Modern British history最新文献

Tom Nairn and Scottish Politics. 汤姆·奈恩和苏格兰政治。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-04-14 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag011

Ben Jackson

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'Free From Doubt'? The border between charity and the state in the British National Health Service, 1948-74. “毫无疑问”？1948年至1974年，英国国家医疗服务体系中慈善机构与国家之间的界限。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-04-14 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag005

Hannah Blythe, Martin Gorsky

{"title":"'Free From Doubt'? The border between charity and the state in the British National Health Service, 1948-74.","authors":"Hannah Blythe, Martin Gorsky","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag005","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag005","url":null,"abstract":"Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is widely regarded as epitomizing statist healthcare. However, before its launch in 1948, Britain had a 'mixed economy of welfare' in which charity loomed large, most notably in the voluntary hospitals. This article examines the legacy of this charitable past in the NHS's early decades. Although at its foundation, the Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, was determined that the NHS should end reliance on the 'caprice of private charity', political considerations meant that teaching hospitals retained their charitable wealth. Bevan's policy was that the Exchequer would cover all 'ordinary expenditure', with voluntary reserves used only for special purposes, including research, additional comforts and amenities. Thus, a theoretical border between state-funded essentials and charitably financed inessentials was drawn for hospitals in the early welfare state. This article asks whether this border held true in practice. Its method is a comparative history of three case studies: St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, the United Sheffield Hospitals, and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. We present quantitative and qualitative analysis of endowment expenditure between 1948 and the NHS's reorganization in 1974. Our findings demonstrate that expectations of a simple division between essential and non-essential aspects of healthcare proved naïve. Charitable spending notionally on research, amenities, and equipment was soon geared to clinical care. It also sustained capital programmes, disproportionately advantaging those hospitals with large inherited assets. Hospital charity also served as a rhetorical and visual device, promoting an ideal of humane care and legitimizing the place of voluntarism within the NHS.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13078793/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147694801","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}

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IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag027

Simon J Moody

{"title":"The popular press and the 1950s moral crusade against British army 'bull(shit)'.","authors":"Simon J Moody","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag027","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag027","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the 1950s, the Daily Mirror led a campaign by the popular press against petty, tyrannical discipline, commonly known as 'bull(shit)', within the British Army. Acting as moral entrepreneurs, tabloid newspapers positioned what they regarded to be the deviant behaviour exhibited by over-zealous non-commissioned officers towards national servicemen as a threat to the normative contours of British society. By doing so, the campaign against 'bull' sought to exploit latent fears about large standing armies in peacetime to pressure the Army to reform and modernize its methods of discipline. The article argues that the campaign against 'bull' was effective in that it elevated military discipline as an issue of public concern during a period in which the British Army was actively seeking to enhance its public image to improve soldier recruitment and retention as it prepared to revert back to being an all-volunteer force after the decision was made in 1957 to terminate National Service. By framing 'bull' as an archaic form of social control that was damaging to both morale and efficiency, the moral crusade compelled the Army to explain and justify its methods of discipline amidst increasing public and parliamentary concern.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148383483","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}

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'I felt like I just belonged': urban multiculture and black Irish migrants in post-war Britain. “我觉得自己属于这里”：战后英国的城市多元文化和爱尔兰黑人移民。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag038

Jack Crangle

{"title":"'I felt like I just belonged': urban multiculture and black Irish migrants in post-war Britain.","authors":"Jack Crangle","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag038","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag038","url":null,"abstract":"This article reevaluates historians' understanding of the Irish in post-war Britain from the perspective of a previously unresearched population, black and mixed-race Irish migrants. Writing on the Irish in Britain has lingered on themes such as stereotyping, discrimination, and ethnic profiling. More widely, some historians have framed Irish emigration and the diaspora around motifs of exile and reluctant departure, while others have highlighted the liberating potential of departure. Oral histories with black Irish migrants fall firmly into the latter, emancipatory camp, depicting urban, multicultural Britain as a site of acceptance and belonging. Far from presenting emigration as a reluctant withdrawal from a cherished homeland, Irish people of colour narrated their departure as a liberating exit from an upbringing of alienation and abuse. These findings have wider implications for understanding the dynamics of British multiculture. Black Irish narrators revelled in the anonymity granted by post-war British diversity, which allowed them to discover and embrace their blackness. Some found belonging within the black communities of urban Britain, especially London. Conversely, they faced rejection from Irish diasporic spaces, which were characterized by conservative, Catholic and exclusively white conceptions of Irishness. The article therefore uses previously unexplored narratives to reframe our understanding of the Irish community in Britain and the broader context of urban multiculture in which it existed.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148852206","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}

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Policing through planning: constructing coercive community in British New Towns, 1964-75. 通过规划维持治安：1964- 1975年英国新城强制社区的建设。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag010

Georgie Carr

{"title":"Policing through planning: constructing coercive community in British New Towns, 1964-75.","authors":"Georgie Carr","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwag010","url":null,"abstract":"Histories of British policing in the 1970s focus on the 'inner-city'. These accounts develop a compelling narrative: as economic crisis undermined the authority of the state, it sought to rebuild legitimacy through the production of racialized categories of crime, developing authoritarian methods-often drawn from colonial police playbooks-to coerce and contain working-class residents. Many of these accounts articulate policing to urban policy, revealing how policing was intensified in pockets of abandonment created by deindustrialization and suburbanization. But while urban historians have emphasized the relationality between city and suburb in this period, accounts of suburban policing are few. This article links the policing of cities to British new towns, analysing new police methods which sought greater control over the composition of social class through urban planning. It argues that new towns-developed as quiescent, orderly environments by the state-were later positioned as test sites for new models of 'community policing'. Attention to a hitherto overlooked corpus of archives highlights the unexplored early significance of planning to policing, revealing how the interventionist administration of urban space became increasingly central to the extension of the coercive functions of the state. Through comparative analysis of the policing of new towns designated under the 1946 New Towns Act and the violent administration of an unofficial 'new town' in Kirkby, Merseyside, I show how conceptions of planned suburban order were centred on hierarchical concepts of social class, emphasizing the increasingly authoritarian impulses of the welfare state.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148371733","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}

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Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2025: The growth of the British private security industry in the age of decolonization, 1960-74. 邓肯·坦纳论文奖得主2025：英国私人保安行业在非殖民化时代的增长，1960-74。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag025

Rebecca Orr

{"title":"Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2025: The growth of the British private security industry in the age of decolonization, 1960-74.","authors":"Rebecca Orr","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag025","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag025","url":null,"abstract":"Before the Second World War, private security companies provided guards for a small number of wealthy householders and local business owners in Britain. By the mid-1970s, however, the industry had expanded rapidly to offer a broader range of guarding and watch services to corporations, public authorities, educational establishments, and other organizations across the country. Leading British security firms also extended their operations overseas as they established subsidiaries across the former empire. Focusing on the largest company, Securicor, this article explores how private security companies cultivated and sustained a demand for guarding services that had previously been marginal. It argues that individuals with colonial policing and military experience played an important role in marketing privatized policing as a solution to societal unrest and political instability between the early 1960s and mid-1970s. As security professionals, they positioned private security as a means of countering Britain's postimperial decline at home and safeguarding property against the encroachments of postcolonial governments abroad. The appointment of former colonial officials as executives, managers, and guards further lent legitimacy to private firms in the eyes of public police forces. In effect, decolonization helped bolster demand for new types of privatized services, cultivated and delivered by those for whom the empire no longer offered a viable career path. Many of the private companies founded in this era continue to dominate the British and African security sectors today.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148428310","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}

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Ukania Perpetua and the anomaly of empire. 永久的乌克兰和反常的帝国。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag013

Stuart Ward

{"title":"Ukania Perpetua and the anomaly of empire.","authors":"Stuart Ward","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwag013","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a re-examination of Tom Nairn's lifelong prediction of an impending Break-Up of Britain, against the backdrop of the Union's apparent resilience since the publication of his magnum opus in 1977. Specifically, it considers Nairn's conceptualization of the end of empire as the necessary precursor event that doomed the UK to inevitable destruction. What Perry Anderson terms the 'protracted delay' between Nairn's predictions and their fulfilment provides a useful vantage point to reconsider Nairn's thesis with the benefit of more than 50 years' hindsight. It is argued that Nairn's Gramscian model and his inherently structural view of empire tended to screen out the complex social interface between Britain and the wider imperial world. For all the crucial explanatory power he attributed to the empire's demise, he almost never exemplified his argument with reference to any specific part of it or referred to the corrosive effects of any given decolonizing moment. To gauge the empire's full significance, then, requires a larger frame of reference, comprising not only the unitary UK state but also the empire-wide affinities that were so crucial to popular investments in being British. To the extent that Nairn was right about the intricate nexus tying the Union to Britain's global coordinates, it was not always for the right reasons.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148383499","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}

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'As near to war as it was possible to get in peace time': physical education, youth, and pacifism in inter-war Britain. “在和平时期尽可能接近战争”：两次世界大战之间英国的体育教育、青年和和平主义。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag042

Emily Calcraft

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An inconvenient mandate: Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism, and the politics of climate change, 1987-90. 一个不方便的授权：玛格丽特·撒切尔、新自由主义和气候变化政治，1987- 1990。

IF 0.2

Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag028

Peter Farrelly

{"title":"An inconvenient mandate: Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism, and the politics of climate change, 1987-90.","authors":"Peter Farrelly","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwag028","url":null,"abstract":"Between 1987 and 1990, Margaret Thatcher became one of the most high-profile world leaders to warn publicly of anthropogenic climate change. This article argues that her apparent 'green turn' was not a moral conversion or a departure from Thatcherism, but a strategic adaptation of it. Drawing on declassified Prime Minister's Office files, Cabinet correspondence, and private papers, it shows that climate policy was shaped through a 'neoliberal filter' that favoured responses compatible with fiscal discipline, technological modernization, and market logics. As a result, ministers supported climate modelling, international forestry initiatives, and above all the renewed case for nuclear power, while resisting structural remedies-most notably carbon taxation-that threatened industrial competitiveness, economic growth, or political consent. Reconstructing key episodes-including the 1989 Downing Street Climate Seminar and the 1990 white paper This Common Inheritance-the article exposes the internal hybridity of late Thatcherism: a governing project able to appropriate the language of planetary responsibility while resisting measures that threatened the neoliberal political economy forged during the 1980s. In doing so, it reinterprets Thatcher's final term as one of pragmatic yet sharply delimited adaptability, revealing both the possibilities and the limits of neoliberal environmentalism at the close of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148407501","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}

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Between engagement and proscription: the British State's dilemma in dealing with Sinn Féin, 1981-90. 在接触与禁止之间：1981- 1990年英国政府在处理新芬党问题上的困境。

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Modern British history Pub Date : 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwag023

Martyn Frampton

{"title":"Between engagement and proscription: the British State's dilemma in dealing with Sinn Féin, 1981-90.","authors":"Martyn Frampton","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag023","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwag023","url":null,"abstract":"The rise of Sinn Féin as an electoral force in Northern Ireland after 1981 presented the British government with a fundamental dilemma: How should it deal with a political party that was closely associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and which expressed open support for political violence? Should Sinn Féin be treated as a party like any other, or should it be isolated-and potentially proscribed-because of its links to 'armed struggle'? At stake were wider issues about the functioning of political legitimacy, engagement, and exclusion in a democratic system amidst ongoing conflict. Drawing on internal government debates and policy discussions, this article explores the way in which the governments of Margaret Thatcher confronted these dilemmas in practice. It argues that, despite the Prime Minister's uncompromising public rhetoric and own ideological preferences, British policy towards Sinn Féin was shaped by a pragmatic calculus developed by ministers and senior civil servants. In doing so, this article reinforces recent historiographical interpretations of the Thatcher era that question the rigidity of 'Thatcherism' as an applied political doctrine and the importance of institutional and administrative dynamics in the making of policy.","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148260830","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}

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