{"title":"Anarchism, anti-militarism, and the British Empire: the case of war commentary and the freedom defence committee.","authors":"Eleanor Strangways","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwaf006","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Anti-imperialism was central to the anarchist critique of the Second World War. Throughout the war, the anarchist publication War Commentary became a platform for challenging the British Empire and garnered the active involvement of key anti-imperialist thinkers such as Jomo Kenyatta and Chris Jones. George Padmore, another notable anti-imperialist in this period, was on the board of the Freedom Defence Committee (FDC)-established in 1945 to defend the arrested editors of War Commentary-an organization that would later become a springboard for anti-imperial solidarity. Through an analysis of the publication War Commentary and relations with the FDC, this article highlights the often-overlooked convergence of anti-imperialism and anarchism during and immediately after the Second World War. It begins with the domestic intellectual context, demonstrating how anti-imperialism was at the heart of the anarchist rejection of the war, and how this stance was influenced by anti-imperial actors from the colonies. Additionally, it reveals how these networks developed in the British Empire through a focus on the FDC's connections with Ghana. In doing so, this article will reveal how anarchist responses to the Second World War contributed to connections between anarchist groups in Britain and anti-imperialist groups in the colonies, while also highlighting the growing disillusionment of colonized activists with these alliances.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144556440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ewan Gibbs, Ewan Mackenzie, Alan McKinlay, Des McNulty, Jim Phillips, Stephen Procter
{"title":"Rolls-Royce engineers and deindustrialization in Scotland from the 1950s to the 2020s.","authors":"Ewan Gibbs, Ewan Mackenzie, Alan McKinlay, Des McNulty, Jim Phillips, Stephen Procter","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf002","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research involving Rolls-Royce engineers made redundant in 2020, when the firm ended its Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul operation at Inchinnan in Renfrewshire, Scotland, provides recent-world perspective on the history of deindustrialization in the UK. Specifically, it qualifies the half-life metaphor, which has been advanced in social sciences and humanities literature to explain the prolonged chronological impact of job losses and workplace closures. The metaphor imprecisely presents deindustrialization as a moment of rupture followed by a predictable contraction and downplays the continued importance of industrial work after the 1980s. Evidence provided by the redundant Rolls-Royce workers through life-course interviews and a survey questionnaire shows that deindustrialization is both a historical and continuing current-world process. Two phenomena are emphasized: the adaptation since the 1950s in Scotland of a robust industrial culture, equipped with moral economy understanding of employment changes; and, into the 2010s, the 'post-industrial' presence of significant levels of industrial and what we term 'industrial-analogous' employment in the UK.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143782346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Ambassadors of cultural appreciation': the social, political, and associational life of Chinese students in Britain, 1908-37.","authors":"Jennifer Bond, Georgina Brewis","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwaf007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article uncovers the experience of Chinese students in Britain before the Second World War, focusing on students who attended universities and colleges between 1908 and 1937. It argues that Chinese students at British colleges and universities played an important role as unofficial ambassadors who were uniquely qualified to interpret China to the British despite religious, political, linguistic, and regional schisms that divided the student community. This article shows that by the mid-1930s, Chinese students in Britain enjoyed a rich associational culture, with active local groups and national bodies that worked closely with the wider British student movement. This article discusses how and why Chinese students sought to interpret China and the Chinese to British audiences and examines the specific tactics and techniques they developed to do so. The presence of Chinese students in Britain remains curiously neglected, and they are less well researched than other diasporic student communities or their compatriots who studied in France or the USA. Since the mid-2010s, Chinese students have formed the largest cohort of international students in the UK. This article makes the case for the significance of university and college students as cultural intermediaries, both within and outside formal empire, as well as contributing to a revaluation of what was a more varied Chinese presence in Britain before 1937 than is often recognized.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144311171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The National Front and environmental politics, 1967-90.","authors":"Beth Bhargava","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae053","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae053","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The green entanglements of the inter-war British far right are well-documented. Martin Pugh has drawn attention to the predominantly rural, agricultural support base of the British Union of Fascists. We know that the aspiration to go 'back to the land' was deeply enmeshed with a politics of racial hygiene, which equated the urban with miscegenation and the rural with purity. However, in the post-war world, British far-right ecologism has typically been interpreted as a curious anomaly driven by cynical realpolitik. This article contends environmental themes as an intellectual staple of British fascism-running from the interwar far right, through the NF, and into the latter's largest successor organization, the Flag Group. The Front's preoccupation with the environment, and its racism, were mutually reinforcing, central pillars of its politics. Its environmentalism was alternately revolutionary and conservative, nostalgic and future oriented.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Civil resettlement: citizenship, mental health and masculinity in repatriated British POWs.","authors":"Gabriel Lawson","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf004","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf004","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article investigates the programme of 'Civil Resettlement' created by the British Army's Department of Army Psychiatry to respond to the challenge of resettling prisoners of war (POWs) returning to the UK in 1945. Former POWs were seen as asocial and potentially subversive and were therefore encouraged to undergo a period of treatment in a Civil Resettlement Unit (CRU) before re-entering civilian life. These units sought to inculcate emotional health, 'good citizenship' and healthy masculinity in a supposedly at-risk population. Ex-POWs were seen as lacking in each of these categories due to the psychopathological environment present in Axis POW camps. POWs needed assistance on their return, lest the social stresses of resettlement result in permanent mental harm. Civil Resettlement was originally conceptualized as the solution to the emergent problem of mentally unwell POWs, but those who devised the programme held that it could be expanded to society as a whole. Unfortunately, post-war austerity meant that CRUs left a smaller legacy than their founders had hoped, but the short-lived programme raises questions surrounding the social nature of health and the relationships between citizenship, masculinity, and mental health.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143677431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anniversary fever? History and the culture of NHS celebration.","authors":"Roberta Bivins, Mathew Thomson","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae066","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae066","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Delivered a day after Britain's National Health Service (NHS) reached its 75th year since its opening on the Appointed Day of 5 July 1948, the Pimlott Lecture for 2023 explored the culture of NHS anniversary-making. What can the marking of these anniversaries tell us about changing attitudes towards the service, and indeed, the British state? Here, examining evidence from the media, government archives, and Mass Observation, we argue that NHS anniversaries have long functioned as points of reflection but that their role as moments of national celebration and even communion has come to the fore only recently and culminated in the apparent 'anniversary fever' of 2018. We will explore the reasons behind the growing public fervour, what it can tell us, and the lessons offered by our work on this (still) best-loved of British institutions for historians working on highly politicized objects in 'fevered' times.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11717143/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142961158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vice versa: sex work and drug use during the HIV epidemic in Thatcher's Britain.","authors":"Lola Dickinson","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf003","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf003","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article traces the origins of the present-day association of prostitution and drug addiction in Britain. Through an examination of a variety of political discussions in the 1980s that centred on sex work, drug use, and HIV/AIDS, I locate the emergence of the cultural legitimacy of narratives of addiction within discourses of prostitution. I argue that it was in the 1980s, within the context of the rise of heroin use and the concomitant emergence of AIDS, that the interwoven discourses of drug addiction and prostitution were forged and cemented. Within the context of these two 1980s epidemics, the discrete and intelligible figure of the 'drug-using prostitute' emerged. Public health policy approached sex work within the context of AIDS as inextricably linked to IV drug use both in their policy discussions and policy implementation. Yet, the emergence of the 'drug-using prostitute' also served other political and punitive ends, being used in debates around the criminalization of drug possession and sex work. Overwhelmingly, these political discussions gendered the sex worker and positioned her in opposition to the idealized heterosexual family, necessitating the policing and pathologization of both drug use and sex work. The use of the figure of the drug-using prostitute sits at the convergence of discourses of disease, criminality, publicness, gender, and moral depravity, and thus, this article contributes to the historiography of sex work, drug culture, public health, 'deviance', and Thatcherite Britain.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143677432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Race, homosexuality, and AIDS in London: the response of British AIDS voluntary organizations to Black gay men's sexual health needs during the AIDS crisis (1980s-2000).","authors":"Lucy Cann","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae061","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae061","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Focusing on three specific organizations-The Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), Blackliners, and The NAZ Project (Naz)-this article explores the different ways in which voluntary organizations responded to Black gay men (BGM) in Britain during the AIDS crisis from the 1980s to 2000. Illustrating how the place of BGM in Britain at this time was multidimensional and often contradictory, the first section demonstrates how they required safer-sex messaging that took account of the heterogeneous ways in which they experienced the intersection of racism and homophobia. Situated in this context, the second section explores for the first time the well-documented work of THT as it applied to BGM. It shows how although the Trust increasingly recognized the need to reach BGM, white activists struggled to grapple with issues of race. It demonstrates how their work on race was shaped by the broader context of changes to voluntary organizations' relationship to the state. In doing so, it makes clear the challenges of intersectional activism with communities of colour for white-dominated organizations and sheds light on how the HIV/AIDS voluntary sector responded to communities with particular needs. Taking Black AIDS organizations as its focus, the final section uncovers how Blackliners and Naz centred gay men in their work and reveals their nuanced and culturally sensitive initiatives. By tracing the contrasting ways in which these organizations navigated contested understandings of race in the final decades of the twentieth century, this article demonstrates the real-world consequences of the fragmentation of political conceptions of Blackness.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142886644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The country house and the neoliberal society.","authors":"Peter Mandler","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf001","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwaf001","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The English (or British) country house has enjoyed an under-appreciated social and economic revival in the last 25 years as a result of changes in the political economy associated with 'neoliberalism', which have benefitted both new buyers of country houses and old owners. One result of this revival has been the 're-privatization' of the country house, which has reduced its public profile. Recent interest in the cultural meanings of the country house-re-evaluated in light of empire, slavery, and nationalism-should take into account the greater insulation that neo-liberalism has lent these houses and their owners.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143607743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The urban geography of pop in sixties Britain.","authors":"Simon Gunn","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae065","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae065","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The explosion of pop culture in Britain between the late 1950s and the late sixties is usually taken to have been an urban phenomenon. Pop was the 'sound of the city' in Britain as much as America. But what kind of 'urban' was involved-big city, small town, centre, suburb? What kind of geographical reach did pop have across the different parts of the United Kingdom in the 1960s? What was the significance of London in a cultural movement that was simultaneously national and international? Understanding where pop was made and performed in its formative years helps explain why it took off so spectacularly in sixties Britain; it illuminates why post-war Britain was so receptive to and generative of pop music as well as the music's nationwide appeal. In this respect, the article contributes not just to the history of pop music and youth but to the larger cultural history of post-war Britain.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142961140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}