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Ilford's rapid population growth during the 1890s and 1900s fuelled demand for the establishment of a local emergency hospital and, in order to finance this development, residents held an annual carnival every July from 1905 to 1914. The carnival was a huge success, eventually attracting estimated crowds of around 250,000 people. This article uses the Ilford Carnival to examine the relationship between leisure and suburbanization. It analyses the carnival as a spectacle, considering the event's combination of tradition and modernity, the role of commerce and technology in the production and reproduction of its imagery, and the geographies of cultural dissemination involved. The article then evaluates the carnival as a festival, examining how it both contributed to local identity formation and inverted suburban values, as well as how it helped bring meaning to suburban time and related to changes in the temporal organization of work and leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Uganda–Tanzania War of 1978–1979 has received little attention from historians. This article uses British diplomatic sources to explore the causes and course of the conflict. In particular, it examines how Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere sought to hide from and later justify to the rest of the world an invasion of Uganda and the overthrowing of Idi Amin, actions that contravened the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Distinct among contemporaneous African conflicts for its noticeable lack of a Cold War context, the war demonstrated the shortcomings of the OAU in resolving African conflicts. Despite some dissenting voices, Nyerere's own disregard for state sovereignty was largely overlooked, as the fall of Amin's regime was quietly welcomed by the majority of Africa's leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the reporting of racecourse crime, exploring the shifting cultural contexts in which the press constructed outbreaks of metropolitan gang-related crime. The first part of the article looks at the extended coverage of what became known as the ‘racecourse wars’, concentrating on three key themes which permeate the accounts of racecourse crime between 1920 and 1925: the organisation of crime, the use of firearms and the mobility of criminals. The coverage of these events, which can be traced across a number of different newspapers, was often described in ways that reflected concerns about the organisation and professionalisation of crime. After 1925, despite continuing outbreaks of violence and racecourse-related crime, the press coverage subsided. However, in 1936 the racing men once again became ‘folk devils’, and the final part of the article explores the re-emergence of press reportage by considering the responses to the Lewes Racecourse Affray in June 1936. In this latter period, the rising influence of the American gangster film (as well as coverage of events in American cities such as New York and Chicago) meant that a newer language of gangsterdom would become increasingly embedded in British cultural forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

George Orwell's initial response to wartime internment is characterised by his silence. Uncertainty, desire for government work, wartime necessity, political prejudice and faith in English reasonableness contributed to his toleration of the policy, in the specific context of total war. Orwell worried that criticising internment could undermine public trust in civil liberties, which performatively protected England from the excesses of totalitarianism. Unlike others on the Left, he therefore placed his faith not in the vigilance of parliament, but in an illusion embraced by the English people: that they remained guardians of civil liberties, despite a need in wartime to curtail them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Leonard and Virginia Woolf's early interactions with the Women's Co-operative Guild and supplies a contextualised analysis of Virginia Woolf's preface to Life as We Have Known It (1931). Written to introduce a volume of autobiographical sketches by Co-operative Guildswomen and published in a variant form in the Yale Review, this essay has generated conflicting debate in Woolf studies. In this article I argue that the essay fictionalises Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Guild, concealing her familiarity with Guild activities to better engage an anticipated middle-class readership and promote frank interrogation of class prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the British and Americans expended blood and treasure together in the Kuwaiti desert in 1991, bureaucratic blood from both sides was also visible on carpets in London and Washington. The reason was attempts to replace the access to Heathrow airport of two failing airlines, Pan American World Airways and Trans World Airlines, with American and United Airlines. This succession rights affair was one of the most difficult diplomatic negotiations ever on civil aviation between the United States and Britain. How and why that controversy developed, its resolution, and what impact on, and feedback from, the broader Anglo–American relationship that it had are the main concerns of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun, with a particular focus on the relationship between her surrealist work and interest occultism in Great Britain and Ireland during the mid 20th century. An overview of the role that automatism played in Colquhoun's work is provided. The relationship between her interest and Celtic civilization and her occultism is discussed.

Following the entry of the USSR into the Second World War in June 1941, images of Soviet women proliferated in Britain. Official propaganda, parliamentary debate, and popular culture positioned self-sacrificing Soviet woman as models for British women’s behaviour in wartime: their wartime citizenship. The example of the Soviet woman also offered an opportunity for British to claim the full range rights of rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These ranged from arguments for better provision of childcare to, most controversially, the right to bear arms in the event of German invasion. These public protests came to nothing. Under pressure from the post-war repudiation of the gains women made during the war, the viability of pro-Soviet rhetoric was then fatally undermined by the advent of the Cold War. Nonetheless, women’s public and private admiration for their Soviet contemporaries aided the project of refashioning citizenship’s boundaries across the public and private spheres. Evidence from these contests also points to new ways of approaching questions about British political culture from the 1930s through to the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The vernacularization of voice-recording technology over the course of the past century means that we have largely forgotten what a strange and quasi-magical thing it is to preserve someone’s voice. This article, first delivered as the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, traces the development of voice-recording technologies in the twentieth century from gramophone records to miniaturized mobile devices. It argues that the recording of the voice led to a renewed awareness of the voice as a trained instrument, as a marker of individual identity, and as a way of immortalizing speech and preserving an auditory remnant of people after their deaths. Recording technologies extended the range of voices that could be heard by taking the BBC and other voice capturers beyond the London-based live studios and what Lord Reith referred to as the anonymous ‘collective personality’ of the radio announcers; and it made people listen intently to voices as both expressions of the self and as vehicles for communicating with others. The voice recording technologies of the past century were essentially democratizing, allowing the ‘voice of the people’ to be heard in authentic everyday settings, albeit in fragmentary and imperfect ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the British attitude towards the interdominion conflict in Kashmir, India that involved the outbreak of India and Pakistan's limited hostilities from October 27, 1947 to January 5, 1949. Topics discussed include the strategic foundations of Great Britain concerning decolonisation and the Cold War, outbreak of the Kashmir conflict, and the decision-making on the issuance of a stand down order to the military personnel of Great Britain who were involved in Kashmir.

Women in Second World War Britain benefitted from measures to improve maternal and child health. Infant and maternal mortality rates continued to fall, new drugs became available, and efforts were made to improve the health of mothers and babies through the provision of subsidised milk and other foodstuffs. However, in return, women were also expected to contribute to the war effort through motherhood, and this reflected wider cultural ideas in the North Atlantic world in the first half of the twentieth century which equated maternity with military service. The aim of this article is to examine the interplay between narratives of birth and narratives of war in the accounts of maternity from women of the wartime generation. It will explore how the military-maternity analogy sheds light on women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in Britain during the Second World War, whilst also considering maternity within women’s wider role as ‘domestic soldiers’, contributing to the war effort through their traditional work as housewives and mothers. In doing so, the article reveals the complexity of women’s narratives. It demonstrates that they do not simply conform to the ‘medical vs. social’ binary, but reflect the wider cultural context in which women gave birth. Women incorporated the dominant discourses of the period, namely those around war, into their accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influenced by developments in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the British Communist Party (CP) began to treat its rivals on the far left, principally the Trotskyists, as class rather than political enemies. Surveillance, including the maintenance of dossiers, began in 1932, but was greatly heightened in the late 1930s, as international tensions, notably the Nazi threat to the Soviet Union, increased. Less attention was paid to the Trotskyists in the later years of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period, but was intensified during the Party crisis which followed the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party. Later, the CP was faced with additional rivals, the Maoists, to monitor. Surveillance came to an end in the 1970s as sectarian attitudes abated and the CP entered its terminal decline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The beginnings of British Empire sports in 1911 were soon followed by the increased recognition of female athletes at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games with the swimming gold medal won by the British 4 × 100 metres freestyle relay team (Isabella Moore of Scotland, Irene Steer of Wales, Annie Spiers and Jennie Fletcher of England). The first British Empire Games were held in Hamilton, Ontario Province in Canada from 16 to 23 August 1930 and were a relatively small affair, soon followed by the much larger 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Despite the relative difference in size, female athletes represented England, Wales and Scotland and the Republic of Ireland at British Empire, then Empire and Commonwealth Games, in a distinct articulation of the sporting self, community and nation. The article concludes with the British Empire and Commonwealth Games held in Kingston, Jamaica from 4 to 13 August 1966 because this was the first time that the games had been held outside the so-called White Dominions. During the period of analysis, an Empire or Commonwealth gold medal was presented inWorld Sports, the official magazine of the British Olympic Association, as a ‘championship’ title and this nuances our understanding of Olympic titles relative to Empire and Commonwealth victories in the popular imagination. The discussion traces the gradual evolution of the female schedule in the British Empire Games and argues that it was important to the careers and public recognition of women such as Scottish swimmer Helen Orr (Eleanor) Gordon and England's Mary Glen Haig, the fencer who became the third woman to sit on the International Olympic Committee in 1983 and who should, maybe, have won a gold Olympic medal but never did. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Defining city-region boundaries for governance or policy requires robust data analysis reflecting a conceptualisation of city-regions. Geddes introduced the concept to England and both fundamental and contingent features he identified remain valid. Subsequent work has not clarified issues raised by the contingent features and one of these—whether or not cities dominate the region definitions—here structures the review of city-region definition methods. Following a historical review of the failure of proposals for English city-region governance geography—which ascribes a key role in those failures to institutional inertia fuelled by rural interests—a review of the ‘city-centric’ methods which exacerbate rural opposition shows they fail to meet essential requirements. By contrast a ‘regions first’ approach to city-region definition is shown capable of implementing all the fundamental features of the concept, including the analysis of flows over and above those of commuting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the Polish-Czechoslovak confederation project of 1939-1943, which was seen by its proponents in wartime London as the core of a potential Central European Federation. The author devotes special attention to British policy, as it helps not only to understand how the project fitted into British and Allied post-war planning, but also to reveal the various alternatives that were being considered for postwar settlement in East Central Europe. The main reason for the confederation project's failure was the well-known Soviet veto. However, there were other factors that made the USSR's policy so decisive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1961, at the height of the Berlin crisis, the United States and Great Britain simultaneously struggled to adopt effective policies toward the first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade. While the John F. Kennedy administration initially adopted a policy of standoffishness toward the conference, the government of Harold Macmillan engaged in a campaign of quietly encouraging moderate attendance. Moderate British expectations led to sound policy, whereas the Kennedy administration's inability to develop a coherent outlook and response cost it a priceless opportunity to understand the emerging phenomenon of nonalignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the role of the John Hilton Bureau newspaper advice service, which ran under the auspices of the News of the World between 1942 and the late 1960s. The Bureau merits attention from historians on account of the light it can shed on how ordinary Britons accessed the law, legal and other types of advice before and after the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949. It also provides insight into how relationships between the state and individual differed between the highly regulated wartime state and the supposedly affluent, consumerist welfare state that followed it. The article also argues that the John Hilton Bureau evolved from a service defined by the reputation of the eponymous Hilton, a Cambridge professor and radio personality, to one that saw itself as a crusading organisation standing up for the ‘little man’ against a bureaucratic welfare state and unscrupulous traders. Finally, the Bureau is a reminder that the post-war welfare state was not simply divided between the public and voluntary sectors, but also included an array of private sector interests. The Bureau’s position outside of the public and voluntary sectors enabled it to be a critical and challenging voice, untainted by a sense of charity, but its location within a profit-making organisation also made it vulnerable in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the turn toward the small companion animal that occurred in British veterinary medicine in the twentieth century. The change in species emphasis is usually attributed to post-war socioeconomic factors, however this explanation ignores the extensive small animal treatment that was occurring outwith the veterinary profession in the interwar period. The success of this unqualified practice caused the veterinary profession to rethink attitudes to small animals (dogs initially, later cats) upon the decline of horse practice. This paper argues that a shift toward seeing the small animal as a legitimate veterinary patient was necessary before the specialty could become mainstream in the post-war years, and that this occurred between the wars as a result of the activities of British animal welfare charities, especially the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public fears of widespread venereal disease led in 1913 to the appointment of The Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (RCVD). In 1916 its Final Report offered only a single cautious and somewhat imprecise summary statement about the likely prevalence of venereal diseases in England and Wales. Although the significance of contemporary attitudes to venereal disease has attracted a good deal of historiographic attention, no historian or demographer has since investigated this aspect of the Royal Commission's work. This article critically re-examines the most important quantitative evidence presented to the Royal Commission relating to the years immediately prior to the First World War. It utilises this evidence to produce new estimates of the probable prevalence of syphilis among adult males, both nationally and among certain geographical divisions and social groups in the national population; and also to offer a comment on the likely prevalence of gonorrhoea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In late August 1968, following a British proposal, Nigeria announced that it would allow an international observer team into the country to show that it was not pursuing a campaign of genocide in Biafra. This article analyses why the United Kingdom pushed for the creation of the observer team, and shows how the team's work was incorporated into the British government's justifications for its support of the Nigerian government. The experience of the observer team illustrates the difficulties of providing an ‘objective’ view regarding whether or not genocide is taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Karl Heinz Bohrer’s Ein bißchen Lust am Untergang: englische Ansichten is a collection of essays on England originally published in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and in the monthly Merkur between 1968 and 1981. This article explores these and subsequent essays by Bohrer. At the heart of Ein bißchen Lust am Untergang is the concept of decadence as a positive – or at least ambivalent – concept: it is ‘the highly stylized capacity for enjoyment after so much imperial exertion’. Marx described England as the ‘demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’, and for Bohrer even in decline the country remains the avant-garde of the Western world, in contrast to hard-working, but un-decadent Germany. The Falklands War (1982) marked the end of this specifically English form of ‘enjoyment in decline’. More recent reflections on British, German and European politics reveal tensions and inconsistencies in Bohrer’s characterization of decadence. In reconstructing Bohrer’s work a number of concepts alongside decadence are discussed: the agonal; political aesthetics; closed form; and nostalgic modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides the first in-depth account of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–10). In a period of intensifying labour unrest, young female servants working in private homes attempted to organize their own trade unions. Short-lived and disrupted by the First World War, their efforts left little formal documentation and have never before been the subject of historical study. Their activities can, however, be traced in the pages of women’s movement periodicals and the correspondence columns of local and radical newspapers. The idea of organizing domestic servants as workers was an anathema to many in both the labour and the women’s movements. Nevertheless, the Domestic Workers’ Union provides a fascinating case study of how, in this moment of exceptional social unrest, elements of trade unionism and feminism converged to challenge entrenched gendered divisions between the public and the private, the workplace and the home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Race Relations Act of 1965 has been remembered by historians as one prong of a governmental strategy to deal with the impact of black and Asian post-war immigration to Britain, an attempt to improve inter-group relations at the same time as efforts were being made to restrict Commonwealth immigration. This iconic Act was the first to criminalize racial discrimination and outlaw the incitement of racial hatred. This article focuses on the creation and use of one part of this new law, Section Six, the incitement clause. It argues that early patterns of prosecution under this legislation reveal a government agenda which was not solely focused on the protection of black and Asian Britons but instead on longer-running issues relating to the tolerance of political violence. Far from simply outlawing racism, this article argues that the incitement clause ultimately enabled a re-articulation of racial discourse, tweaking the linguistic parameters of racist agitation while consciously allowing for its continuation. In doing so, it reflected a nation which was still unsure about the merits of multiculturalism, where it remained largely acceptable to argue that black and Asian Britons did not belong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the British government expanded its social programs, and private charities and co-operative associations began to offer more benefits, birth certificates became essential to the bureaucratic process of establishing both age and identity. But every time a birth certificate was produced, it made the private circumstances of an individual’s birth public knowledge. For those born out of wedlock, handing over these certificates was often stigmatizing at a time when illegitimacy remained for many a shameful family secret. When the government finally introduced an abbreviated birth certificate in 1947, which documented name, sex, and birth date without reference to parentage, they were responding to long-standing concerns both within and beyond the state bureaucracy about the tension inherent in keeping public records about people’s private lives. The emergence of the short form birth certificate is thus part of a much larger human story that can help us to map significant shifts in the relationship between the individual citizen and the modern state in the information age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Twopenny libraries first appeared in North London in 1930 and quickly spread throughout urban Britain. Their innovation was to dispense with subscription fees and charge per loan. Unlike older commercial libraries such as Mudie’s, twopenny libraries served a working-class clientele. Some twopenny libraries were standalone businesses. Many more were sidelines to existing businesses such as tobacconists’ and newsagents’ shops. Library services could be profitable in their own right, but often their main value to their proprietors was to bring customers into the shop more regularly. Established players in the book trade initially responded to twopenny libraries with alarm, but the threat they posed was limited. Their market was not the same as those of booksellers. Some public librarians made arguments along these lines about the twopenny libraries’ impact on public libraries; certainly, the two types of institution coexisted. Twopenny libraries carried a lot of so-called light fiction, but they also lent working-class readers the ‘middlebrow’ bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s. The wider significance of the twopenny library lies in the way it problematizes the distinction commonly made between a middle-class public for new hardcover novels and a working-class readership of fiction that appeared in cheap papers and magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Britain's attempt to distance itself from Israel as London sought to conciliate the Arab world in the aftermath of the Six-Day War has entered the historiography of Anglo-Israeli relations. A neglected aspect of the development of British policy towards Israel has been the intense debates among British decision-makers regarding the supply of tanks to Israel following the 1967 conflict. British reluctance to export the powerful Chieftain tank to Israel stemmed not only from an unwillingness to fuel an arms race in the Middle East, but also from a determination to protect ongoing and extensive British economic interests in the Arab world, especially oil supplies. In keeping with efforts to dissociate itself from Israel, Britain also sought to downplay, and even conceal from the Arab world, ongoing sales of the less sophisticated Centurion tank to Israel. In many ways, British policy towards Israel culminated in the decision during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to maintain an arms embargo to the region which, while not extending to all Arab countries, hit Israel especially hard as it desperately sought ammunition and spares for its Centurion tanks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Margarine was invented in the 1870s as a cheap alternative to butter. This article examines the ways that consumers felt about the product during the period from the end of the First World War to the end of rationing following the Second World War. It argues that margarine continued to suffer from an association with poverty which was closely linked to feelings about social status and public versus private spheres. However, there was a range of other factors keeping margarine in its second-rate niche, from taste (or perceptions thereof), associations with privation, and an entrenched attachment to a ‘butter mystique’ with which margarine could not compete. Through this discussion, margarine is shown to be an important but overlooked symbol of domestic material culture and a visible marker of a family's social and economic status. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how British immigration control policy was carried out during the nineteen-seventies to filter immigration, while addressing the perceived problem of 'non-white' colonial migration. Recently released government documents suggest that the immigration control system should be viewed as a series of inter-connected institutions and actors that operated under the influence of a number of different, and often contradictory, factors. The result of these competing factors was an immigration control system that, relying on the paradoxical whims of the government and other sections of civil society, was restrictive and suspicious towards potential migrants, but at the same time constrained in its behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, the wool textile industry faced a significant labour shortage as its traditional workers escaped the poor wages and conditions of wool mills for better-paying, cleaner jobs. Three broad solutions to this crisis were adopted: the employment of immigrants, mainly from the Indian Subcontinent and Eastern Europe, the re-formatting and promotion of apprenticeships and the recruitment work undertaken by the Wool Industry Training Board. Of these solutions, employing immigrants was by far the most successful in bringing workers into the industry, while the latter two were resounding failures. In prioritising the recruitment of young, white, British men, the industry, trade unions and government missed a key opportunity to train immigrants and women to take the places of the skilled workers they so desperately sought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a small number of the so-called ‘counterfactual’ or ‘what-if’ historical books, which ask us to imagine what would have happened if events in the past had turned out differently than they did, have been published. They have stimulated an important, albeit not entirely new, methodological debate about issues and questions which are (or should be) of central relevance to the work of labor historians, and which such labor historians need to engage with and contribute towards. This brief discussion article attempts to do this by presenting one particular Marxist viewpoint, with the hope and expectation that others (hopefully supportive but possibly critical of the argument presented here) will follow. In the process, it examines the past use (and abuse) of the counterfactual within historical analysis, presents an argument for the validity of a refined and renamed ‘alterfactual’ approach and examines the use of such an alterfactual approach to the British miners' strike of 1984–1985. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses early charges of racism, made against the original UK Reclaim the Night (RTN) marches in the 1970s. These charges appear to have stuck, and been accepted almost as a truism ever since, being maintained in several academic texts. Using archive materials, and recent, empirical qualitative research with founding RTN activists and participants, I shall investigate the emergence of RTN in the UK in 1977 and the practicalities and influences behind this type of protest. I will also consider possible reasons behind the charges of racism, addressing justifiable critiques and concerns. I will conclude that the specific charges made against the first RTN marches were inaccurate. However, I will also explore possible reasons why concerns about racism surrounded these marches at their formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have regularly acknowledged the significance of religious faith to the eugenics movement in Britain and the USA. However, much of this scholarship suggests a polarised relationship of either conflict or consensus. Where Christian believers participated in the eugenics movement this has been represented as an abandonment of ‘orthodox’ theology, and the impression has been created that eugenics was a secularising force. In contrast, this article explores the impact of religious values on two eugenics organisations: the British Eugenics Education Society, and the American Eugenics Society. It is demonstrated that concerns over religion resulted in both these organisations modifying and tempering the public work that they undertook. This act of concealing and minimising the visibly controversial aspects of eugenics is offered as an addition to the debate over ‘mainline’ versus ‘reform’ eugenics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The British farming community is rapidly diminishing due to its ageing workforce, the rise of second-home ownership, and the costs involved in running a farming business in the twenty-first century. The private nature of this community, often coupled with a deeply held mistrust of non-farmers has made it difficult to ascertain farmers' own feelings on their current situation, and how things have reached such a position. This article explores how some of the major twentieth-century events for agriculture have affected a single Yorkshire farming community by tracing the deteriorating relationship between farmers and the government, through changing legislation and reactions to crises, from a point where farmers were held to be vital to Britain's survival through to one where the agricultural community finds it plausible that their own government would actively try to destroy their livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses an aspect of British policy in the Trucial States that has received scant scholarly attention. It examines British attempts to promote economic and social development in the Trucial States, and places this policy within the context of British attitudes towards the economic development of the colonial empire. During the 1950s Britain's interest in the Arabian Peninsula expanded, in notable contrast with the rest of the Middle East. One aspect of this expanded role was British efforts to improve the economic and social conditions prior to the discovery of oil in Abu Dhabi in 1958. British officials on the ground were concerned to improve the lot of the population of these impoverished shaikhdoms for a combination of political and strategic and ethical reasons. This article shows that attempts to introduce a modicum of economic and social development in the Trucial States were hindered by the Treasury's refusal to provide adequate funds, and because of inherent problems in finding suitable development projects. Nonetheless, the plans put in place during the 1950s did provide the foundations for subsequent development programmes, which, in turn, drastically expanded as a result of oil wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how the Second World War brought a new breadth to Afghanistani politics despite the fact that the country did not participate in the war. It widened the power struggle between members of the royal family and introduced new players to the scene who, by fighting for their own interests, shaped the course of events. The paper looks at the main political issues which caused division within the ruling class, mobilized the educated classes, and shaped Afghanistani politics. It also examines those players who brought about the new political developments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mandate system was created as part of the overall machinery of the League of Nations in an attempt to 'promote world peace' in the aftermath of the First World War. The 'A' mandates, with which this article is concerned, were the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire that had been occupied and conquered by France and Britain by the end of the war. Was the mandate system in any sense an improvement on colonialism? To the extent that the period of foreign rule was rather short in comparison with other colonial regimes, one can perhaps say that it was. On the other hand, however high-minded its stated aims, the mandate system was a product of the imperial framework of its day, in which the white races were regarded as superior to the brown or black races. The supervisory instruments of the League (specifically the Permanent Mandates' Commission) were inadequate to deal with any shortcomings on the part of the mandatory, and there are a number of examples of situations where, for example, the legitimate interests of minorities were ignored to suit the wider interests of the powers. In general, the mandated states lacked institutional underpinning, and their immediate legacy was a string of weak states throughout the Arab world, where many of the institutions of civil society were destroyed in the course of military coups in the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British Empire's response to the Armenian genocide during the early 20th century. It examines the British government's desire to demonstrate that its imperial responsibilities included the enforcement of human rights, the nationalism among Muslims in Ottoman Turkey that British efforts fostered, and the convergence of human rights and geopolitics. The article also discusses the history of British defense of human rights in the Ottoman Empire.

This article is based on recently declassified Sigint reports on Eastern Europe produced by GCHQ and covering the years 1945 to 1950. This material allows historians to fill in an important gap in the current historiography, namely the virtual absence of Sigint in the discussion of post-war British policy. The significance of this material is not so much the actual content – much of it does not come as a great surprise to historians – but rather the extent to which it enabled the British government to almost immediately draw a precise and detailed picture of events behind the iron curtain and how this affected not only British foreign policy, but particularly domestic policy, in the field of counter-subversion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses new evidence to investigate Yugoslav foreign policy through the prism of inter-party relations rather than traditional high diplomacy. It shows the Yugoslav Communists hoped comradeship with Britain's Labour Party would influence Western policies to counter the Soviet threat. Initial successes, especially a deterrent statement by the British Cabinet in February 1951, inspired great optimism. The Labour left was also delighted that Communism could be reformed and Cold War tensions lessened. However, ideological differences crystallised over the Djilas affair and Yugoslavia's choice for Non-Alignment. Only mutual opposition to the USSR during the crises of 1956 ensured their continuing friendship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the end of the Great War to the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain and British India clashed over the Indian Army's role in imperial defence. Britain increasingly sought an imperial fighting force that it could deploy across the globe, but the government of India, limited by the growing independence movements, financial constraints, and—particularly—renewed tribal unrest on its North-West Frontier, refused to meet these demands. Attempts to reconcile Britain's and India's conflicting strategies made little headway until the late 1930s when compromise ultimately emerged with the establishment of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India 1938–39. While the Committee refuted India's traditional focus on the subcontinent's own security, importantly it recognized the necessity of British financial support for the Indian Army and the maintenance of a large local fighting force to prevent North-West Frontier unrest from disrupting imperial military planning at a time of global war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the three decades following the end of World War Two – a time when, following the 1944 Education Act, local education authorities (LEAs) were the key agencies responsible for running the education system across England. For the first time, there was a statutory requirement for LEAs to secure adequate facilities for further education (FE), and the post-war era is generally remembered as a period when they dominated FE. Yet this is not the full story of FE in post-war England: it is often forgotten that a significant amount of FE existed outside the municipal framework. This article returns to the post-war decades and begins to uncover the largely forgotten history of FE outside local authority control at that time. It highlights how voluntary and private organisations offered various forms of post-compulsory education outside the municipal framework, and how they contributed to the eclectic and diverse nature of FE across England. This, I argue, not only reflected the expedience, compromise and inertia that characterised FE in post-war England but was rooted in a capture of educational policy more generally by a privileged elite intent on maintaining a social order characterised by social, economic and cultural divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The article presents the author's insights on the legacy of British labour historian Eric Hobsbawm. Topics discussed include the works of Hobsbawm like the book "Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour," his reaction to the feminists in the 1960s generation, and the focus of his research in the labour history of Great Britain.

This article reconsiders the negotiations between the United States and Britain at the outbreak of the 1982 Falklands War. The Reagan Administration did not support Britain, its staunchest NATO ally, and on the contrary assumed an even-handed position that recognised Argentina as a key ally as much as Britain. Not only did American mediation fail; it also caused a major crisis in Anglo-American relations. The underlying reason for the American decision was the obsessive importance that the Administration attached to fighting communism in Latin America after establishing covert co-operation with the Argentinian military junta in 1981. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

El artículo discurre sobre el Mandato de Gran Breteña relacionado con la formación de un territorio para los judíos en Palestina. El autor comenta sobre el estado social y político de los israelitas durante este época, de 1918 a la creación de Israel en 1948. También se considera la importancia de este territorio en la cultura y las tradiciones judías.

The relationship between China and the British left lends itself to a transnational approach as – in the virtual absence of formal institutional relationships – ephemeral committees and networks of activists carried particular weight. This article will focus on the transnational dimensions of four separate episodes: the ‘Hands off China!’ campaign (1925–1927), the campaign against Japanese aggression (1937–1939), the defence of the newly formed People's Republic of China (c.1949–1960) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It highlights the role of a number of important individuals such as the political maverick Cecil l'Estrange Malone, the writer Hsiao Ch'ien, the artist Jack Chen and the scientist Joseph Needham. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the continuity and changes in Clarke’s ideas about the State and community in education, especially in relation to a rapidly changing political situation in England in the 1930s and 1940s. His ideas evolved in the intellectual context of British idealism. Moreover, in response to the threat to democracy arising from Fascism or Totalitarianism, the distinction between the State and community was a key theme in Clarke’s ideals of liberal democracy. Additionally, this paper also proposes the implications of Clarke’s ideas for future educational development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to show that from the end of the eighteenth century, international order began to be defined in terms of ground rules relating to non-intervention and intervention, with the former being prioritised over the latter. After the Napoleonic wars, within continental Europe there was an attempt to consolidate an intervention ground rule in favour of dynastic legitimacy over the right of self-determination. By contrast, the British and Americans sought to ensure that this ground rule was not extended to the Americas where the ground rule of non-intervention was prioritised. During the nineteenth century, it was the Anglo-American position which came to prevail. Over the same period international order was increasingly bifurcated with the non-intervention ground rule prevailing in the metropolitan core and with the intervention ground rules prevailing in the periphery. This article, however, only focuses on the metropolitan core and draws on two case studies to examine the non-intervention ground rule in very different circumstances. The first examines the British response to the American Civil War in the 1860s during an era of stability in the international order. The second explores the British Response to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s when the international order was very unstable and giving way to a very different international order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Agreement of Supreme Allied Command Atlantic (SACLANT) was an emotive public issue in Britain and became wrapped up in Party politics in a General Election year. In Opposition Winston Churchill used the SACLANT issue to attack the Attlee government, which had accepted the Atlantic Command. Once returned to power Churchill pursued SACLANT to a summit meeting with President Truman and afterwards claimed to have extracted significant concessions. Labour Party MPs dismissed these claims as mere face saving devices. This article investigates these contending claims. Ultimately it argues three things. Firstly, Churchill persecuted the Attlee government with SACLANT more successfully than he convinced the Americans of his views on how naval cooperation in the Atlantic ought to be conducted. Secondly, the concessions on SACLANT that Churchill laid before Parliament in 1952 were inflated in their significance. Finally, Churchill did obtain more important concessions/clarifications than critics allowed, this apparent contradiction being explained by the fact that these were private Anglo-American understandings that could not be publicly disclosed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]