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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2023

        Who governs Britain?

        Trade unions, the Conservative Party and the failure of the Industrial Relations Act 1971

        by Sam Warner

        Providing fresh insights from the archival record, Who governs Britain? revisits the 1970-74 Conservative government to explain why the Party tried - and failed - to reform the system of industrial relations. Designed to tackle Britain's strike problem and perceived disorder in collective bargaining, the Industrial Relations Act 1971 established a formal legal framework to counteract trade union power. As the state attempted to disengage from and 'depoliticise' collective bargaining practices, trade union leaders and employers were instructed to discipline industry. In just three-and-a-half years, the Act contributed to a crisis of the British state as industrial unrest engulfed industry and risked undermining the rule of law. Warner explores the power dynamics, strategic errors and industrial battles that destroyed this attempt to tame trade unions and ultimately brought down a government, and that shape Conservative attitudes towards trade unions to this day.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2010

        The life of Una Marson, 1905–65

        by Delia Jarrett-Macauley

        This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2024

        Exhibiting Irishness

        Empire, race and nation, c. 1850-1970

        by Shahmima Akhtar

        Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. My research demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2011

        Holiday camps in twentieth-century Britain

        Packaging pleasure

        by Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Jeffrey Richards

        This book is the story of two holiday camp chains established in the 1930s that provided thousands with packaged pleasure. Warner and Butlin's commercial camps emerged at the intersection of cultural shifts that politicised working-class leisure and consumption. Entertainment fostered in the post-war camps provided a forum for popular pleasure that reinforced the idea of a 'national' culture grown from the common experience of war. Butlin and Warner, the big commercial chains of the 50s and 60s, are enmeshed in our social and cultural history. Dawson uncovers the significance of the holiday camps to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain, drawing on an impressive variety of sources, from government documents to trade journals, advertising, photographs, oral histories, literature, films and songs. This unique volume will be of interest to academics and specialists of British social history, popular culture and tourism studies whilst remaining accessible to enthusiasts. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2015

        Governing Europe's spaces

        European Union re-imagined

        by Dimitris Papadimitriou, Caitriona Carter, Martin Lawn, Simon Bulmer, Andrew Geddes, Peter Humphreys

        What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU - of its development, its policies and its working processes - shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? The book constructs a case for re-imagining Europe - not as an entity in Brussels or a series of fixed relations - but as a simultaneously real and imagined space of action which exists to the extent that Europeans and others act in and on it. This Europe is constantly being made in particular spaces, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill-defined. We ask how do those concerned with building Europe, with extending and elaborating the EU, think of where they are and what they are doing? The book captures Europeans in the process of making Europe: of performing, interpreting, modelling, referencing, consulting, measuring and de-politicising Europe. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2019

        Alternative countrysides

        Anthropological approaches to rural Western Europe today

        by Jeremy Macclancy

        A fresh anthropological look at a central but neglected topic: the profound changes in rural life throughout Western Europe today. As locals leave for jobs in cities they are replaced by neo-hippies, lifestyle-seekers, eco-activists, and labour migrants from beyond the EU. With detailed ethnographic examples, contributors analyse new modes of living rurally and emerging forms of social organisation. As incomers' dreams come up against residents' realities, they detail the clashes and the cooperations between old and new residents. They make us rethink the rural/urban divide, investigate regionalists' politicisation of rural life and heritage, and reveal how locals use EU monies to prop up or challenge existing hierarchies. They expose the consequences of and reactions to grand EU-restructuring policies, which at times threaten to turn the countryside into a manicured playground for escapee urbanites. This book will appeal to anyone seriously interested in the realities of rural life today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2004

        Dress and globalisation

        by Margaret Maynard, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman

        Dress and globalisation is the first work to survey dress around the world, drawing together issues of consumption, ethnicity, gender and the body, as well as anthropological accounts and studies of representation. It examines international western style dress, including jeans and business suits, headwear and hairdressing, ethnicity and so called 'ethnic chic', clothes for the tourist market, the politicisation of traditional dress, 'alternative' dressing, and T-shirts as temporary markers of identity. It also considers dress and environmental issues, touching on adventure gear, the 'green' consumer and the possible impact of 'smart' clothing. Dispelling the myth of universal 'world' attire, this book demonstrates that western-style clothing transcends geographical boundaries but along with other forms of dress, can form a montage of differing tastes, ethnic preferences and national and local imperatives. By discussing the nature of globalisation, this book shows that, if economics permit, all cultures are selective in their choice of what to wear. Dress and globalisation will be welcomed by students of dress history and cultural studies. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        February 2009

        Christianity and democratisation

        From pious subjects to critical participants

        by John Anderson

        This book examines the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratisation that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades. It offers a historical overview of Christianity's engagement with the development of democracy, before focusing in detail on the period since the 1970s. Successive chapters deal with: the Roman Catholic conversion to democracy and the contribution of that church to democratisation; the Eastern Orthodox 'hesitation' about democracy; the alleged threat to American democracy posed by the politicisation of conservative Protestantism; and the likely impact on democratic development of the global expansion of Pentecostalism. The author draws out several common themes from the analysis of these case studies, the most important of which is the 'liberal-democracy paradox'. This ensures that there will always be tensions between faiths that proclaim some notion of absolute truth and political orders that are rooted in the idea of compromise, negotiation and bargaining. Written in an accessible style, this book will appeal to students of politics, sociology and religion, and prove useful on a range of advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2013

        Contemporary history on trial

        Europe since 1989 and the role of the expert historian

        by Harriet Jones, Kjell Ostberg, Nico Randeraad

        Is it right for historians to serve as 'expert witnesses' to past events? Since the end of the Cold War, a series of heated and politicised debates across Europe have questioned the 'truth' about painful episodes in the twentieth century. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica, inquiries and fact-finding commissions have become a common device employed by governments to deal with the pressure of public opinion. State-sponsored programmes of education and research attempt to encourage a common moral understanding of the lessons we learn from these painful memories. Contemporary historians have increasingly been drawn into these efforts since 1989 - in the courtroom, in the media, on commissions, as advisers. In a series of thoughtful essays, written by leading historians from across Europe, this volume considers the ethics and responsibilities that this new role entails. For anyone concerned with the role of the historian in contemporary society and how we arrive at a public understanding of history, this book is essential reading. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Unfit for heroes

        Reconstruction and soldier settlement in the empire between the wars

        by Kent Fedorowich

        Research on soldier settlement has to be set within the wider history of emigration and immigration. This book examines two parallel but complementary themes: the settlement of British soldiers in the overseas or 'white' dominions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, between 1915 and 1930. One must place soldier settlement within the larger context of imperial migration prior to 1914 in order to elicit the changes in attitude and policy which occurred after the armistice. The book discusses the changes to Anglo-dominion relations that were consequent upon the incorporation of British ex-service personnel into several overseas soldier settlement programmes, and unravels the responses of the dominion governments to such programmes. For instance, Canadians and Australians complained about the number of ex-imperials who arrived physically unfit and unable to undertake employment of any kind. The First World War made the British government to commit itself to a free passage scheme for its ex-service personnel between 1914 and 1922. The efforts of men such as L. S. Amery who attempted to establish a landed imperial yeomanry overseas is described. Anglicisation was revived in South Africa after the second Anglo-Boer War, and politicisation of the country's soldier settlement was an integral part of the larger debate on British immigration to South Africa. The Australian experience of resettling ex-servicemen on the land after World War I came at a great social and financial cost, and New Zealand's disappointing results demonstrated the nation's vulnerability to outside economic factors.

      • Crime & mystery
        September 2021

        The Purified

        by C. F. Peterson

        Eamon’s newfound happiness is shattered by the kind of murder that the government doesn’t want to believe happens anymore. Detective Maclean thinks he has the killer, but something worse than a body has been found beneath the waters of The Minch, something that should never have been brought to the surface, and now it is not just TV crews that are watching the village. This novel is the second in a series set in and around the village of Duncul.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2011

        A Rugged Nation

        Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy

        by Marco Armiero

        A Rugged Nation uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. State regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings. World War I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. The book ends with two exemplar tales about mountains and their place in the Italian recent history: the Resistance against the Nazi-Fascists, which found its sanctuary up in the mountains, and the 1963 Vajont disaster, which, with 2,000 people killed, represents the tragic epilogue of the hydroelectric modernisation of the Alps.

      • May 2021

        The Life of a Spy

        An education in truth, lies and power

        by Rod Barton

        I was certainly no James Bond with a licence to kill, but I experienced some events that might have intrigued Bond. I have worked with the British intelligence services and for the CIA. I have had guns pointed at me, death threats made, a price placed on my head.    In 1971, a young Rod Barton applied for a job as a junior scientist with the Australian department of defence. Little did he know that the role involved more than analysis of dry scientific data: as the Cold War between Russia and the United States intensified, Rod found himself being inducted into the murky world of international espionage.    Rod rose through the ranks, conducting fascinating research and chasing intelligence leads across South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, his life changed again. One of few who knew enough about the science behind Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program, he became a special adviser to Hans Blix, head of the United Nations Weapons Inspection Commission. His clashes with the CIA and Australian politicians over weapons of mass destruction and prisoner abuse reveal the depths of the politicisation of the War on Terror.    Told with passion and insight, this is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes account of a world marked by risk, secrecy and individual acts of courage. From the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, it will take you to the front lines of politics and war.

      • March 2022

        The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng

        Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China

        by Alison Hardie

        The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and re-assesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, but is best known as a dramatist, and his poetry is now largely unknown. He is most notorious as a ‘treacherous official’ of the Ming–Qing transition, and as a result his literary work—his plays as well as his poetry—has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan’s literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognised since his own time. Ruan, rather than being a transgressive figure, is actually a very typical late Ming literatus, and as such his attitudes towards identity and authenticity can add to our understanding of these issues in late Ming intellectual history. These insights will impact on the cultural and intellectual history of late imperial China.

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