in which they are implemented. The social context of economic change in Britain provides an original theoretical framework linking economic growth and civil society and offers a unique insight into the Thatcher era. This book will be of interest to students of British politics and comparative political economy, public policy and political history. ;

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