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E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his monumental treatment of class formation inThe Making of the English Working Class(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), E. P. Thompson presented a view of class as a ‘happening’ and attacked the liberal and ‘orthodox’ Marxist views of class as a ‘thing’. This paper argues that Thompson's book was primarily attempting to answer political questions of his own time, and more specifically the question of modern socialism. Exploring the theoretical arguments of class formation that influenced Thompson's oeuvre, the paper will also explore the connections between Thompson and ‘orthodox’ Marxism and challenge those who see Thompson's work as only a counterargument to scholars who treated class merely as an economic structure. For Thompson,The Makingwas not only a historical treatise, but an answer to both ‘Old’ and New Leftists who saw the working class mainly as an economic and cultural phenomenon, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new universities of the 1960s were innovatory, in their curricula, architecture, independence and academic ambitions. They also marked a different relationship between universities and their localities. For a century, new universities had been predicated on local demand, whereas the 1960s universities were conceived of as national institutions meeting a national demand. This new approach to university–civic connections was sudden, novel and contributed to a sense of remoteness attached to the new universities. This paper examines how the different policy was formulated, predominantly by the UGC, and considers some examples of how the policy played out in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The image of Margaret Thatcher appearing on television dressed in a ‘peacock blue sari’ must seem rather farfetched—and yet, for a brief moment, it appeared a distinct possibility. That such an event seemed plausible reflected the growing recognition among senior Conservatives of the electoral significance of ethnic minority voters. While Conservatives had begun to experiment with measures to appeal to BAME voters as early as 1951, from the mid-1970s formal party structures dedicated to the recruitment and representation of BAME voters began to emerge. In 1976 the Party launched the Anglo Asian Conservative and the National Anglo West Indian Conservative Societies, both of which sought to address poor performance among black and Asian voters. This paper explores the development of Conservative electoral strategies targeting BAME voters in the period after 1951, and reflects on what these strategies reveal about Conservative narratives of the nation in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper explores how the concern with the apparent 'Americanization' of British commerce and culture played out within the world of London advertising in the post-war period. In doing so, it engages with, and partly challenges, a pervasive line of argument within economic and cultural history that has emphasized the influence of American commercial power over Europe's economies in the immediate post-war decades. Historians of this period, like contemporary commentators before them, have tended to privilege the dominance of what Victoria de Grazia has recently termed America's irresistible 'Market Empire' in their exploration of trans-Atlantic relations. In this paper, I take the case of JWT London, a US-owned multinational advertising agency, and its relationship with its parent company in order to revise claims about US commercial domination. JWT is an instructive case because it was a classic example of an international advertising agency in the era of high American commercial expansion. Yet the organization of its London office and the relations between London and New York reveal a picture of business practices that complicates assumptions about American commercial domination. JWT London was not the bold apostle of the American vision of its parent company, but rather it sought to soften and not aggressively assert the corporate identity and commercial ethos of its American parent. In this regard, JWT London, like other US companies before it and since, worked to shed its Americanness and go native. To insist on this process of indigenization is not to deny the authority of US models of commercial life in this period. Rather it is to suggest that even within a US-owned company like J. Walter Thompson, American commercial influences took particular forms in Britain and that the American domination over Europe was neither monolithic nor homogeneous nor irresistible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Opinion polls of adults are used to illuminate public attitudes to Church and clergy in Britain since the 1960s. Wherever possible, comparative data are provided for other institutions and professions. The standing of Church and clergy diminished over the half-century, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, mirroring the net decline in institutional Christianity revealed in performance indicators of church membership, attendance, rites of passage and affiliation. This loss of status reflects, not merely the passive effects of a secularizing climate, but active disenchantment with policies and practices pursued by Church and clergy. The paper exemplifies how secularization can be understood (following Chaves) as declining religious authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In February 1947, the British government made a number of policy decisions which led to withdrawal from India, Palestine and Greece. The paper seeks to demonstrate that although economic constraints highlighted the need to reduce overseas commitments, these pressures did not predetermine the choice or timing of the withdrawal decisions. The consequences of the retreats in terms of reduced military overstretch, balance of payments alleviation and the diminution in Britain's international status are also examined. It is concluded that the Attlee administration shed a range of military burdens as rapidly and in as orderly a fashion as political and strategic circumstances permitted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whilst much has been written about the pace and magnitude of social, economic and political changes in Western countries during the post-war era, there has been little empirically grounded discussion of the agenda-setting capabilities of specific governments nor of the criminological shock waves that resulted from the ‘new right’ policies adopted by some governments in the 1980s. In this paper, using Britain as our case study, we explore how agenda-setting, political competition over key issues and the emergence of trends in policy agendas have influenced both crime itself and crime policies. Throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher made political capital by promoting concerns about crime and her own and her government's reputation for being the natural custodians of ‘law and order’. Yet during that period, crime rose and became a policy issue in a way it never had been before. How can we understand these shifts in crime rates, their relationship to government policies and the rise of crime on the policy agenda? Using data from a range of sources dating back to 1961 and using time series modelling, we present a ‘policy feedback’ model of these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In April 1921, J.H. Thomas, the Labour Party MP and National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) leader, initiated libel proceedings against the Communist—journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He cited defamation in the form of cartoons and words depicting the events of ‘Black Friday’—when he allegedly betrayed the locked-out Miners' Federation by leading the withdrawal of NUR solidarity. To Thomas, the framing of his image by indigenous Bolsheviks threatened to fatally define his character and career within popular imagination, and undermine Labour's rise. In this paper, I argue that during the domestic and international crises surrounding the First World War, innovative left-wing editors and cartoonists tested the boundaries of newspaper cartooning, and gave dissident cartoons renewed menace before the Law. The case was the first for over a century in which graphic satires of a national political figure were successfully prosecuted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is considerable debate among historians and sociologists over the periodisation of the social dynamics of mass consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. During the immediate period following post-war austerity, journalists and other commentators focused on greater affluence and the relative reduction in spending on 'necessary' items. Sociologists, however, often emphasised the continued role of class in shaping consumer preferences. In this paper, I use evidence from the Family Expenditure Survey, conducted by the UK government since the 1950s, to capture relative differences in the weekly spending patterns of all households. I compare expenditure data for the year 1961 for detailed categories of consumer goods and services, with respect to differences in income, class and age, and compare these data with the results for 1971, 1981 and 2004. Using a multi-dimensional approach more conventionally used in lifestyle research and brand marketing allows us to examine how consumption is structured by inequality, though in subtly changing ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits sociological studies of Liverpool between 1956 and 1964 to challenge the prevailing emphasis on affluence in histories of post-war Britain. Vulnerability to poverty continued to shape working-class life, and the sociologists and their respondents drew on class to account for this. However, while the researchers used class as a social description, their respondents suggested that class was a dynamic social relationship within which they operated a degree of agency, albeit mediated by gender and locale. Their agency was not only facilitated by the development of a post-war welfare state, rather than by personal affluence, but also relied on older household economic strategies that highlight continuities with the pre-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]