Search

This paper analyses the rise of synthetic nitrogen in Great Britain and its empire, from the First World War to the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than focus solely on technological innovations and consumption statistics, it seeks to explain how nitrogen was a central element in the expansion of a form of agricultural governance, which needed simplified, stable, and seemingly universal input/output formulae. In the first half of the twentieth century, nitrogen was thus gradually constructed as a global indicator of development, as it was particularly adapted to scientific and political regimes increasingly relying upon abstraction and quantification. Yet, the history of nitrogenous fertilizers in the interwar years also shows that this cannot be reduced to a simple story of triumphant modernity, as their development and globalization was imperfect, unstable, accompanied by resistance and the resilience or emergence of other models. Rather than assuming an all-powerful "state" project, the paper thus seeks to recover the multiplicity of actors, and attempts to account for the rise of nitrogenous fertilizers; not just as the progressive application of a technological breakthrough, but as a difficult process embedded in technological, financial, and military constraints, corporate strategies, political imperatives, and the changing institutional framework of agricultural research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centenary commemorations of the First World War have prompted renewed debate as to the ways in which it ought to be remembered in future, not least through teaching and through historical fiction. This article discusses two contemporary collections of short stories and a number of novels published between 1991 and 2014. It reads these modern literary accounts of the First World War against current popular perceptions of and commemorative discourses surrounding the war, including the representation of the war in secondary education and the use of literature in the classroom. In doing so, the article draws in part on a research project that investigated the teaching of the First WorldWar and its literature in English secondary schools between February 2013 and August 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C. P. Snow's identification of ‘two cultures’, as the literary critic F. R. Leavis pointed out in 1962, represents not an insight but a cliché, one that invites the repetition of further clichés about the origins of a divided culture, the need to bridge cultures, the emergence of a third culture, or the reality of one culture. Yet this recurrent feature of ‘two cultures’ talk does not nullify the concept's value as an object of study, if these discussions are treated as revealing points of entry into foreign historical contexts. This article adopts this approach, unearthing the liberal position that Snow developed as a novelist and critic from the 1930s, that he advanced in the form of a disciplinary lament inThe Two Cultures(Snow, C.P. 1959.The two cultures and the scientific revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), and that — to his distress — increasingly came under radical critique from the mid-1960s. Ultimately, the technocratic liberalism that Snow associated with science at mid-century came to be closer to American neo-conservatism by 1980. By tracking the fortunes of the ideological position that structuredThe Two Cultures, rather than lifting that text out of its moment in an attempt to engage its arguments today, this article testifies to the abiding value of contextual analysis at a moment when intellectual historians are increasingly inclined to question and even displace it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in urban development in Britain and colonial towns, the meaning of the imperial message was variable. In the British context imperial meaning was directed to cure perceived local crises while, alternatively, within a colonial setting imperial propaganda came secondary to national priorities. The conclusion is that, in the case of Empire Day, the urban setting is decisive to understanding how imperial propaganda was transformed to meet the needs of local or national environments. Key differences in the way civic culture and the provincial press evolved in Britain and her colonies ensured that Lord Meath’s desire that Empire Day would nurture a unifying and homogenous imperial identity proved an elusive aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Were women agents of their own political emancipation or did politicians preemptively grant rights to them in a bid for electoral success? This article claims that both electoral politics and the ordinary strategies of women’s movements explain the timing of female suffrage. Drawing on archival evidence from the United Kingdom, I show how in an electoral environment where the incumbent Liberals saw disadvantage to reform, an enterprising group of Liberal suffragists formed a pact with the Labour party, trading economic resources for the party’s promise to push for suffrage reform. The Election Fighting Fund, as the pact was called, was key to securing women’s place in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. In raising the possibility that ordinary instead of revolutionary tactics proved key to voting rights reform, women emerge as an interesting new case for the study of democratization. [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]

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]

Could the Western foreign policy makers have done anything to prevent the violence accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia? The answer to that question largely depends on their level of awareness of what was happening in the South Slavic federation in the run-up to war. This article analyzes a string of newly declassified documents of the British Foreign Office related to the February 1991 visit of a high-level British political delegation to Yugoslavia, together with interviews with some of the meetings’ protagonists. These declassified documents and interviews offer a unique snapshot in the development of the Yugoslav crisis and Britain’s policy in the region. They give us a clear picture of the goals and strategies of the principal Yugoslav players and show us what the West knew about the true nature of the Yugoslav crisis and when. The article’s conclusions are clear. Yugoslavia’s breakup and impending violence did not require great foresight. Their cause was known well in advance because it was preannounced—it was the plan of the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević to impose a centralized Yugoslavia upon the other republics or, if that failed, to use force to create a Greater Serbia on Yugoslavia’s ruins. Crucially, British policy at the time did nothing to dissuade Milošević from his plan and likely contributed to his confidence in using violence to pursue the creation of a new and enlarged Serbian state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I consider the value and challenges of using oral history interviews to access and interpret narrative memories of men and women who became active in the left network around Britain’s anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. I focus in-depth on the individual stories of one man and one woman who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined far left Trotskyist organisations. The stories reveal a two-fold search for past revolutionary and current selves. Reading between the shifting layers of past and present, the article will explore what deeper insights interviewing offers into the complex ways in which activists shaped subjectivities both in their far left groups and in the interview itself. It engages with the concept of inter-subjectivity to reflect on the interpersonal relationship between interviewer and interviewee in the oral history encounter. It thus considers the meeting of particular subjectivities and the role they played in shaping the oral history narratives. Through careful attention to my own internal state at the time of interviewing, and to how the interviewees’ stories made me feel, I seek to understand unconsidered political, social and emotional gendered experiences of life on the British far left around 1968. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The early years of the inter-war period in Britain was dominated by a desire to construct a better world by applying the wartime experience of collectivist planning in peacetime. New directions in public policy included plans for co-ordinating inland transport. Sir Eric Geddes played a crucial role in formulating policy, which included the formation of the Ministry of Transport. Parallel to these developments those in the transport industry were moved to create the Institute of Transport to organise and promote the standing of the profession. Lord Ashfield took a decisive role in shaping the new Institute, including the development of a comprehensive scheme of education to support the training and development of those pursuing a career in transport. These two institutions were the twin-pillars of the new era of co-ordination, which was now orthodoxy. Initially the idea of co-ordination was seen as the outright successor of competition but was later realigned into one of an accommodation between co-ordination and competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the interest provoked by hotels during the interwar period in the popular imagination. Ways in which inter-war fascination with the hotel reflects and inflects socioeconomic conditions; Increase in the ease and economy of foreign travel after World War I; Growth of tourism in England; Idea of the hotel as a place where reality and metaphor slide seamlessly into one another.

The article discusses the role that the British state played in urban inner city policy in Great Britain from the 1930s through the early 1980s, commenting on the Marxist perspective on the state's role in urban policy. An overview of urban planning in Great Britain, including British law the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act to prevent urban sprawl and maintain rural ways of life, is provided.