Modern British history最新文献

This article examines the brief flowering of spaces for children in British museums in the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that managing museum space for both adults and children became an important issue for curators, merging with and to an extent replacing nineteenth-century concerns with managing space to accommodate different class groups. It investigates the children's galleries, 'corners' and museums which emerged between 1900 and 1950, comparing them with fuller provision in the USA. In the UK, children's museum spaces were constrained by a lack of space, expertise and money, and a concern not to make the museum childish; and by an association of children's provisions with slum areas and women experts. Curators were unsure how far to adopt a child-focused approach, or for which age groups they should provide. For a few commentators, children's presence was seen as incompatible with adult use of museums, to the point where they should be totally barred. Thus, children's spaces were partly a way of separating children and adults in museums, and reinforced a sense of difference between adult and child visitors. Most children's spaces disappeared after the Second World War, as slums and unaccompanied child visitors declined, and a focus on more 'professional' curating emerged. Fewer children seem to have visited, a trend accelerated by the wider context of familial and leisure change. The development of more engaging displays for all, not just children, served to narrow the apparent intellectual gulf between adult and child.

This article analyses anxieties surrounding glue-sniffing in 1980s Britain and their entanglement with the era's accelerated deindustrialization. A vibrant 'New Drug History' has overlooked glue-sniffing, despite its prevalence and prominent media coverage during the 1980s, which placed it at the vanguard of a renewed concern about drugs. Concurrently, scholarship on deindustrialization has largely neglected related anxieties surrounding drug use. This article addresses these lacunae by arguing that glue-sniffing offers a potent lens through which to examine the emotional dimensions of accelerated industrial decline during the early 1980s. Drawing upon popular media, expert discourse, and subcultural artefacts, it contends that the figure of the glue-sniffer became emblematic of broader societal fears regarding diminished opportunities for youth amidst unprecedented unemployment. This perceived crisis of youth futurity saw glue-sniffing become entwined with concerns surrounding not only joblessness, but also dereliction, juvenile crime, and youth subcultures. As such, this article helps take the notion of foreclosed futurity beyond the realm of theory through historicizing it as an everyday structure of feeling intensified by Thatcherite political decision-making.

This article reinterprets contemporary forms of economization in UK government by recovering their emergence in the early nationalized transport industry. I show that two prominent practices of present-day governing-the rule of efficiency in allocative decision-making, and the monetization of non-marketed goods by way of consumer observation-were first developed in the UK between 1948-1959 by a public research institution called the Road Research Laboratory. The Laboratory sought to design an appropriate basis on which to make decisions about the post-war development of motorways 'on behalf of the public', within the broader frame of a planned economy. Through a landmark appraisal of the M1 investment, it reached the proposition that government should generally select the transport projects with the greatest 'social return on capital', a figure which included the monetized value of saved lives and leisure time. Reconstructing the Laboratory's arrival at this destination, I argue for seeing it as the product of social democratic aspirations for statecraft. I conclude that British public officials developed a 'social democratic governmentality' in the mid-twentieth century, challenging arguments that such a phenomenon was either marginal or non-existent. Economization was integral to it, however, of the kind that historians have commonly characterized as neoliberal.

This article examines the South African intellectual Nontando Jabavu's broadcasting career at the BBC and how she established herself as an authoritative and accessible voice on race relations, African affairs, and culture as a roving freelance broadcaster for the Corporation. Jabavu came from a renowned family with deep roots in education and journalism, and with extensive connections with the rapidly eroding world of Cape liberalism in the Union of South Africa. This article argues that Jabavu's BBC programmes marked her as a burgeoning Black intellectual thinker and a consummate transnational mediator of African affairs and diasporic cultural practice for the Corporation in the post-war years. It shows how she played a leading role in challenging prevailing perceptions about race and empire, with her broadcasts not only anticipating but contributing to broader shifts in British attitudes about racial inequality and imperial legacies. By foregrounding a voice situated within elite cultural institutions while persistently challenging the racial and imperial foundations that governed them, this article advances a broader reframing of Black British intellectual history and contributes to emerging scholarship that re-evaluates the BBC's entanglements with empire and the role of colonial African intellectuals and broadcasters in shaping post-war British culture.

In the 1950s, Southall became home to a Punjabi Sikh community, largely due to Sikh men arriving for work in local factories. Their migration from Punjab followed the Partition of India and Pakistan. In Southall, these men faced significant hostility, often framed in exclusionary and racialized terms tied to the Second World War, to define who belonged in post-war Britain. A local mythology developed around the first employer to hire Punjabi men in the area: Woolfe's Rubber Factory. This article argues that Sikh male identity in Southall drew on their military service to link their imperial past to their British present. Imperial connections and identities travelled from India to gain new meaning as expressions of political belonging in Britain.

In the 1920s and 1930s, British mass-manufacturers opened their factories to hundreds of thousands of ordinary consumers. As the market for branded household commodities became increasingly competitive, visitors were offered a day out of mechanical wonderment and informative entertainment in hopeful exchange for loyalty at the grocers. Such tours were also a significant riposte to the radical consumerist movement and popular discomfort at the rise of monopoly combines. Organized factory tours worked hard to present capitalist mass production as a form of social-democratic progress, positioning mass production and mass consumption as the twin engines of a more equitable, abundant, and democratic society. This essay provides the first systematic critical engagement with inter-war mass factory tourism and explores four of the most popular destinations: Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight; Cadbury at Bournville; Rowntree at York; and Fry at Somerdale. It unpicks the contradictions within the attempt to turn monotonous factory work into a source of spectacular pleasure and examines the common techniques used to construct hegemonic visitor experiences.

This article examines British public relations campaigns during decolonization by analysing the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation's (AGC) strategies between the 1940s and 1960s. As West Africa's largest gold mining firm, AGC hired leading British Public Relations (PR) firms to counter labour militancy, nationalist challenges, and threats of nationalization. Using business documents, personal correspondence, and campaign materials-particularly the 1962 'In Ghana-With Ghana' newspaper campaign-I demonstrate how PR consultants gathered intelligence, coached executives in engaging Ghanaian officials and workers, and promoted private enterprise. These efforts presented AGC as a champion of independence and multiracial partnership while characterizing capitalism as a humanitarian force. This study reveals how decolonization shaped British PR while PR consultants helped corporations maintain power without the empire.

Income tax cuts of the 1979 Budget have been commonly considered as a starting point of the supply-side tax cuts that were the centrepiece of the Thatcher government's economic policy. Recent studies reveal how the policy was formed inside the Conservative Party in opposition. However, the budget-making process after the party came to power, which has been disregarded, demonstrates that these income tax cuts were far more complex. Conservatives' traditional incentive arguments were intensified by Labour's tax increases in 1974, and the Conservative Party in opposition stressed the importance of tax cuts for a free society. However, from 1977, Labour's Denis Healey cut income tax for lower-income earners, mostly influenced by the temporary economic recovery and the pressure from poverty lobbies and the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The income tax cuts package of the 1979 Budget not only included the Conservatives' package but also had to incorporate income tax cuts by Healey, and Geoffrey Howe significantly modified the scale of increases in personal allowances for a 'better balance' during the 1-month budget-making process. Income tax cuts under the first Thatcher government were a much more fluid policy than widely believed and were formed by various economic and political factors. This article examines how the different tax packages interplayed in forming income tax cuts during 1979-1980 and provides a different perspective on the Thatcherite tax policy.

Histories of mass incarceration in Britain are normally structured around a moment of rupture in the early 1990s, when penal populism took off and prison numbers started to climb. But for Britain's black and Irish communities, expansive incarceration had been the norm since at least the 1970s. What then connects these two phenomena? How was the longer history of targeted incarceration related to this broader penal turn? Generations of activists answered this question by arguing that the state first trialled techniques of coercion on marginalized groups, before rolling them out to everyone else. But this simple, sequential logic cannot do justice to the messy web of connections between these two historical processes. Rather than trial-then-roll-out, hyper-incarceration and mass-incarceration appear as separate projects that intersect in various ways during the 1990s: in the imagery used to justify the penal turn, in the continued targeting of Britain's West Indian communities, and in the slow brutalization of the British state. The penal turn was not the inevitable sequel to earlier experiments. What this history instead reveals is the variegated and often contradictory ways that different projects of racialization and incarceration intersect at different historical moments.

In January 1984, seven British and one US national were jailed in the 'independent' Bantustan of Bophuthatswana for their roles in a complex fraud at a Sun City casino. This article demonstrates how the Bophuthatswana 'government' tried to use the detainees as pawns in their efforts to gain recognition of the territory's independence, and the difficulties this created for British policymakers. While the Bophuthatswana authorities initially allowed British and US officials to visit the detainees, they soon became obstructive and demanded that permission be sought from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As neither the UK nor the USA recognized Bophuthatswana's independence, such formal contact was ruled out. However, as this article will demonstrate, a well-orchestrated campaign by the families of the detainees put pressure on the British government, which ultimately made concessions to Bophuthatswana regarding the visa process its ministers had to undertake prior to visiting the UK to allow contact with the prisoners. This article will also demonstrate the degree of sympathy that certain sections of the British elite had for Bophuthatswana's quest for international recognition. Indeed, the deal regarding the visa restrictions and access to the detainees was arranged through Sir Peter Emery, a Conservative member of the British parliament and chairperson of Shenley Trust, a firm hired by the Bophuthatswana government to facilitate its gold sales.