Richard Price here offers a sweeping interpretation of modern British history. He challenges the dominant assumption that the nineteenth century marked the beginning of modern Britain. British Society argues on the contrary that nineteenth-century British society was the extension of an earlier era whose main themes first appeared in the late seventeenth century and which continued to shape the social, economic and political history of the country until the end of the nineteenth century. This book casts light on the main themes of economic, political and social history, and offers alternative interpretations on questions and issues that are central to the history of modern Britain. It follows in the great tradition of works such as Briggs's Age of Improvement, and Perkin's Origins of Modern English Society, and will be of enormous interest to all students and scholars of the period.
Age discrimination is a highly topical issue in all industrialised societies, against a background of concerns about shortening working lives and ageing populations in the future. Based upon detailed research, and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this unique study traces the history of the age discrimination debate in Britain and the USA since the 1930s. It critically analyses the concepts of ageism in social relations and age discrimination in employment. Case-studies on generational equity and health care rationing by age are followed by an analysis of the British government's initiatives against age discrimination in employment. The book then traces the history of the debate on health status and old age, addressing the question of whether working capacity has improved sufficiently to justify calls to delay retirement and extend working lives. It concludes with a detailed examination of the origins and subsequent working of the USA's 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act.
What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of natio
The Islamist attacks of 9/11, the Danish cartoon affair and rioting by Muslim youths in France are just some of the events that have caused the 'Muslim question' to become a key issue of public debate in many western democracies. Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship argues that the Muslim case raises important questions about how we understand western secularism and respond to new religious claims in multicultural democracies. The contributors challenge prevailing assumptions about the history and practice of western secularism and recover the pragmatism behind liberal principles in negotiating new conditions. By situating the Muslim experience in relation to western secularism and liberal democratic practice, and through examining a variety of national contexts (including Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, the United States, Australia and India), this book extends thinking about our contemporary condition and considers the broader significance for multicultural liberal d
A challenge to the central theme of the existing histories of twentieth-century Britain, that the British state was a welfare state, this book argues that it was also a warfare state, which supported a powerful armaments industry. This insight implies major revisions to our understanding of twentieth-century British history, from appeasement, to wartime industrial and economic policy, and the place of science and technology in government. David Edgerton also shows how British intellectuals came to think of the state in terms of welfare and decline, and includes a devastating analysis of C. P. Snow's two cultures. This groundbreaking book offers a new, post-welfarist and post-declinist, account of Britain, and an original analysis of the relations of science, technology, industry and the military. It will be essential reading for those working on the history and historiography of twentieth-century Britain, the historical sociology of war and the history of science and technology.
