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Archivists in England formed themselves into a self-conscious profession over about three decades following World War I. Domestic threats to archives during World War II, especially the indiscriminate pulping of paper, provided an important motivation for this development. Furthermore, this wartime peril was straddled by a century-long period of decline among the landed aristocracy that likewise endangered important cultural objects. The legitimacy and legality of these dangers demanded that English archivists employ subtle yet assertive means to defend archives. Consequently, they created advocacy organizations and networks, educational programmes, county records repositories, and professional attitudes and ideas that collectively formed an archival profession in England by the mid-1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the history of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Great Britain since 1945. It examines the relationship between NGOs and political activism and engagement. The author particularly explores environmental NGOs and NGOs committed to international development and aid. He links support for NGOs to declining public trust in elected officials and political institutions. The role of professional and technocratic expertise in NGOs is also considered.

The decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War saw Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race of unprecedented expense against the German empire. The spiralling cost of armaments proved politically problematic for a Liberal ministry ostensibly committed to ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform’. Outside the government, however, an organized navalist lobby agitated enthusiastically for ever greater levels of defence preparedness. Groups such as the Navy League have typically been regarded as bastions of the radical right. In fact, as this article demonstrates, Liberal engagement with and participation in the navalist lobby was far greater than historians have realized. Liberal MPs accounted for a significant portion of the Navy League’s support within Parliament, and Liberals held many leadership positions in the organization. These men were motivated by considerations of national defence, but they also identified their navalism as belonging to a coherent Liberal political tradition. The navy had long been associated with progressive political causes, above all with the maintenance of free trade, and was regarded as being free from the more regressive forms of militarism associated with standing armies. In this sense, navalism was not simply a phenomenon of the radical right; it also represented a distinctly Liberal form of militarism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses moral and sexual changes in Great Britain in the post-World War II era, examining the notion of a permissive society. It explores the influence of the state and the press and comments on the role of London, England in these transformations. The author also reflects on sexual scandals, particularly noting an affair between British war minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler, the supposed mistress of a Russian spy. An inquiry into sexual reform led by John Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden, also known as Lord Wolfenden, is also considered.

The English ‘sexual revolution’ has recently become increasingly conceived as ‘long’, lasting many decades, and by some historians as a gradual phenomenon, but reaching a peak with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the 1960s. At the same time, the ‘religious crisis’ of the same decade has been attributed by some recent scholarship to liberal Christian revolt within the churches, and largely unconnected with sex. This article offers different views. First, based on the illegitimacy rate, it argues that, after a period of decline, restraint, and only minor change in the period 1946–59, the 1960s witnessed a sudden growth in pre-marital heterosexual intercourse before the pill’s availability to single women, implying a cultural rather than a technological cause. Second, based on contemporary social surveys, it argues that there is clear evidence of a strong inverse correlation between levels of religious activity and levels of pre-marital sexual intercourse. Third, it argues that in the 1950s the dominant conservative Christian culture restrained single women from pre-marital sexual intercourse, but that from the early 1960s changing attitudes led to rising levels of sexual activity, led by single women, which reduced religious attitudes and Christian churchgoing, thus constituting a significant instigator of the religious crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of voluntary organizations in British political and civic life in the early- and mid-twentieth century. It examines various types of organizations, including voluntary agencies and women's groups, particularly those campaigning for women's suffrage. The author comments on the book "Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911," by Keith Middlemas, particularly considering Middlemas' writings about trade unions and employers’ associations.

The article discusses the role of India as Great Britain's ally in World War II, particularly commenting on India's supply of manpower and goods. It comments on the issue of Indian independence and examines food shortages and transportation. The policies of the British War Cabinet, Viceroy of India Archibald Wavell, and Secretary of State for India Leo Amery are examined.

The article considers the 20th century biographies of people of Great Britain's working class, often associated with communists. Some of the subjects considered include upward mobility, social classes, left-wing political activism, group identity, the Great Depression, and political parties of the interwar period such as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Young Communist League. Some of the works considered include the book "Men in the Pits" by Ferdynand Zweig, and interviews with cartoonist James Friell and civil servant Dave Marshall. A historiography of British working classes is presented.

This article examines the presentation and promotion of British 'imperial' sports, such as rugby and cricket, in the publications of a selection of elite Irish schools during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article also discusses the ways in which this representation of British sports differed from the representation of such sports by Irish nationalists and argues that the positive representation of these sports in the school publications was part of a wider worldview, prevalent among Ireland's upper and middle classes, which saw connections with Britain and its empire as being in no way incompatible with the development of Irish national identity or of Irish patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British fear of bombing in the early twentieth century has aptly been termed ‘the shadow of the bomber’. But the processes by which the public learned about the danger of bombing are poorly understood. This paper proposes that the press was the primary source of information about the threat, and examines a formative period in the evolution of public concern about airpower — the so-called air panic of 1935 — during which German rearmament was revealed and large-scale RAF expansion undertaken in response. A proposed air pact between the Locarno powers enabled a shift from support of disarmament to rearmament by newspapers on the right, while simultaneously supporting collective security. Paradoxically, after initially supporting the air pact, the left-wing press and its readers began to have doubts, for the same reason: the need to support collective security. This episode sheds new light on Britain’s early rearmament, and how the government was able to undertake it, despite the widespread feelings in the electorate in favour of disarmament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growth of government and its bureaucracy in the first half of the twentieth century focused political interest in Britain on office work, workers, and practices. Parallels were drawn to offices in large organizations in business and industry and an active market of office products offered a growing choice of machines and other appliances for use in public offices. Demands for manpower in the military and related industries during the First and Second World Wars coupled with an increase in public business in civil offices encouraged both novelty and greater system in analysing processes to overcome obstacles to speed and management controls. Certainly by 1930 civil servants in Britain saw their offices as being different from those of their predecessors. Modern ideas linking specialist skills in organization and methods with machine processes drove changes to increase economy and to speed workflow. This article explores aspects of office history in the British Civil Service especially as it relates to the use of machines for written communications, the conditions that encouraged their use, and the ideas that came in their wake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike recent contributions in the field, which discuss the geography of British overseas investments, this article focuses on the growth of capital exports from Great Britain during the period 1870–1913. Using a broader concept of foreign investments, which includes foreign direct investments (FDIs), and refocusing on the push and pull factors emphasised in earlier literature, we propose a framework able to capture the long-run determinants of British capital exports. Moreover, the framework includes elements suggested by early and recent works such as the institutional setup of the international economy and the evolution of world trade. The most relevant result, in an error correction model environment, is that the timing of British overseas investments in the long run seems to be related to the evolution of world trade, domestic growth and to the role of India as a colony. On the other hand, the attraction elements of the borrowing countries, captured by the risk-adjusted realised rates of return abroad, have been proven to matter in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the closure of the London games, BOA leaders turned their immediate attentions towards capturing British success at the forthcoming 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. A conscious effort to avoid the organizational pitfalls that marred previous Olympic campaigns emerged as a discernible feature of British preparations, as BOA leaders sought to introduce modern and progressive methods of training and preparation. Void of public and governmental financial support, and hindered by fierce squabbling between both the Home-Nations and the various governing bodies of British amateur sport, the participation of a British team in Stockholm, as well as the very existence of the British Olympic movement hung precariously in the balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking to align psychiatric practice with general medicine following the inauguration of the National Health Service, psychiatric hospitals in post-war Britain deployed new treatments designed to induce somatic change, such as ECT, leucotomy and sedatives. Advocates of these treatments, often grouped together under the term 'physical therapies', expressed relief that the social problems encountered by patients could now be interpreted as symptomatic of underlying biological malfunction rather than as a cause of disorder that required treatment. Drawing on the British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work, this article analyses the critique articulated by psychiatric social workers based within hospitals who sought to facilitate the social reintegration of patients following treatment. It explores the development of 'psychiatric social treatment', an approach devised by psychiatric social workers to meet the needs of people with enduring mental health problems in hospital and community settings that sought to alleviate distress and improve social functioning by changing an individual's social environment and interpersonal relationships. 'Physical' and 'social' models of psychiatric treatment, this article argues, contested not only the aetiology of mental illness but also the nature of care, treatment and cure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1950 was a crisis year in the Cold War and saw a growing rift between the United Kingdom and the United States over how best to wage it. It was in the Far East that the most dangerous crisis occurred. Britain recognised the People's Republic of China, not only because the Communist regime clearly controlled the mainland, but also because it was felt that it was not irretrievably linked to the Soviet Union. The United States, on the other hand, regarded China as a Soviet satellite and displayed a consistently hostile attitude towards it. The situation worsened with the outbreak of the Korean War in June. Although the United States and Britain agreed that the invasion of South Korea must be repelled, the British were anxious not to broaden the conflict, whilst the Americans used it as a stick to beat the Chinese. The war also prompted accelerated rearmament and the Americans favoured the rearmament of West Germany. Things came to a head in November, with the large-scale Chinese intervention in Korea, followed in early December by a visit to Washington by the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. The British believed that the United States had already concluded that a global war was inevitable, whereas they wished to avoid it if possible. As this article shows, the events of 1950 amply demonstrated the subordinate position of Britain in the 'special relationship.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on British intelligence in China, Japan, and Korea from the end of the Second World War to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. It seeks to ascertain whether the collection of secret intelligence and its subsequent interpretation provided an accurate picture of Soviet and local communist intentions in East Asia. Since the war against Japan began, the region was largely an American responsibility and remained so after 1945 when they occupied Japan, Korea below the 38th parallel, and sent forces to China. Much of the intelligence effort for East Asia also devolved upon the Americans. Yet, the British retained an intelligence interest there not least because of their extensive commercial assets in China and the region's proximity to Britain's imperial position in Southeast Asia. That interest gathered pace after growing Communist threats inside China and Korea. However, the available intelligence resources for the Far East as a whole were scarce, making it difficult to piece together a clear picture of fast moving events in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation--concessions, compensations, and other inducements--to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, which isolates opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases--Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s and Germany's offensive efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union in 1939--help to demonstrate these arguments. By paying attention to these dynamics, international relations scholars can better understand how balancing works in specific cases, how it manifests more broadly in international politics, and why it sometimes fails in situations where it ought to work well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes one of the lesser known social surveys of the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and looks at its origins and its outcomes. Funded by the Rockefeller grant to Oxford University to enhance social studies there, the Oxford Survey published in two volumes in 1938 and 1940 engaged Oxford academics from agricultural economics, economics, statistics, and government, as well as Barnett House members involved in voluntary organizations, adult education, settlements, citizenship, and social work. It was a far-reaching study that aimed to analyse all aspects of public services, in the context of a thorough-going description of the geography, industry, and population statistics of the local area. It was also designed to have national relevance, because of the development of the motor industry in Cowley. The Oxford Survey differed from Booth and Rowntree’s exploration of the habits and circumstances of the urban poor. Instead, it had more affinity to surveys of industrial and regional planning and work coming from the Le Play school, in which the act of surveying communities was perceived as a way of enhancing citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early cold war, the British government founded a voluntary civil defence service designed to protect the nation and the population from the effects of enemy attack in the event of war. Although civil defence was a site of massive voluntary effort—around 500,000 people joined—it was also considered a ‘failure’. This article examines the propaganda utilized to recruit these volunteers in the ‘atomic age’, and argues that the messages used reveal a range of concerns about the conflict, patriotism, and voluntarism in the early post-war years that existed in tension. In particular, it analyses the tensions between duty and service on the one hand, and leisure on the other, symptomatic of the wider debates surrounding citizenship and participation in the period. It also explains the importance of the Second World War and the gendered perceptions of civil defence in attempting to mobilize potential recruits. The article concludes that civil defence propaganda succeeded in mobilizing significant levels of participation, but was perceived as a failure due to an understanding of patriotic citizenship rooted in the cultural context of the Second World War. In a period of cultural change, propaganda began to emphasize leisure as well as duty, but struggled to reconcile the two messages in a way capable of convincing recruits in large enough numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the First World War, the British government put into operation a Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire. This scheme was driven by a complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies. This article examines the Free Passage Scheme, paying particular attention to the ways in which it was envisaged as a means of restoring a gendered balance of the population in Britain, where young women outnumbered young men at the end of the war, and in the dominions, where men outnumbered women, and was also seen as a way of emigrating women whose wartime work experiences were understood to be in conflict with gendered identities in the post-war period. The article argues that the Free Passage Scheme needs to be understood as gendered, as it envisaged the transformation of female members of the auxiliary wartime services into domestic servants for the Dominions. The scheme’s failure, it is argued, prefigures the failure of the far larger Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The London Observer was the title given to the published version of the diaries of General Raymond E. Lee, US military attache in London in 1940-1941, edited by James R. Leutze, which appeared in 1971. Yet Lee did not arrive in London till spring 1940, as Britain's 'Finest Hour' sounded and the nation squared up to Luftwaffe air attack and the threat of German invasion. Compared with this phase of the Second World War, so extensively chronicled by historians, scant attention has been paid to British preparedness for war-and especially little to evaluations by America's London observers of the quality of British preparedness. This article seeks to fill that gap. Firstly, it highlights the severe organisational shortcomings and largely absent coordination that prevented the US diplomatic and intelligence apparatus forming coherent advice to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the State Department on whether Britain's defences, and Neville Chamberlain's government, could withstand the Third Reich. Secondly, it shows that seriously divergent assessments resulted as to the likelihood of Britain withstanding a war, notably as between the pessimism of Joseph P. Kennedy, the US ambassador to the Court of St James from 1937 to 1941 and father of later President John F. Kennedy, and the measured optimism of his professional defence advisor, Brigadier-General Bradford G. Chynoweth, Lee's predecessor as US military attache in London. Finally, it suggests the importance of personalities in international politics, as the difficulty for the State Department, the War Department and the President of accurately calibrating British war readiness in 1939 became greatly exacerbated by the personal animosity between their men on the spot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that both Neville Chamberlain's National Government and many anti-appeasers used and abused the language of the League of Nations in the years before the Second World War, long after they had abandoned Geneva itself as an effective instrument to maintain peace. It concludes that while many formerly pro-League figures could not bring themselves to admit the truth about the demise of collective security-and were, in effect, deluding themselves-this was, in many cases, 'a most dishonest argument'; born out of party politics and the need to keep world opinion on side in the pursuit of alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fractious Eden-Dulles relationship has become a staple of the historiography of Anglo-American relations in the 1950s and is often advanced as an explanatory factor for the sharp disagreements that afflicted the UK and the USA in 1954 over the Indochina War, German rearmament and European integration, and, more controversially, for the way in which the 'special relationship' reached its nadir over Suez in 1956. But what are the origins of this clash? In this article, the Eden-Dulles back-story is examined, from their first meeting in 1942 through to the Yoshida letter of 1952, and the roots of their difficulties in working with each other are located in a disagreement over how best to manage the Cold War in East Asia. This policy dispute was in turn accentuated by pronounced personal and temperamental differences so that well before 1956 the basis for mutual trust and understanding had been badly eroded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the attitude of Winston Churchill to Germany and to the German people. It begins with an assessment of how Churchill is viewed in Germany today, comparing this with his reputation in Britain. The author points out that while the most significant parts of Churchill's political career were concerned with commenting on German affairs and with planning strategies designed to defeat the German state in war, he knew little about the country. Although Churchill undoubtedly advocated magnanimity in how the Germans ought to be treated at the end of the world wars, the reality has been that any residual political tensions between Britain and Germany can in part be attributed to Churchill's words and strategies. What is more, when Churchill's attitude towards Germany is examined more closely, it is generally much less sympathetic. Before the First World War, Churchill admired the German social security system, resented the predominance of the Junkers in government and feared Germany's growing naval capability. After the War, Churchill then feared an alliance between Germany and the new Soviet government in Russia, and advocated a policy of appeasement to both primarily for this reason. In the case of Germany, this included a sympathetic approach towards revisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but when Weimar democracy failed, Churchill was quick to denounce the new Nazi regime. The article then examines the impact of his views on Hitler's regime on the wartime alliance between Britain and the USA. On key aspects of this issue, Churchill was happy to be led by Roosevelt and the article highlights the lack of clarity that existed between the British and American governments about how best to treat Germany when the war had ended. The remainder of the article considers the criticisms that have been levelled at Churchill by those groups that faired worst at the hands of the Nazis, especially the Jews and by scholars considering ethical and strategic issues concerning the blanket bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government documents from the British and American National Archives, currently within the public domain, have provided a revealing insight into Whitehall's and Washington's objectives in relation to the geopolitically strategic island of Cyprus. Whilst many continue to argue in favour of a Western conspiracy to overthrow President Makarios and divide the island in the summer of 1974, British and American governments' documents suggest that whilst the American intelligence community's role in the coup against Archbishop Makarios remains nebulous, any possible suggestion of collusion, whether British and/or American, with Turkey in its subsequent invasion, can now be largely dismissed. This article looks at the history of US and British policy on Cyprus from 1964-1974, by examining the crucial way in which Whitehall allowed its foreign policy vis-à-vis Cyprus to become influenced by decision-makers in Washington, and the role played by the two countries in the infamous and ultimately tragic summer of 1974. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The delegation of functions to a range of quasi-autonomous bodies has formed a major challenge to the operation of representative democracy, in both administrative and democratic terms, since the formation of the modern state. These challenges have been more pronounced within Westminster-style democracies that are founded on the logic of ministerial departments and the convention of individual ministerial responsibility to Parliament. Towards the end of the twentieth century, these challenges became more pronounced as the centrifugal dynamics of New Public Management led to what has been termed the 'unravelling' or 'unbundling' of the state. In many countries around the world concerns regarding a 'democratic deficit' and patronage stimulated reform campaigns demanding territorial devolution in the belief that new regional democratic structures could increase accountability and transparency. This was particularly true in the UK where proponents of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland claimed that such a reform would lead to a 'bonfire of quangos'. This article draws upon theories derived in relation to multi-level governance in order to frame an analysis of how devolution has altered the sphere of delegated governance. This reveals a complex pattern of resource dependencies, motivations and incentives that have led to markedly different reform trajectories but certainly not the 'end of the quango state'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the numbers of 'other women' and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses 'irregular and illicit unions' in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalence of illicit unions throughout the twentieth century and before allows us to question contemporary concerns about our supposed 'divorcing society' and the decline of family life in modern Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates representations of unmarried motherhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s through readings of popular British film and fiction. These sources are used to illustrate contradictions and conflicts in the meanings afforded to unmarried motherhood and, in turn, to highlight how the unmarried mother was used as a motif for exploring post-war normative boundaries around marriage, motherhood, and female sexuality. The article draws upon Raymond Williams's idea of a 'structure of feeling' to make connections between these representations and issues and debates about the role and status of women and mothers more generally in post-war Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses three areas that limited the effectiveness of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926. First, re-registration was public, expensive, and time-consuming. Second, the Treasury Office used the change in the law of intestacy to refuse more distant relatives' claims on estates. Third, the law separated legitimacy from nationality, thus denying citizenship to legitimated children born abroad of British fathers and foreign mothers. In short, both because of parliamentary oversights and civil servants' narrow interpretations of the law, relatively few children took advantage of the Act, and the minority who did, rather than being 'illegitimate' or 'legitimate', were a third category, the 'legitimated'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experiences of unmarried mothers who kept and tried to raise their children between World War One and the end of the twentieth century. It argues that there has not been a simple progression from their experiencing social stigma and ostracism to more enlightened attitudes since the 1970s. Rather there is a great deal that has hitherto been unknown about what the evidence suggests were very diverse experiences and attitudes throughout the period. A major change since the 1970s has been from pervasive secrecy about unmarried motherhood, cohabitation, adultery and similar 'irregular' practices, especially among the middle classes, to greater openness. The article uses a variety of sources, including the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (founded in 1918, now One Parent Families), oral histories, contemporary interviews and official and unofficial investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of the social sources that influenced Great Britain's appeasement approach to foreign policy during the 1930s. It examines appeasement in an international context and explores how economic factors motivated this stance and how economics influence foreign policy and international security in general. It argues that Great Britain's appeasement approach towards Nazi Germany was a crisis strategy that attempted to eliminate multiple socioeconomic and geopolitical problems by limiting their foreign policy responsibilities.

The article discusses how the government of Great Britain has balanced its global interests with those in south-east Asia during the 1950s. It claims that although the needs of the Malayan emergency were prioritized by the British government over the requirements of the Korean war, it has reluctantly provided ground troops to Korea. The article also examines how Great Britain worked for the defence of Hong Kong.

The deep moral vacuum engulfing capitalist society in 20th century England triggered many authors to determinedly and courageously confront it. One of these authors was D. H. Lawrence, who used explicit phallic language in his works to highlight an overall atmosphere of moral lethargy and sexual hypocrisy. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, explicit language forms the base of the relationship between Connie Reid, a member of aristocracy, and a gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Lawrence's works were not the first to be subject to censorship or even lawsuits over alleged obscenity. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the ways in which this author uses explicit language as reaction and response to key social issues of his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years before and during the Second World War, the Roosevelt Administration played an important and often overlooked role in encouraging Britain's disengagement from the Indian subcontinent. Roosevelt's motivations in pressing for Indian independence were varied. They included a mix of principled opposition to colonialism, practical concern for the outcome of the war and pragmatic jockeying for influence with post-colonial nations when the war was won. Churchill's government was wary of being pushed by Washington to move more quickly to 'quit India' than it thought prudent. U.S. policy and actions clearly influenced the direction of events toward independence, but U.S. caution as the war ground on led to disillusionment among nationalist leaders. This reaction would have consequences once swaraj was won and India came into its own, at a time when the Cold War was becoming the dominant factor in America's view of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the imperial dimension of Winston Churchill's rhetoric on Ireland over the course of his entire career. Whereas previous discussions of Churchill and the Irish question have tended to focus on whether he was sincere or opportunistic, his views are treated here in the context of the rhetorical environment in which he was operating. It is shown that, in his Edwardian Liberal phase, his argument that Home Rule would strengthen the Empire was part of a pre-existing Liberal and Nationalist discourse. He refashioned these arguments in order to sell the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921-22, but they were later turned against him by Conservative colleagues when he opposed the Statute of Westminster, and the imperial dimension of his Irish rhetoric weakened thereafter. However, certain themes, such as his praise of Irish military heroism, remained constant. It is argued that rhetorical analysis is a valuable but neglected tool for Irish and imperial historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that, in spite of recurrent contrary perceptions, Britain's political and cultural interest and involvement in Central and South-Eastern Europe was intensive and proactive during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Early in the century, the classic British priorities of economic benefit buttressed by limited diplomacy were gradually expanded to include political overtones when radical Liberal politicians, journalists and intellectuals launched an 'amateur' campaign to support popular movements for national self-determination and individual human rights; first in the Balkans, then in Central Europe. During WWI, many such 'amateurs' with East-Central European contacts were co-opted by the British government. In return for promises of post-war independence, the oppressed nationalities of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires were enlisted to help the Allied war effort. One important tool in the dissemination of these powerful new ideas was the journal entitled The New Europe, owned and edited by Robert William Seton-Watson. Following the end of the war and the embedding of the peace treaties, official British attitudes began to shift with regard to the new successor states in the east. This, in the long run, distanced Britain from any Eastern or South-East European commitments. Former members of the New Europe group continued to defend the new status quo and were disappointed by the lack of concern with which the Locarno Pact treated Germany's eastern neighbours. The irony is expressed that the creation of a new world order based on a League of Nations should thus be accompanied by disillusionment with pre-war and wartime liberal engagements in foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1960s, the Labour government established a Commission to devise the best way of integrating Britain's elite independent schools with the state-financed school system. Despite-and because of-the left's scepticism of private education, the Commission faced enormous obstacles and their solution of state-subsidised boarding places was seen as unworkable, unaffordable and unpopular. Government papers help to explain the various reasons why the Commission's proposals were not implemented: in particular, the public schools were regarded as a low spending priority. The lack of reform is key to understanding the continuing importance of independent schools in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the final decades of the twentieth century, history in British higher education experienced major challenges that highlighted fundamental issues of educational purpose and value. As the hitherto private world of university history teaching and learning began to open up to public scrutiny, what emerged was a statement of what one subject representative body called 'the traditional standpoint of historians' on undergraduate history education. Drawing particularly upon evidence from national discipline consultations and recent rethinking of the representation and uses of tradition, this article argues that the appeal to the educational past was more complex than public statements suggested and that more critical scrutiny of history's educational traditions might play an important role in imagining pedagogic and professional futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that three films including Daily Round, Penny Journey and The Horsey Mail, produced by General Post Office (GPO) projected the physical, social, and cultural landscapes of the countryside of Great Britain and the obstacles to integrate modern transportation services within contemporary rural Britain are presented. It is stated that several documents depicting the state of interwar Britain, including H.V.Morton's "In Search Of England," were published during that period.

This article analyses British policy towards Iraq during the period following the Second World War until the 1958 Iraqi revolution. Using British archival sources it demonstrates how Britain covertly tried to stem the rise of communist and nationalist anti-imperialist sentiments in Iraq through an insistence on employing ill-fitting anti-communist propaganda designed as a Cold War weapon with which to counter Soviet influence. Failing to appreciate the level of indigenous politicization, because of their own rigid ideas about the nature of the 'Iraqi mind', British officers were incapable of devising local responses to the growing threat of anti-imperialism, instead inadvertently handing over the initiative to Iraqi political groups to set the agenda. In this way Britain gradually lost the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq despite maintaining a huge propaganda apparatus in the country and the wider region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides the 'missing dimension' in the historiography of Syria and Lebanon in the Second World War. It is based on secret British and Syrian documents obtained by the French intelligence from their agents in the British Legation in Beirut and the Syrian government in Damascus, never published before. These documents, recently discovered by the author, shed new light on the activities of the British intelligence agencies in the Middle East during and after the war. They reveal that these agencies played an important role in shaping Britain's policy in the region by securing the tacit collaboration of prominent Arab nationalists in Syria and Lebanon and other Arab countries. In Syria (and Palestine), Britain conducted a 'dual policy': one purported to mediate between the French and the Syrians, details of which are found in British archives, and a tacit policy aimed to evict France, of which few traces remain in official documentation. Hence de Gaulle's accusations that Britain secretly engineered the expulsion of France from the Levant were indeed justified, and that the Syrians' claim that their country was the first Arab state to secure complete independence is questionable. The article also discloses that Britain was behind the Hashemite schemes to integrate Syria in a Greater Syria or an Iraqi-led Hashemite confederation. Copies of more than one hundred of the documents are annexed to the article, including a secret agreement from 29 May 1945 revealing that President Quwatli was coerced into granting Britain a dominant position in Syria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sale of buses by the Leyland Motor Company to Cuba proved contentious, not only in the realm of Anglo-American relations, but also in the domestic sphere of a behind the scenes inter-departmental disagreement within the British government. This is because the bus exports pitted political against economic interests at the height of the Cold War and in the midst of a British export drive. As Her Majesty's Government readily recognized, Washington was particularly sensitive over any issue related to Cuba, which by 1963 was firmly in the communist orbit of the Soviet bloc and which the United States was determined to isolate economically through the application of a trade blockade. The decision to approve the sales came at the end of the Macmillan and Kennedy administrations, and clouded the short-lived partnership of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home and President Lyndon B. Johnson. The bus exports became an election issue in the campaigns of both leaders in 1964, assuming a political significance that belied the buses' seemingly innocuous function and outward appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the task of 20th century local history approach and the significance of history in Great Britain. The use and abuse of the past through commercialisation, commemoration, consumerisation and personalisation is noted. The agenda for local history with thematic approach to 20th century study referencing to local studies conducted in Great Britain is outlined.

In this paper we argue that the fertility decline that began around 1880 had substantial positive effects on the health of children, as the quality-quantity trade-off would suggest. We use microdata from a unique survey from 1930s Britain to analyse the relationship at the household level between the standardised heights of children and the number of children in the family. Our results suggest that heights are influenced positively by family income per capita and negatively by the number of children or the degree of crowding in the household. The evidence suggests that family size affected the health of children through its influence on both nutrition and disease. Applying our results to long-term trends, we find that rising household income and falling family size contributed significantly to improving child health between 1886 and 1938. Between 1906 and 1938 these variables account for 40% of the increase in heights, and much of this effect is due to falling family size. We conclude that the fertility decline is a neglected source of the rapid improvement in health in the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing accounts of British efforts to achieve a nuclear non-proliferation treaty between 1964 and 1968 largely overlook the later stages of decision making within the Labour government. Scrutiny of previously classified sources reveals that a desire for entry into the European Economic Community had a much larger influence on the content and conduct of British non-proliferation policy than previously suggested. By 1967, Prime Minister Harold Wilson sought a secondary role in treaty negotiations, and left the running to the superpowers. This avoided unnecessary conflict with the countries of the Community, resentful of the Treaty's discriminatory terms, and helped to protect Britain's application to join the EEC. Although this bid was unsuccessful, ambitions for future membership continued to influence non-proliferation policy in 1968. Indeed, a desire for future entry into the EEC helps to explain why Britain became the first nuclear weapon state to ratify the Treaty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early Cold War, Dr. Omond Solandt became Canada's leading defence research diplomat. As Chairman of the newly created Defence Research Board, Canada's first peacetime defence research organisation, Solandt established strong ties with Canada's senior allies, Great Britain and the United States, in the realm of military science and technology. His goal was to harmonise Canada's defence research agenda within this informal science alliance and to gain access to Allied scientific knowledge and technology. Solandt's efforts in maintaining strong and co-operative relations with London and Washington are examined, shedding light on the personal nature of Canada's efforts in the realm of defence research diplomacy, including within the controversial realms of biological warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a roundtable of reflections discussing the contributions and potential trajectory of British historical studies from scholars in the United States and Canada. Questions addressed within the section include the status of teaching 20th-century British history and issues at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the methodology and historiography used by North American scholars, and the influence of imperialism and globalization in the examination of 20th-century history. Multiple entries also reflect on the individual accomplishments of the authors as historians within the field.

Since the 1990s, the concept of strategic culture has (re-)gained scholarly attention in International Relations theory, offering a supplementary or alternative explanation for state behaviour. Using this concept as an analytical tool and drawing on International Relations theory, military history and organisational theory literature, this article examines the organisation of High Command in Britain and Germany between 1850 and 1945 from a comparative perspective. It demonstrates the explanatory power of strategic culture by identifying the enduring character of key attributes in the way both nations organised their strategic decision-making bodies and processes. With the next theatre of war unclear, Britain as an island nation preferred flexible and adoptable High Command structures in which the incontestable primacy of political control was key. On the contrary, the organisational choice of Germany was driven by its precarious geographical setting in the centre of the European continent and the idealisation of a personalised unification of political leadership and military command which contributed to the narrowed a-politicised, technical and operational focus of the German High Command. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British arms policy and the United Nations (UN) arms embargo on May 29, 1948 to Israel and Arab League states during the first period of Arab-Israeli war from 1948-1949. It says that the British and Zionists cooperated to retain the lift for the U.S. embargo after being lifted in August 1949. It states that the British arms embargo from 1948-1949 is considered as their first betrayal to Arabs. It also discusses the foreign relations of Great Britain to Egypt and Iraq