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Against a backdrop of pressing economic and strategic concerns shaping British policies after the Second World War, Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, embarked on an official tour of Africa in November-December 1947. He visited South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, as well as other African territories. Montgomery's controversial report and the reactions to it cast light on British attitudes towards and perceptions of her African empire in the immediate postwar period, as shaped by Labour government defence and developmental policies. At the same time, it invites reconsideration of Montgomery's place in imperial and military historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationships, both real and imagined, that developed between German prisoners of war and women on the British home front during the First World War. Through an analysis of press coverage and archival materials, it adds a new dimension to the history of women’s wartime experiences. Contact with German prisoners challenged the authorities’ capacity to both control and protect British women on the home front. News of women’s interest in German prisoners jeopardised the morale of British soldiers and the idealised image of British women as potential wives and mothers while threatening the balance between the battle and home fronts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic 'first wave' folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a 'conservative modernity', which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a 'second wave' folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums' perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Persia (Iran), the Tehran-based Defence Security Office was responsible for protecting from Nazi subversion and sabotage three potential strategic targets: the vital oilfields, pipelines, and refineries of Khuzistan; the Lend-Lease supply route between the Persian Gulf and the Soviet Union; and the security of the Persian polity itself. Against all odds, under the command of Lt Col E.L. ‘Joe’ Spencer, this small but effective British/Indian security-intelligence unit succeeded in neutralising the Nazi threat, in capturing all German operatives on Persian soil, and in maintaining the security of a territory five times the size of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to write the army transport mule, which has previously been neglected in the equine historiography of the conflict, into the story of the First World War. It does not aim to tell the entire story of the role of mules in the war, as this deserves fuller investigation. Instead, it focuses on how various British sources depicted the army transport mule and how the actual involvement and treatment of these animals on the Salonica Front accorded with these perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1943, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) launched one of the Allied intelligence services' biggest efforts to foster resistance within Nazi Germany in cooperation with Slovene partisans in the Carinthian borderland. The so-called Clowder Mission systematically supplied weapons and other military assistance to the partisans who, in summer and autumn 1944, offered the strongest -- albeit often neglected by scholars -- militant resistance within the borders of Nazi Germany. Although SOE's operational aim of externally fomenting Austrian separatist, patriotic resistance deeper inside the country failed, its strategic aim of assisting the separation of Austria from Germany and re-establishing an independent Austrian nation-state proved to be sound. At the same time, the Carinthian Slovene partisans fell short of attaining their political objectives. This article analyses the paradoxical results of British subversive politics towards Austria and Slovenia. It traces the impact of the SOE's agenda and the origins of the Moscow Declaration on the reestablishment of Austria, and elaborates on the character of British-Slovene cooperation, its success and its breakdown in the context of British subversive politics, inter-Allied rivalries and competition, and the geopolitics of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE GOUZENKO AFFAIR IS REFERRED TO as the event that started the Cold War. This article draws on recently declassified documents that shed new light on Britain's role in this affair, particularly that of the Foreign Office and the British High Commissioner to Canada. The documents reveal how the British had a major part in directing the response to Igor Gouzenko's defection in 1945. This event revealed the need for increased counterespionage security, but it also became a spectacle that directed the public's attention away from the British connection: specifically, the role of Alan Nunn May, a British nuclear scientist who had provided the Soviets with classified information. Instead, the public's interest was centred on Soviet spies, communism as a subversive force, and the brewing Soviet-US conflict. These newly declassified sources demonstrate how it was the British intelligence services and the British government that went to great lengths to help focus the public's attention in this direction. They took great pains to direct Canadian policymaking, which included working to discourage Canada's prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King from handling the affair privately with the Soviet ambassador, and were likely behind the infamous press leak to US reporter Drew Pearson that forced King to call a Royal Commission and publicize the affair. With the help of the British government and intelligence services, the Cold War began. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Labour Government's decision to withdraw from Britain's overseas bases east of Suez in the 1960s had profound repercussions for British grand strategy. One of the last colonies to be evacuated was the port town of Aden, located on the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula. First seized by the East India Company on behalf of the British Empire in 1839, it became a Crown Colony almost a century later in 1937. By 1963, the British government had presided over Aden's entry into the fledgling Federation of South Arabia, a transitional body that was envisaged as a vehicle for independence. Drawing on the Labour's Party's archives, amongst a range of other sources, this article examines the shift in policy within the Labour government on the issue of Aden. It makes the case that, in contrast to the Conservative government's wholehearted support for Britain's tribal allies in South Arabia, Labour hedged its bets by balancing its policy off between the tribal rulers and the new radical nationalist opposition. By refusing to back the fledgling Federation government, Labour, instead, adopted a non-committal stance that would lead to greater strategic inertia in its policy towards the Middle East during the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship has been widely debated in post-war British history, yet historians discuss the concept in very different, and potentially contradictory, ways. In doing so, historians are largely following in the footsteps of post-war politicians, thinkers, and ordinary people, who showed that citizenship could – and did – mean very different things. The alternative ways of framing the concept can be usefully described as the three registers of citizenship. First, there are the political and legal definitions of what makes any individual a citizen. Secondly, there is the notion of belonging to a national community, an understanding of citizenship which highlights that legal status alone cannot guarantee an individual's ability to practise citizenship rights. Thirdly, there is the idea of citizenship as divided between ‘good’ or ‘active’ citizens, and ‘bad’ or ‘passive’ ones, a differential understanding of citizenship which has proved very influential in debates about British society. This article reviews these registers, and concludes by arguing that all three must be taken into account if we are to comprehend properly the nature and citizenship as both status and practice in post-war Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This article links two processes that reached culmination during the 1970s: the emergence in central government of concern for inner city areas, and the rejection of urban modernist approaches to the built environment. It focuses on the approach of the Department of the Environment in dealing with the issue, particularly through the three Inner Area Studies on Lambeth, Small Heath in Birmingham and Liverpool 8, which were published in 1977. The first section gives an account of the background under which the Studies were commissioned by the Department of the Environment, then headed by Conservative Secretary of State Peter Walker. Part two gives a brief account of the Studies. Part three details their reception under the Labour Government, and shows their influence on the 1977 White Paper Policy for the Inner Cities. Through this case study, two arguments are made about the changing approach to the built environment in the 1970s: that political and planning elites played a pivotal role in the disavowal of urban modernism in this period; and that the multiple problems exemplified by the inner city made modernist approaches appear increasingly untenable, even to former advocates. The conclusion suggests that, at least in its approach to the inner city, the meliorist aims of the post-war period were not an intellectually spent force by the 1970s, but remained an ambitious and evolving project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the small number of British subjects who visited China and North Korea during the Korean War with a view to influencing British opinion. Although none were brought to trial, all experienced some form of punitive action, whether the loss of employment, loss of passports, or damage to their reputations. The subject is placed in the context of the Cold War, and the wider concerns about disloyalty on the Left at the time, as well as the controversies surrounding the Korean War in Britain. It concludes that the actions of these individuals have to be understood in terms of their alternative loyalties (such as to the 'new' China, or to an alternative vision of the United Nations), which ultimately outweighed allegations of disloyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late nineteenth century onwards there emerged an increasingly diverse response to escalating patenting activity. Inventors were generally supportive of legislation that made patenting more accessible, while others, especially manufacturers, saw patenting culture as an impediment. The medical profession claimed that patenting represented ‘a barrier to medical treatment’ and was thus detrimental to the nation's health, yet, as I argue, the profession's development of strict codes of conduct forbidding practitioners from patenting resulted in rebellion from some members, who increasingly sought protection for their inventions. Such polarized opinions within the medical trade continue to affect current medical practice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses efforts to minimize freedom of speech in Great Britain before, during, and after World War II by focusing on efforts by groups including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), to abolish hate speech such as antisemitism in print in response to Nazism and fascism. Other topics include racism against Blacks and Asians, decolonization and British immigration, and the sedition trial against newspaper editor James Caunt.

One of the most complex issues facing British rule on the local municipal level towards the end of the Mandate period was the problem of Jaffa's Jewish neighbourhoods. This question, which emerged with the outbreak of the 1936 disturbances, engaged the government thereafter until the end of the Mandate. The demand by the residents of Jaffa's Jewish neighbourhoods for annexation to Tel Aviv – actually for municipal detachment from Jaffa – constituted the root of the problem. In this setting of the sharpening of relations between the authorities and the Jews and Arabs in 1945–1947, all three involved parties found themselves deeply immersed in it in the attempt to bring about its resolution. The annexation problem ceaselessly preoccupied the institutions of the Jewish Yishuv as a Zionist–Yishuv struggle of the highest order. This period gave rise to a series of unprecedented moves by the Jewish side, which were intended to influence the British government toward solving the problem. The article examines its development of the problem from the viewpoint of the three sides concerned in the years 1945–1947, with the focus on the policy line adopted by the Jewish side, its implications and its results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article approaches debates about how the history of the post-1945 English welfare state might be written. It argues that professionals' interventions on immigrant children can serve as a prism for understanding the crafting of the modern English welfare state. In this sense the article engages with the narrative concerning the resilience of a post-war British history that sees 1945 as a moment of profound rupture symbolised by the demise of Empire, the development of a universal welfare state, and the coming of mass immigration that brought with it social problems whose management presaged a distinctive British multiculturalism. Due to its influential impact on the development of immigrant education policies in England and because of its extensive education archive the article uses the Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) as an empirical and historical case. The significant British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Immigration Act of 1971 serve as demarcations of the period treated. The article concludes that the immigrant child and the child's background were consistently presented as educational problems and as the cause of both poor academic attainment and a more intangible unwillingness to assimilate. In this lens the crafting of the post-war English welfare state was a continuation of an imperial project shoring up imperial boundaries within as the former colonised appeared on English soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and political crisis of 1931 provoked the reappearance of rank and file movements in Britain. This article examines the unofficial organisations that developed in building, engineering, passenger transport and the railways – as well as more ephemeral bodies. It critically synthesises the existing historiography and replenishes it with new material from the Russian archives. The progress of rank and filism to 1939 is surveyed and the largely forgotten project of a new Communist-led rank and file organisation, a Trade Union Militant League, which would supersede the National Minority Movement, is recuperated. The article stresses the role of Comintern policy in harnessing and moulding grass-roots rebellion. It validates that strand in the literature which argues that Moscow’s subsequent turn to the popular front and aspirations to alliances with labour movement leaders predominated over, and legitimated, indigenous influences, enhanced existing adaptation to trade unionism, and encouraged subordination of oppositional movements to activity in official structures. By 1939, the Communists had abandoned the idea of a national rank and file movement they had pursued since 1923. Little survived of the revolutionary enterprise launched in 1931. Rank and filism endured only as a handful of sectional, party-sponsored, trade union ginger groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on methodological and ethical issues that have shaped a collaborative project which aims to chart social, legal and political responses to child sexual abuse in England and Wales across the twentieth century. The etymological problem of searching for child sexual abuse in the historical archive is discussed, given that the term itself is a relatively recent one. Acknowledging that research tools will always be partial, it then focuses on the gaps and silences in the archive, most problematically in relation to the voices and experiences of victims and survivors themselves. Finally it discusses ethical issues relating to the naming or anonymising of those accused and convicted (as well as victims and survivors) in the writing up of research findings. The discussion focuses on two key periods – the 1920s and 1950s – and on education policy, including regulatory procedures for teachers in state and fee-paying schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

R.H. Tawney (1880–1962), a leading English economic historian and prominent socialist, was vigorously involved in educational reconstruction during the Second World War. For Tawney, the war was a war for social democracy. His ideals of social democracy formed a basis for his case for Public (independent) School reform and free secondary education for all. Despite this, the connection between Tawney’s ideals and his perspectives on educational issues has not been addressed fully by historians and thus there has been a lack of a proper explanation for his often criticised sympathy for the public schools and his indifference towards the multilateral school. Hence, this paper aims to re-examine the link between them in greater depth. It concludes that, according to Tawney’s ideals of social democracy, the abolition of the public schools was not necessary for the establishment of a democratic educational system. Moreover, Tawney did not launch an attack on the tripartite system proposed by the Norwood Report of 1943 since it was not against his ideal of equality as long as different secondary schools were equal in quality and status. Equality, he believed, must be advanced through the raising of the school leaving age to 16 and the abolition of fees in all secondary schools. Thus, he laid more emphasis on the school leaving age and tuition fees than on the multilateral school. In brief, on various issues pertaining to secondary education, Tawney’s opinions and actions were deeply grounded in his distinctive ideals of social democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High school education is central to adolescent socialization and has important downstream consequences for adult life. However, scholars examining schooling's political effects have struggled to reconcile education's correlation with both more liberal social attitudes and greater income. To disentangle this relationship, I exploit a major school leaving age reform in Great Britain that caused almost half the population to remain at high school for at least an additional year. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that each additional year of late high school increases the probability of voting Conservative in later life by 12 percentage points. A similar relationship holds when pooling all cohorts, suggesting that high school education is a key determinant of voting behavior and that the reform could have significantly altered electoral outcomes. I provide evidence suggesting that, by increasing an individual's income, education increases support for right-wing economic policies and, ultimately, the Conservative Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the debate over environmental and human health effects of nuclear testing to shed light on the ambivalent relationship between scientists, the public, and the state in Britain during the crucial, but often overlooked, period leading up to the first cycle of anti-nuclear weapons mass protests. In this, it examines how members of Britain's main organization of nuclear scientists – the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) – used their expertise in their engagement with both the public and the state to assess these effects of fallout from nuclear testing. What made the ASA stand out from other groups of the atomic scientists’ movement was its ambivalent relationship with the government. This was, by and large, the result of several ASA members’ occupational backgrounds in government employment and the association's self-imposed adherence to an ambiguous principle of scientific ‘objectivity’ in political matters. The ASA's role in the debate over fallout thus exemplifies a basic dilemma that many scientists in Britain and other Western liberal democracies faced between their roles as ‘objective’ and ‘unpolitical’ scientific experts, on the one hand, and socially responsible scientists, on the other, illustrating the ambivalent position of experts and uses of their knowledge. [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]

This article analyses early years education policy in England from 1918 to 1972, applying the theoretical ideas of John Kingdon. Throughout this period, the educational needs of young children were a low political priority, but they did occasionally rise on the agenda. When the issue gained prominence, politicians considered two key policy alternatives for potential investment: the expensive, self-governing nursery school, orientated towards promoting children’s physical health, and the cheaper nursery class, attached to an infant school, perhaps better at easing transition to formal education. After an initial period of damaging indecisiveness, the choice fell first on nursery schools and then on nursery classes. The reason that such fundamental changes in approach were possible was that an underlying lack of political commitment meant policies were only ever partially implemented. This chaotic pattern of development has had a damaging effect on the coherence of early years services offered today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abolitionism as a humanitarian trend at the height of the colonial period was a great intellectual achievement by the European civilization. But the process of making Asian and African people and the right to manumit slaves exercised by Europeans also was a part of complex colonial policy and combined moral assumptions with political and economic interests. This article aims to show how the right to manumit became an important issue in British Imperial policy. It proves that for the British, with the on-going process of self-determination of people in Arabia and Persia, it became more and more difficult to exercise the right to manumit slaves and that in some cases a humanitarian approach was sacrificed for political interests and for imperial strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional 'successor' to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A former major base of British colonialism, East Africa, has served as one of the testing grounds for what has been referred to as neo-colonialism. According to Kwame Nkrumah, neo-colonialism indicates that although ‘in theory’, a colony attains independence, ‘[i]n reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Panaf Books, 2004 [1965]). This article challenges this image of neo-colonialism. Based on British documents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have become available to the public only in the last decade, and sources in East African libraries, it casts new light on British external relations with East Africa in the heady days of independence. These documents demonstrate that the new states of East Africa enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy, that Britain's development aid was inconsistent and that Britain's involvement in the affairs of its former colonies was reluctant. These accounts reveal that the impact of British policy on newly independent states was actually limited, and thus the nature of Britain's relationship with its ex-colonies and the discourse of neo-colonialism are debatable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the first half of the twentieth century, despatches about the coldest corner of the British Empire were circulated to three, sometimes four, of its southern neighbours under the British crown: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. Of these four, South Africa seemed the least interested in Antarctica, despite the keen interest of some influential individuals and a strategy of bringing Antarctica into the imperial fold through British dominions that were proximate to Antarctica. In this context, we ask how South Africa viewed itself in relation to the Antarctic to the south and the British metropole to the north. We discuss the key activities that connected South Africa to Antarctica—whaling and weather forecasting. Moreover, we consider some of the enterprising plans for a South African National Antarctic expedition, and what these plans reveal of South Africa's perception of itself as a southern country. This article interlinks with a growing scholarship that is critical of treating Antarctic history as politically and culturally isolated, including showing how the relatively simple natural and political ecology of the Antarctic can throw into relief multiple national and international concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The decolonization process in the 1940s and 1950s in Middle Eastern states under Great Britain's informal influence did not aim at recognizing the same type of independence of these states as that enjoyed by Britain and the United States. In the 1940s Washington laid the groundwork for its leading role in Iran during and following the Iranian oil crisis, whilst London with the assistance of the Americans in part reasserted British influence after the crisis. The United States achieved a paramount position in Iran with the assistance of its oil companies and through cooperation with Great Britain, and at the expense of the latter and the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many assessments of the trajectory of positive neutralism in Egypt have presented it as a foreign policy implemented in response to the Cold War context, and ineffective in the shadow of superpower rivalries. This contribution contends instead that positive neutralism developed out of the pursuit of a particular combination of foreign policy and nation building in Egypt, by elites whose political formation was dominated by an anti-colonial rather than Cold War consciousness. This is demonstrated through the analysis of three foreign policy episodes and parallel nation building programmes unfolding between 1952 and 1955. Together they illustrate the origins of positive neutralism in the positions taken by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers on the British presence in Egypt, on regional alliances and the Baghdad Pact, and on development and pan-Arabism in nation building, all before Egypt's participation in the 1955 Bandung Conference after which the policy of positive neutralism was formally adopted. The use of Egyptian documents throughout foregrounds Egyptian agency and motivations in drawing up policy, and enables an evaluation of the contributions of positive neutralism identified in Egypt at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do states appease their foes? In this article, we argue that governments are most likely to favour appeasing a foreign threat when their top leaders are severely cross–pressured: when the demands for increased security conflict sharply with their domestic political priorities. We develop the deductive argument through a detailed analysis of British appeasement in the 1930s. We show that Neville Chamberlain grappled with a classic dilemma of statecraft: how to reduce the risk of German expansionism while facing acute partisan and electoral incentives to invest resources at home. For Chamberlain, appeasement was a means to reconcile the demands for increased security with what he and his co-partisans were trying to achieve domestically. We conclude by discussing implications of the analysis for theorising about appeasement and about how leaders make grand strategy more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses aspects of the book "Unfinished Empire. The Global Expansion of Britain" by John Darwin. Particular focus is given to Darwin's overall attitude towards British history with special attention to the process of decolonization. Other topics addressed include 20th century historiography, the history of Great Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and British imperialism, as well as its colonies.

Between 1930 and 1945 professional wrestling could lay claim to being one of the most transnational sports moving across the Anglo-world. Participants originated from western and eastern Europe, North America, the Antipodes, Britain and India. Significantly, wrestling was one of the few sports in which participants from the British Empire and the USA competed in these decades of comparative sporting isolationism. It is argued here that the ‘All-In’ American style which came to dominate the sport as an extreme and theatrical form of ‘catch-as-catch-can’ wrestling was not uniformly accepted across the Anglo-world. Cultural differences between the USA and the British Empire meant wrestling styles had to be adapted as they crossed national boundaries. The notion of ‘cultural hybridity’ is a valuable concept here as ‘All-In’ met three different responses within the Empire: complete acceptance, modification and rejection. The reasons for the varied responses are considered and the argument made that while American culture was at one level admired in the British Empire, there was also concern about perceived professionalization and corruption in North America, which wrestling seemed to epitomize. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Frederick Porter Wensley was one of Scotland Yard's ‘Big Four’ detectives, head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department and responsible for establishing the Flying Squad. On his retirement in 1929, he used the two bound scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs he had collated to document his personal life and career to inform his 1931 autobiographyDetective Daysand serialized press articles. Through examining the interaction of material between scrapbooks and autobiographical writings, this article explores how Wensley constructed his post-retirement persona as ‘celebrity detective’ from a canny understanding of what had made him a commercial subject for the press. It argues that Wensley recast his life to promote his own successes at the expense of a narrative of police unity, providing a vehicle for him to suggest further changes to the structure of the police force without official sanction. By juxtaposing this against tightening legislation on police communication with journalists during the inter-war period under the Official Secrets Acts, this article demonstrates how the ‘celebrity’ that Wensley sought to occupy was increasingly regarded as irreconcilable with police ability to effect ‘impartial’ regulation, anticipating the concerns raised by the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The article thus charts a turning point in defining the relationship between police and press. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Radical political activism in the 1970s and 1980s had a huge impact on documentary photography in Britain. Community organisations and photography collectives emerged and endeavoured to democratise the arts for those who would not otherwise have come into contact with them. Community photography used the technology to break down the barriers between artist and audience. It involved participation in the production of ideas and meanings, the active transference of skills and the acquisition of technical and aesthetic skills within communities in the hope that arts techniques/activity would become an integral part of everyday lives. For many of the projects the central objective was about learning – enabling an understanding of how events, ideas, and social relations are made meaningful through the promotion of visual literacy. This paper will document the emergence of the community photography movement in 1970s and ’80s Britain, the learning strategies developed and the arguments around the fragmenting of alternative photographic practice in the 1980s with the movement away from putting cameras into people’s hands towards greater engagement with cultural theory and the politics of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article concerning the Great Revolt of 1936-39 is based on archival research conducted in England and Israel in 2011-12. It argues that British resort to harsh repressive measures during the 1936 phase of the revolt began earlier, endured longer, and occurred more frequently than scholars have hitherto recognized. It contends further that this oversight is an instance of a broader trend in the scholarship: namely, the internalization of the pervasive tendency in British and Zionist archival materials to characterize the rebellion as a crime wave, to which the Mandate merely responded, rather than provoked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few grand strategies have been more scrutinized than Britain's decision to appease Nazi Germany. From 1933 to 1938, Britain eschewed confrontation and attempted to settle German demands. However in the five months following the negotiations at Munich, the British abandoned appeasement and embraced a policy of confronting the German state. The roots of both appeasement and confrontation can be found in Germany's legitimation strategies. Until the Munich crisis, Adolf Hitler justified Germany's aims with appeals to collective security, equality, and self-determination—norms central to the European system established by the Treaty of Versailles. After Munich, in contrast, German politicians abandoned these legitimation strategies, arguing instead that expansion was justified as a matter of German might, and not international rights. As Britain came to see German demands as illegitimate, so too did they decide this revisionist state was insatiable, impervious to negotiation, and responsive only to the language of force. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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]

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]