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E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his monumental treatment of class formation inThe Making of the English Working Class(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), E. P. Thompson presented a view of class as a ‘happening’ and attacked the liberal and ‘orthodox’ Marxist views of class as a ‘thing’. This paper argues that Thompson's book was primarily attempting to answer political questions of his own time, and more specifically the question of modern socialism. Exploring the theoretical arguments of class formation that influenced Thompson's oeuvre, the paper will also explore the connections between Thompson and ‘orthodox’ Marxism and challenge those who see Thompson's work as only a counterargument to scholars who treated class merely as an economic structure. For Thompson,The Makingwas not only a historical treatise, but an answer to both ‘Old’ and New Leftists who saw the working class mainly as an economic and cultural phenomenon, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the relationships between space, ethnic identity and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It will do so by comparing the Spitalfields violence of 1906 and the Brixton unrest of 1981. The association of physical metropolitan space with 'difference' in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this 'othering' was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right will be analysed. The paper will then dissect relationships between the police and working class Jewish and Caribbean communities, and how these deteriorating relationships exploded into extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Cold War era, the Connolly Association, an Irish republican socialist political organisation in Britain close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, was seen by British Communists as a potential means of winning recruits amongst Britain's growing post-war Irish community. This view was shared by the Catholic Church, which, amidst the broader ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, placed an increased emphasis on anti-communism in the early post-war years. This article will discuss clerical opposition to the Connolly Association in early Cold War Britain and Ireland, drawing chiefly on diocesan archives and Catholic periodicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits sociological studies of Liverpool between 1956 and 1964 to challenge the prevailing emphasis on affluence in histories of post-war Britain. Vulnerability to poverty continued to shape working-class life, and the sociologists and their respondents drew on class to account for this. However, while the researchers used class as a social description, their respondents suggested that class was a dynamic social relationship within which they operated a degree of agency, albeit mediated by gender and locale. Their agency was not only facilitated by the development of a post-war welfare state, rather than by personal affluence, but also relied on older household economic strategies that highlight continuities with the pre-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural understandings of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault have shifted considerably since the 1960s in the United Kingdom and more widely. This article investigates how changing discourses around sexual abuse, harassment and assault are navigated by British women in later life when they narrate experiences that occurred in their youth in the 1960s and early 1970s. It identifies six sites of youth that are relevant to understanding how women narrate experiences of sexual violence: home; school; local outdoor places; workplaces; heterosexual intimacies; independent travel. These sites are associated with different points on a 'girl to woman' register, tracing a pathway from the immaturity of girlhood, through the liminal state of young womanhood, into maturity. How interviewees positioned themselves on this register reflects how they understood their youthful selves in different sites, and their past experiences of unwanted sexual attentions. While gender inequality is understood to have limited women's education and employment opportunities in youth, it is surprisingly absent from narratives of sexual violence. In attending to this absence, we argue that what is at stake for the women in how they navigate shifting cultural discourses is narrating a version of themselves that is agentic and morally responsible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both education and parenting became increasingly ‘child-centred’, or ‘progressive’, in post-war England. This article contends that the impact of this shift for concepts of childhood, and for children themselves, was equivocal. Progressive methods were physically and emotionally demanding for both teachers and parents, and popularised versions of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis shaped a limiting concept of the child. This article also suggests, in line with recent work by Thomson and Shapira, that changing concepts of childhood map democratic selfhood because the capabilities that children lacked were those that must be possessed by the adult citizen. By exploring how children were defined in relation to adults, and how adults’ needs were increasingly subordinated to those of the child, this article also begins to question how we might usefully use age as a ‘category of historical analysis’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward Thompson'sThe Making of the English Working Class(London: Gollancz, 1963) was a creative work in both substance and methodology. The insistence on recovering the neglected experience of a class through history from below was complemented by a methodological commitment. The latter agenda was elaborated briefly and assertively in the Preface and subsequently practised throughout the richly detailed text. Actors must be understood in context as acting creatively within constraints. Their assessments of shared experience provide a basis for shared consciousness, organisation and collective action. This methodological agenda is critically assessed through an examination of the propositions within the Preface. The analysis is linked to a consideration of the agenda's previous employment in Thompson's essay ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ (InEssays in Labour History, edited by Asa Briggs, and John Saville. London: Macmillan, 1960). Thompson's creativity is itself located within the constraints within which he worked. These were intellectual and political Marxism and a-historical sociology, earlier experiences in the Communist Party and the hopes and frustrations of the New Left. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why, despite the universalist aspiration of the British welfare state, was institutional care for poor older people so frequently condemned as inferior? This article seeks an answer in the period before 1945, when local government reform might potentially have raised quality. It adopts a regional case study approach, arguing that this permits access to relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence obscured in national sources, and that concentration on urban experience has hitherto produced a distorted picture. It finds that in contrast to the expansive municipal medical services targeted at the broader population, in this area the assumptions, administrative structures and material inheritance of the Poor Law impeded change and constrained resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The fate of the Liberal Party in West Yorkshire is seen by some as a microcosm of its inevitable decline nationally, because of its inability to appeal to the newly enfranchised working class with its values too close to the Conservatives. Dutton has contended conversely that West Yorkshire Liberalism demonstrated the varied pattern of the Party's development in different regions, and the way in which its association with the Conservatives significantly affected the latter. Using newly available sources, this article takes up Dutton's argument and extends it to look at the fate of the Liberals who did not work with other parties, and what their persistence implies about the fundamental driving forces of politics in West Yorkshire and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]