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The article discusses the psychological conditions and factors, which affect the relations of white and coloured people in Great Britain. A substantial proportion of English people hold antipathetic or prejudicial ideas and attitudes towards coloured people, and are averse to any fairly close social contact with them. English people are prejudiced more often against persons of African origin than against other coloured nationalities, and that such prejudice is generally more wide spread if accompanied with the idea or suggestion of closer physical proximity. English people fear losing social status through association with coloured individuals. Individual and unpleasant experiences tend inevitably to augment this situation and to make the coloured persons concerned less willing to seek fresh white contacts, which possibly would modify their hardening views about English people in general. Emotive factors usually play a larger part than in the English case in the development of the coloured person's racial attitudes. The coloured person who remains, or who resides in this country, has a longer experience of English life and social interactions, and consequently both a greater spur and a greater opportunity, in some cases, for making psychological adjustment and social accommodation.

Social history in Great Britain ceased long ago to be a description of manners and customs although traces still survive as, for example, in a war-time best-sellers reference to the history of people with the politics left out. It has now become the history of men and women in their social relationships and groupings. As such, the subject derived from economic historians driven to seek explanations of the causes and consequences of economic change in fields outside their own immediate province. Two examples within the field of interest of this Conference may serve to illustrate some limitations of the traditional approach to the period which experienced the transition to industrialism. First, for forty years or more economic historians have been investigating the mechanisms of eighteenth-century population growth. Defective data have been interpreted with such sophistication by students concerned to relate demographic change and economic development that, an increase in of population seems the only remaining certainty today. Second, historians have been providing contradictory answers to the question, on the standard of life of the working classes in the late decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries.

The article explores the validity of some of the assumptions commonly made about the family and social life of old people, drawing on part of the information from an inquiry conducted on this subject. Concerns about the growing number of old people springs partly from the assumption that many of them are isolated from their families and from the community. The main purpose of a study of kinship now being carried out is concerned with the structure and functioning of kinship in Great Britain. This study is of a random sample of people of pensionable age in the borough. Its purpose is to provide data, by means of intensive interview, about the families of older people living in a mainly working class area and to relate problems of ill-health, retirement, income, companionship and so on, to family structure and relationships. The chief finding was that for the great majority of older people the domestic unit and the primary social unit was the three or four generation segment of an extended family in one, two or more households in close proximity. It was impossible to understand the social situation of the elderly except in this context.

Rural depopulation is a world phenomenon associated with industrialization. A great many factors are involved. The standards of providing a variety of public utility services and extending social organizations in villages with persistently decreasing population are compared with those in villages of increasing population. The attitudes of residents in villages where population has persisted for a long time differ considerably from those of people of the "outside world," and in these villages little interest is taken in local government, education, or the organization of local social activities. Employer-employee relationships are often strained. Many reasons contribute to the initial decision to leave the home in the country. No nation in the world has a higher proportion of paid workers in agriculture than the United Kingdom. This gives workers greater mobility and, since there are fewer owner-occupied holdings, less chance of promotion. Once emigration has begun, it tends to generate its own momentum-fewer people can support fewer services, and fewer services will tend to make the area less attractive. Mechanization would have created unemployment without the substantial rural depopulation, but the rate of loss today is felt to be out of proportion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]