Modern British history最新文献

During the Second World War and the austerity period that followed it, the British government operated clothes rationing as a welfare policy. Its official aim was to ensure that all citizens had equal access to essential clothing. Despite being associated with the principle of 'fair shares', rationing did not work well for large-bodied consumers. Government agents' assumptions about citizens' bodies generated a rationing scheme that overlooked large bodies. As a result, rationing regulations and economic controls amplified the normalizing impulses of mass production, creating a constant shortage of ready-made large garments and a market in which purchasing power and access to goods depended on body size. Struggling to navigate this market, consumers attempted to hold the government accountable for its declarations of equality. Tracing this issue in government records and in local, national, and trade press, this article discusses how the conflicting motivations of state, trade, and citizens shaped rationing in a way that prioritized the culturally and statistically 'normal' and reflects on what mass welfare meant for citizens with 'abnormal' needs.

This article explores how Caribbean activists living in Britain after 1945 engaged with the movement for the West Indies Federation. By considering overlooked organizations such as the Caribbean Labour Congress, London Branch (CLC) and the West Indian Workers and Students Association (WIWSA), it shows that, first, Britain became a hub for Caribbean nationalism and support for Federation in the post-war years. Secondly, it argues that the West Indies Federation of 1958-62 significantly influenced the formation of important British Caribbean institutions, such as the West Indian Gazette and the Caribbean Carnival. In contrast to traditional narratives regarding post-war Caribbean political activity in Britain, which often treat the 1950s conjuncture through the lens of race and of the prehistory of a 'multi-cultural' Britain, this article seeks to recover a moment when British Caribbean activism was moved by a broader, transnational, self-consciously 'West Indian' nationalist movement. In doing so, it reveals the significance of the West Indies Federation, and Caribbean decolonization more broadly, to the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, and their political activities. Moreover, it illustrates how diasporic and exilic communities and figures continued to play an important role in anti-colonial and nation-building projects.

This article uses the surviving records of the Hanslope disclosure to track the British government's efforts to censor colonial archives in the era of decolonization. As staff withdrew from colonies around the world, they were instructed to either destroy or 'migrate' to Britain large quantities of records that held sensitive, embarrassing, or potentially incriminating details about the history of British colonial administration. Some 25,000 files were eventually shipped to the UK in a program called 'Operation Legacy' where they fell into legal limbo and out of institutional memory. Millions more were burned or ditched at sea. This article pursues these archival policies as they gradually evolved from Malaya to East Africa, the Caribbean, and into the post-colonial era. In giving special attention to Operation Legacy's broader temporal and geographic sweep, this article meditates on two key points. First, while colonial officials actively learned from their colleagues in other colonies, they were forced to adapt Operation Legacy to local circumstances. The uneven application of this policy reflected the late British Empire's status as a patchwork of sovereignties in which people were governed differently. Second, while evidence is limited, officials across disparate colonial administrations were bound together by a common impulse. They sought not only to destroy and 'migrate' records but also to doctor files that could then be transferred to newly independent governments. In the end, the goal was to mask the disconnect in the archives between rhetoric and reality-of the alleged aspirations of Britain's 'civilizing mission' and its history of colonial violence, systemic racism, and other inconvenient truths.

Working-class health cultures before the National Health Service have long been of scholarly interest but those related to oral health are chronically underexamined. This article examines one important aspect of this history-tooth pulling-in early twentieth-century Lancashire. By highlighting the dynamics of market supply and demand, it demonstrates how and why the tooth pulling services of non-orthodox practitioners called dental mechanics remained popular despite the increasing monopolization of oral health by dentists. Dentists characterized mechanics as quacks, but working-class Lancastrians sought out these mechanics because they formed a trusted part of their communities. This demonstration of a population's preference for unorthodox over orthodox practitioners provides a much-needed counter-narrative to professionalization in oral health and highlights the significance of geographically specific traditions over the values of medicine and science.

With Wales considered 'the blackest spot on the tuberculosis map' of Britain, the Welsh National Memorial Association (WNMA) was founded in 1910 with the aim to rid Wales of the disease within a generation. Although the Association's vision of a national health service was lauded by contemporaries as providing a model for England, as the WNMA took over the running of tuberculosis services from local authorities, it met with resistance from county and rural district councils. This essay explores this resistance. In placing the views and work of county and rural district councils at the centre of analysis this essay uses Wales and opposition to the WNMA as a case study to rethink the marginalization of county councils and rural district councils in histories of local government, public health, and housing policy in a pivotal period of central-location relations. As this essay shows, the opposition county and rural district councils expressed to the WNMA was not a straightforward rejection of centralization by authorities on the margins of 'the modern'. Rather, they put forward a competing vision of health and social welfare that championed local autonomy and a strategy of prevention focused on the material and domestic environment and housing reform. As the essay shows, opponents of the WNMA were not backwoodsmen. They were part of a wider national and progressive social reform movement.

This article argues that elocution, speech training, and speech therapy-three professions concerned with the voice-were intimately bound up with a shifting politics of class in early- and mid-twentieth-century Britain. The last two, in particular, attempted to stake new claims in the changed landscape of the post-1945 welfare state. Proponents of speech training distinguished themselves from elocutionists and saw their role to improve children's speech, but they performatively disavowed class as an organizing category within it. This was paralleled by speech therapy, which emerged as a formal profession in Britain in 1945 through the unification of two separate (and often rival) halves of the profession under a single regulatory college, and which found itself having to justify where its pathologizing of vocal production ended and elocution's focus on the aesthetics of accent began. I argue that these disavowals provide a useful framework through which to read class dynamics and consider the performative dimensions of class identities at this time. Mobilising select writers and speech experts-who straddled the boundaries of elocution, speech training, and speech therapy-this article shows how a variety of different categories, from gender to geography, were employed as proxies to allow for the problematization of dialect but not accent and to efface 'class'.