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Edward Palmer Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is widely known throughout the academic world–and indeed beyond. Justifiably. It has many virtues. Among other things, it is an impressive synthesis of the ideas of the “good and the great” of the social sciences. In it we hear echoes not only of Gramsci but of Weber and Durkheim, and we see references not only to classes but to codes and values (Alexander 1990: 21). Thompson, of course, was concerned, first and foremost,...

Writing in 1902, Luigi Villari noted how the Italian word aristocrazia had come to mean something quite different from its English equivalent, aristocracy: “The [former] does not signify the titled classes alone, or those who are of old family. It is best translated by ‘good society’. The nobility are, of course, included in it, but so are a certain number of higher Government officials, most of the wealthy business men [...] and a few professional men.” (Villari 1902: 17.) The impressions of...

Down the centuries of history governments have made successive attempts to collect reliable statistics of property and wealth. The statistics were invariably and inevitably flawed: the ingenuity of the government in devising ways of measuring property and counting wealth has been matched by the ingenuity of the governed in evading accurate returns. The two greatest national surveys were eight hundred years apart: in 1086 William I surveyed England to find out “how much land his archbishops ha...

Historical interest in Winston Churchill–which shows no signs of abating–has focused on what he was, as well as on what he did. Was Churchill the “last lion” of a dying English social order, or a new classless trans-Atlantic man? His official biographer, Martin Gilbert, has avoided this issue, but others have proffered contrasting opinions. In 1962 Anthony Sampson wrote: “Churchill has never taken very kindly to the aristocracy from which he sprung and even in his old age he has preferred the...

The fact that Finland was the easternmost outpost of the Swedish realm at the end of the 18th century and one of the most westerly parts of the Russian Empire in the 19th, could not but influence the thin sprinkling of landowners who lived on their manors in the province of Savo. In the 18th century, Savo was one of the three Finnish regions which were outstanding for the number of upper-class residences, the two others being the hinterlands of the then capital Abo (Fi. Turku) and those of th...

This paper looks at the elite educational systems of Britain and France, in their formative period in the nineteenth century, and in relation to the theme of aristocracy. The nature of social development in nineteenth-century Europe has been much debated in recent years, and it is widely agreed that all the major countries saw the emergence of a composite elite in which significant aristocratic elements survived (Kocka, Mitchell 1993). But if the (classic marxist) view of the era of a triumph...

In the mood of the often savage pessimism, self-criticism, even despair, of the last twenty years, the history of Britain in the hundred years since 1880 has been placed in a context of decline and decay, incompetence and failure. This is particularly true of the economy, where the concept of long-term economic decline and the hunt for technical explanations or cultural scapegoats have been dominant concerns for economic and social historians. It is scarcely any less true of the state, where ...

“He had bought a large map representing the sea,Without the least vestige ufland:And the crew were much pleased when they found it to beA map they could all understand.”(Lewis CARROLL, “The Bellman,”in The Hunting of the Snark, 1876.) RE-CONSTITUTING THE ENGLISH IN 1867 In 1867, Walter Bagehot published his classic work, The English Constitution. As a professional journalist with good contacts, Bagehot knew how political power was implemented on the inside. From this vantage he tackled the mo...

Jacques DalarunGEORGES DUBYThe importance of the work of Georges Duby lies not only its scope but also in its influence, which is not confined to mediaevalists but is known to a wide circle of non-specialist readers. The key to its success lies in the variety of subjects addressed: history of social and economic structures, history of mentalities, of women, of art, of sentiments and of particular events. Another reason is its coherence, which grew increasingly evident as more works were publi...

I In the last decade or so, there has been a marked attempt in geography and urban studies, in the Anglophone academia at least, to think space politically and politics spatially. Notions and concepts that hardly escaped the confines of the fields of political science and theory have now entered, and started to orient to a certain extent, the research agendas of many scholars working in these fields. This, I believe, is good news for it renders the city and urban space as potentially politica...

A few weeks ago I took a friend into the inner city to show her the changes that had been taking place over the past few years. We entered Gandhi Square and as I showed her the memorial stature of Gandhi at the height of his legal career in South Africa, we noticed that a young middle-class man, clearly an office worker, was being chased off a circular bollard where he had sat for a brief rest before his bus arrived. Later, my friend and I sat on a square ventilation shaft with a piece of mar...

The context is the unresolved land and planning disputes between the Bedouin Arabs surrounding the city of Beer Sheva and the Israeli state. The minister asks the indigenous Bedouin in no uncertain terms to leave their ancestors land, where they reside in “unrecognized” (and in the eyes of most Israeli planners “illegal”) villages and towns, and relocate into modernized, legal, and well-serviced localities. Beyond the colonialist disregard of indigenous rights embedded in the minister’s visio...

In then 1960s, U.S. social scientists began a protracted debate about the causes of and remedies for urban poverty, a discussion that accelerated in the 1980s with the realization that new concentrations of poverty were developing. As the poverty research industry matured, it emphasized the role of contagion effects of place and the behavior of the poor in causing poverty, to the exclusion of macro-economic, structural factors. Moreover, researchers and policymakers increasingly saw federal s...

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how culture acts both as an argument for urban improvement and as an evicting agent of “undesirable inhabitants” in the city of Buenos Aires. In fact, certain state-fostered culture cults arise along with social deterioration and increasingly alarming spatial injustice. The hypothesis I intend to develop here is that, although it stems from a supposed spirit of universality, the state-driven cultural policy transforms the city into a unique, special ...

This paper reviews the manner in which a neoliberal political agenda emanating from central government has increasingly infused Irish urban policy and created an entrepreneurial local-authority culture in which urban planning and regeneration policies have been pursued in a highly contentious manner. Specifically, it examines the ways in which the functioning of local-area planning, public-private partnerships in social-housing regeneration and urban gentrification strategies have operated in...

The riots that have repeatedly encircled Paris and ignited other suburban communities around France in the 21st century provide iconic visions of the banlieue as social problem. Powerful images of burning cars, angry youths and social injustice resonate with cinema and social studies that analyze “ces banlieues qui nous font peur”. For many global spectators, the vivid demands of these youths in bleak places far from the promises of Paris, have epitomized issues of space and social justice th...

In this book on Justice and Segregation, I want to return to David Harvey’s book Justice, Nature&the Geography of Difference, in which he challenged scholars to explore the spatial and political forces that produce the convergence of environmental and social phenomena. Harvey called for collapsing the boundaries between social and natural through recognizing human impacts on ecosystem functioning. He also advocated incorporating ecological processes into understanding the transformation of so...

Over the past three decades, cities in Western capitalist countries have been transformed under the policy prescriptions of “neoliberal urbanism”. Neoliberalism’s emergence as a strategic capitalist response to the world profit crisis of the 1970s dramatically restored (finance) capital’s power vis-à-vis labour. But the consequences of the restoration of market rule have extended far beyond the labour process into the very governance and production of urban space. Local authorities and the ph...

A the turn of the 21st Century, professionals and wealthy suburbanites are moving back to central cities attracted by their trendy industrial character, restaurants and clubs, art performances, or streets festivals. Studies of inner city neighborhoods have explained economic growth and development through processes of gentrification, land value, nostalgia, or creativity, which focus on the wealthy newcomers. Instead, I propose to focus on the diverse inner city actors and their ability to cre...

The article provides a survey of the main tendencies of modern architecture in Egypt over the past century, from 1914 to 2014. It argues that an established tradition of borrowing and naturalizing European techniques and aesthetics characterized Egyptian architecture as it entered into the 20th century and continued thereafter. The architectural outcome of the globalizing forces at work in the country has been of marked heterogeneity. Structures of every possible origin and essence, designed both by Egyptian and non-Egyptian architects, coexisted almost side by side. In the 1920s and 1930s, concerns with the fashioning of a national style were gradually replaced by the issue of housing for the unpriviledged, leading to diverse experiments in the field of low-cost and subsidized housing.

After working for almost a decade as an editor of "multicultural" picture books in the United States (at Children's Book Press and Lee & Low Books), Laura Atkins developed a particular interest in how the publication process affects books written by authors of colour (or non-white authors as is more commonly said in the U.K.). Building on previous research, including her article published in "White Privilege and Children's Publishing: A Web 2.0 Case Study,” Write4Children (Web), she here focuses on issues of diversity, representation and storytelling in children’s books. After sharing some of her personal experiences as an editor, she then builds on author interviews, in the hope of ultimately allowing editors to explore their subjectivity and preferences, which shape the publishers’ catalogues. Ses quelques 10 ans d’expérience aux Etats-Unis en tant qu’éditrice de livres « multiculturels » de littérature jeunesse, chez Children’s Book Press et Lee & Low Books, ont amené Laura Atkins à s’interroger sur les effets et contraintes exercées par la publication en tant que « mécanisme » sur les livres d’auteurs de couleur (ou « non-blancs » selon la terminologie adoptée au RoY.A.ume-Uni). Dans la continuité de ses propres recherches (voir "White Privilege and Children's Publishing: A Web 2.0 Case Study,” Write4Children, Web), elle centre ici sa réflexion sur les problèmes de diversité ethnique, de représentation et de narration dans la littérature jeunesse contemporaine. Après un retour sur son parcours professionnel, Laura Atkins rassemble ici les fruits d’interviews d’auteurs dits de couleur, dans l’espoir d’amener ultérieurement les éditeurs et directeurs de collection à se pencher sur leur propre subjectivité.

Wits University Press (WUP), South Africa’s oldest university press, is considered a pioneer in the publishing of African-language literature, due to the publication of the long-running Bantu Treasury Series (later to be renamed the African Treasury Series). Along with the mission presses, local-language newspapers and some educational publishers, this publisher played a part in the development of African-language literature in South Africa. But the press would not have earned this reputation without the commitment of Professor Clement Doke. Inspired by the publication of novels in English by black South African authors, Doke established the series to provide a publications outlet in the local African languages. This paper examines the development and impact of the Bantu Treasury Series, with a focus on the authors and their relations with the series editor and publisher. La publication de l’importante collection Bantu Treasury Series, depuis rebaptisée African Treasury Series, vaut à Wits University Press (WUP), les plus anciennes presses universitaires d’Afrique du Sud, d’être aujourd’hui considérées comme pionnières dans l’édition de littérature en langues indigènes. Au même titre que les presses des missions, les journaux en langue locale et quelques éditeurs scolaires et universitaires, ces presses ont joué un rôle non négligeable dans le développement de la littérature en langue indigène en Afrique du Sud. Le dévouement du professeur et linguiste Clement Doke n’est certainement pas étranger à leur réputation. Inspiré alors par la publication de romans d’auteurs sud-africains noirs en anglais, Doke créa la collection afin de permettre à des auteurs de publier dans les langues africaines locales. Cet article se propose d’examiner l’histoire et l’impact de la collection Bantu Treasury, tout en considérant les relations des auteurs avec le directeur de collection et l’éditeur.

Drawing on previously unpublished interviews with Sarah White and Eric and Jessica Huntley, this article compares the work of two pioneering black publishing houses in Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century, New Beacon Books and Bogle L’Ouverture Press. It places their activities and the publication of specific texts within the context of shifting cultural and political agendas during a period of profound change within British publishing.Whilst providing examples of their joint involvement in cultural and political events, this essay also brings the differences between these two publishers to the fore. These differences reveal the space that has existed since the 1960s for more than one kind of publisher of black interest books in Britain. The activities of New Beacon Book and Bogle L’Ouverture, and those of subsequent generations of black publishers point towards an uninterrupted history of black publishing in Britain, dating back over 40 years. This history is characterised by the unconventional and often controversial approach adopted by each publisher, as discussed here. S'appuyant sur des entretiens inédits avec Sarah White, Eric et Jessica Huntley, cet article compare New Beacon Books et Bogle L’Ouverture Press, deux maisons pionnières de l’édition noire en Grande-Bretagne dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Leurs activités, ainsi que la sélection de textes spécifiques, sont ici replacées dans le contexte des mutations culturelles et politiques survenues au cours d’une période de profonds changements au sein de l'édition britannique.Tout en fournissant des exemples de leur participation conjointe et parallèle à des événements culturels et politiques, l’article met en lumière ce qui distingue aussi ces deux éditeurs, révélant ainsi que depuis les années 1960, le milieu de l’édition en Grande-Bretagne a permis l’arrivée d’éditeurs de livres « noirs » aux styles différents. Les activités de New Beacon Books et Bogle L’Ouverture témoignent d’une histoire ininterrompue de l'édition noire en Grande-Bretagne depuis près d’un demi-siècle. Comme nous le verrons, cette histoire de l’édition noire se caractérise par les approches non-conventionnelles, et souvent controversées, adoptées par chaque éditeur.