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This thesis investigates how cultural authority was asserted, contested and negotiated in early twentieth-century Britain. It does so through the case study of Chinese art collector John Hilditch (1872-1930), a man with no formal training who attempted to pose as an expert on art, culture and the public value of museums. It examines Hilditch's confrontations with authorities at Manchester City Art Gallery, and the British and Victoria and Albert Museums to ask how far the democratisation of high culture enabled individuals like Hilditch to disrupt orthodox social and cultural hierarchies. It builds on the scholarship on the interwar battle of the brows by moving to an understudied area, art collecting and museums, to show how social and cultural hierarchies were actively contested and negotiated in fraught, often public, circumstances. Anxieties over class and 'taste' fuelled the museum elite's attempt to maintain cultural standards, but cultural distinction, expertise and authenticity were unstable categories in the 1920s, which could be forged depending on social and cultural contexts. This thesis demonstrates that Hilditch's attempts to be taken seriously as a cultural authority demanded that museum curators, dealers and intellectuals redraw and make explicit to the public as well as a professional audience the boundaries of 'expertise', as well as 'authentic', 'quality' and 'tasteful' objects. As such, it shows that unorthodox characters played an active, rather than merely symbolic, role in the establishment of conventional social and cultural norms. This thesis argues that studying marginal characters is crucial for furthering our understanding of the past. Furthermore, it contributes to recent debates on the 'messiness' of history by using one life as a springboard to expose the instability of macrohistorical categories such as civic culture, Orientalism, the collector and class. This thesis addresses five overarching research questions. First it assesses the tension between the ways Hilditch and the museum elites framed his art collection to demonstrate that elite 'taste' was difficult to fabricate, thereby exposing the limits of democratisation. Next it examines Hilditch's negotiation of inexpert and provincial networks, such as the local press and publishers, local art and science societies and small provincial museums, to consider what constituted cultural expertise and how amateur claims to this authority impacted the museum elite. Following on, it analyses Hilditch's attempts to fabricate his collection's authenticity and quality to highlight competing notions of 'value'. Next this thesis engages with Hilditch's attempts to evaluate the role of museum officials and curators as public servants, to ask how these roles were policed and understood by different groups. Finally, in exploring Hilditch's Chinese Palace Temple, the thesis considers how notions of 'authenticity' intersected with ideas about culture, race and imperialism. Together they demonstrate how Hilditch destabilised and, by extension, remade the cultural elite's hierarchy.

Since the conflicts in the Gulf and Bosnia in the 1990s, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, a large sociological and political literature on British Muslims has appeared. It is often a contention of these works that Muslims in Britain did not identify, and were not seen in terms of, their religion prior to the time of the Rushdie affair. This thesis contends that, contrary to these arguments, religion has been a significant referent for the claims-making of Muslim communities in England since essentially the time that those communities settled (the early 1960s). This is demonstrated through the consideration of Muslim claims-making and elite practice and policy in a number of thematic areas, including education, employment, social services, and party politics. Building on these insights, it is suggested that such misconceptions about English Muslim social and political mobilisations are attributable to the absence of an historical perspective upon British multiculturalism. This thesis, particularly in two concluding chapters, attempts to correct this absence, offering a broader consideration of British multiculturalism in the studied period. It suggests that – rather than a relatively coherent ideology or policy approach – British multiculturalism has been an institution, produced in an ad hoc manner through the largely uncoordinated actions of a large number of actors, often lacking shared aims, at both local and national level. Although subject to changes over time, this institution has observed a number of consistent ‘rules’ in the form of concepts shared by actors involved in it (such as the ‘ethnic group, ‘community leadership’ and ‘special needs’). Finally, it is suggested that multiculturalism in Britain has endured primarily due to a process of ‘path dependence’ through which many actors have ‘learned’ how to operate within the rules of the institution, and may owe their existence of prestige to it.

The thesis is a political history and a history of ideas. It is an account of social feminism in the early twentieth century as it sought to extend the ideal of equality to the family and social citizenshp to women in their family roles. Although first-wave feminism has been seen as predominantlv concerned with equality in public life. I argue that women's position in the farmly especially as mothers raised questions for the women's movement whch were addressed in a number of ways. At a time when state solutions to social problems seemed increasingly convincing this contributed to a shift in the relationshp between families and the state and suggests that organised women's advocacy may have played a greater part in creatlng a political consensus for state welfare provision than has been recognised. Ths forms the context for social-liberal feminism after 1918, exemplified by the Edinburgh Women Citizens' Association. The papers of the EWCA add a new dimension to knowledge of the women's movement in the inter-war period. They show an ambitious autonomous women's organisabon active at a time when feminism is believed to have been in almost terminal decline. They gave a strong sense of what citizenshp meant to newly enfranchsed women and the purposes to whch thev wished to put their new rights: their view of a distinctive women's citizenship drew on both a Victorian tradition of women's activism and on ideas wbch had been developed in pre-war socialist feminism. As a claim to influence in previously wholly male fora it was embedded within the discursive strengths and limitatlons of women's traditional arenas of power/knowledge, family and morality. My approach to these issues is through an analysis of primary texts including The Economic Foundations of the Women's Movement (1914) by Mabel Atkinson and Women: An Inquiry (1925) by Willa Muir, and secondary sources, mainly from recent feminist scholarship. My discussion of the interwar women's movement in Scotland is based on the papers of the EWCA (1918-1939). The thesis reflects on approaches to political theory and to history and argues that categorisations of the political and of feminism create problems of analysis. Ths calls for a theoretical framework whch situates political ideas and strategy within the disourses of gender of the time rather than in a privileged position outside and counter to it: I draw on aspects of cultural theory to develop this argument. A problematic relationshp between familv interests and women's equality runs through, and is made visible through women's movement history. This opposition is formed by the dichotomous positioning of private and public and of difference and equality and hence of the categories family and state. Atkinson's articulation of the demand bv women for love (sexual relationships and children) and work (economic and personal independence) names a refusal to resolve tlus opposition through a separation between those women who marry and have children and those who have public careers. Attempts to renegotiate the gender settlement as it affects private and family life have proved to be a great deal more difficult to carry through than is creatng a greater role for women in the public sphere, hard though that also may be. The repeated identfication of feminism with equality as access to public life is a consequence of the relative success of arguments from equality, but questions about how a 'male standard' creates difficulties for women in public life continue to be relevant. Redrawing the conceptual boundaries whch form ths tension calls for not a reassertion of difference or equality- but a parallel assertion of both: that equality is brought to the family and that at the same time the differences associated with family and caring roles are insistently brought into public life. In conclusion I comment on how the opposition between family responsibilities and gender equality has become one of the 'self-evidences' of our age and that it poses one of the most central questions for philosophy and politics: how to reconcile social and indvidual interests.