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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]

The various policies developed by the Ottomans and British for governing the indigenous Bedouin tribes of the Negev/Naqab and Beersheba (southern Palestine) region between 1900 and 1948 are examined using primary sources. Whereas Ottoman attempts to pacify the tribes in southern Palestine and Transjordan were somewhat ineffective, the British Mandate achieved a degree of control and stability by incorporating tribesmen into the Palestine Police, strengthening the frontier areas and enhancing inter-territorial tribunal arrangements between Beersheba, Sinai and Transjordan. [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]

This article explores early twentieth-century British political and humanitarian engagement with the Balkans. It focuses on the Balkan Committee, a liberal pressure group that served as the main hub for British interest in the region in the decade before the First World War. Whilst drawing attention to the specific challenges presented by the Balkans to the British liberal mind, it is argued that the Balkan Committee was part of a wider movement of humanitarianism and political activism that encompassed both continental and colonial questions. The issues around which the committee campaigned are related to humanitarian protests against the use of forced labour in Africa, in particular the Congo Reform Association, as well as to the Persia Committee, formed in protest against the 1907 Anglo-Russian agreement. This approach highlights how ‘Europe’ and empire were interconnected agendas within an overarching liberal-internationalist worldview and reformist conscience, despite the different cultural lenses through which humanitarian questions in different parts of the globe were viewed. It is suggested that research into British interaction with the Balkans offers a fruitful means by which to integrate historical analysis of the continental and imperial aspects of Britain's external relations in the ‘age of empire’. [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]

The Royal Malayan Navy (RMN) was created after the Second World War as Britain sought to secure its regional strategic and economic interests through naval and political federation. By guiding the transition towards independence through political concessions to maintain Malaya's integrity, it was hoped imperial influence could be preserved through transferring pro-British colonial institutions such as the RMN. Thus, while Malaya was declared independent on 31 August 1957, the country's navy depended upon British officers, equipment and ships for more than a decade, with UK firms continuing to profit from procurement. A culture of corruption, which developed during the war, flourished from the new opportunities post-colonial political patronage offered individuals involved in the supply and maintenance of the RMN. The ruling party also furthered their nationalist interests by imposing Malay quotas, language and religion upon the service, side-lining British-trained, non-Malay personnel whose allegiance might lie elsewhere. Decolonisation therefore created a vacuum within Malaysia's post-colonial navy which competing imperial, corporate, personal, and nationalist opportunists looked to fill. Adopting a transnational analysis combining original and existing oral histories and archival sources from Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and the UK, with conceptual writing on imperial transition, corruption and patronage, this article presents new insights into the issues created by Malaysia's decolonisation and post-colonial naval development. It widens debates on neo-colonialism and its consequences for British hegemony; how decolonisation created new opportunities for individual, political and economic advancement through the navy; and the impact of Malaysian affirmative action and ‘Islamisation’ policies upon non-Malay naval personnel. [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.

The queen's role as the head of the commonwealth has evolved over the last 60 years. In this article, we explore the ways in which this position was constructed and negotiated through the queen's presence (and absence) at commonwealth conferences. Utilising the example of the Lusaka Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 1979—a highly fraught meeting, the queen's attendance at which was hotly contested—we examine narratives present in newspaper and oral history accounts surrounding the queen's role. Placing this event in the context of the broader constitutional and political issues that have surrounded the headship since the creation of this ambiguous office in 1949, we explore the competing interpretations of the meaning of head of the commonwealth and the vexed question of who was responsible for advising the queen in this role. We argue that the example of the Lusaka summit shows that, far from being a crowned non-entity, the queen was an active agent, both shaping a constitutional role for herself that was separate from that as British monarch and becoming enrolled in broader geopolitical scripts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

British politics immediately following the Boer War featured a group of politicians and intellectuals known as the Liberal Imperialists and this account explores the political thought of their Australian counterparts. Australian liberal intellectuals of particular relevance for this study were located in Melbourne, which was at that time the federal capital, and they were loosely clustered around the key political figure of the period, Alfred Deakin. The extended circle of Alfred Deakin provides scholars with a useful group of active intellectuals from whom it is possible to derive an idea of the Australian inflection given to Liberal Imperialist thought, concentrating on the intersection of notions of imperial unity and progressive social reform agendas which flourished in both Australia and Britain during the Edwardian era. The group of politicians and public intellectuals, comprising an overlapping membership including the Imperial Federation League, friends and associates of Alfred Deakin and the Boobooks Club, would subsequently evolve into the main Australian branch of the Round Table organisation. This article is concerned with discovering the outlines of the Australian version of Liberal Imperialist thought and especially the nature of the Australian inflection superimposed on this British set of ideas, as found in a variety of contemporary pamphlets, printed books and Boobooks minutes. The Australians were less pessimistic than Richard Jebb about the possibilities of a supranational imperial organisation but also insisted that such an organisation must respect the sovereignty of dominions. They differed from most of their British counterparts in supporting the widespread use of tariffs to nurture industry and they also supported the restrictive immigration position enshrined in the infamous White Australia policy, yet they were much in favour of the notion of a strong British navy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the relationship between theory and practice in nineteenth century English public health disinfection practice. Disinfection undertaken by local authorities and practised on objects, spaces and people became an increasingly common public health practice in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was part of a newly developed public health system of ‘stamping out’ disease as described by Hardy. Despite disinfection's key role in public health policy, it has thus far not received significant investigation or historiographical attending. This article explores the development of disinfection policy at local level, highlighting that despite commentators assumptions that increasingly exacting standards of disinfection required professional oversight rather than that of the ‘amateur’ public, there was a significant gap between laboratory based knowledge and evidence derived from practical experience. Laboratory conditions could not replicate those found in day-to-day disinfection, and there were myriad debates about how to create a mutually understandable scientific standard for testing. Despite increasing efforts to bring local disinfection in line with new ideas promulgated by central government and disinfection researchers, the mismatches between the two meant that there was greater divergence. This tension lay at the heart of the changes in disinfection theory and practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, and illustrate the complexities of the impact of germ theory on public health policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 6 November 1944, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East in Cairo, Lord Moyne, was assassinated by two members of a Jewish group called Lehi. The assassins confessed, citing Lord Moyne's anti-Semitism and his policy towards the Zionists as their motives. However, Lord Moyne was not anti-Semitic, and he did not support Zionism. While he supported the 1939 White Paper that limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, he changed his position in 1944 to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The British were heavily involved in the assassination investigation and trial. They assisted the Egyptian police investigation, lobbied for a trial in a military court, and promoted death sentences for both defendants. They also tried to prevent the accused from speaking in the court, fearing the effect that would have on Egyptian and international public opinion. Many Egyptians viewed the assassins as heroes who fought against British imperialism. They wanted the assassins to be released from the central prison in Cairo. During the Second World War, Churchill's involvement in Palestine diminished. Ultimately, the assassination had little effect on British policy in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article examines the condition of music education in Great Britain in the postwar period. It discusses the concern expressed by secondary school music teacher Alan Fluck on the shortage of modern composers, the significance of the idea of democratizing high art in postwar Britain, the quest to broaden access to elite culture, and the plan of the British Ministry of Education to make films on subjects that would have an impact on the growth and development of the modern society.

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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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