Modern Britain

4 Key excerpts on "Modern Britain"

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  The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Twentieth Century

  • Mark Clapson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Many conservative historians thus see the 1980s as the decade that remade Britain: the restructuring of the economy and the wave of patriotism generated by the Falklands War of 1982 restored self-confidence in Britain following the problems of the previous decade. During the 1990s, the long period of Conservative government came to an end, and in 1997 a new political agenda was evident in the rise of New Labour. This last point is an important reminder that most historians never focus completely on one decade in isolation: they look for continuities between decades, and try to identify the consequences of a decade of change in its immediate or medium-term aftermath. The social and cultural innovations now associated with the 1960s, and the economic problems of the 1970s, for example, did not simply begin on the first day of each decade and end on 31 December 1969 or 1979. On modern and contemporary history The twentieth century witnessed the overlap between modern and contemporary history. By the modern period in Britain, historians often refer to the beginnings of mass urbanisation and industrialisation during the mid-eighteenth century, through to a cut-off date during the twentieth century. That cut-off date has been the First World War, the Second World War, and even later, including the present day. ‘Modern’ is a flexible adjective, and the time span associated with it is also moveable. Historians also debate the legitimate temporal beginning of the ‘contemporary’ period. According to John Barnes, this is usefully viewed as the period within living memory for the majority of people. Hence the interwar period by this temporal definition may be viewed within the broad era of ‘contemporary’ history today

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  Contemporary Britain

  A Survey With Texts

  • John Oakland(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  [Some critics, such as Martin Jacques, argue that Britain is] backward looking and nostalgic… What I cannot stomach is the fundamental mistake in [their] interpretation of British history. [They] portray an old Britain with its certainties and a new Britain with a mass of uncertainties. So the culture of old Britain has given way, [they] argue, to doubt and a collapse of the ‘Establishment’.

  This view is false, even if it is fashionable. The history of these islands is one of continuity and change. Many features of contemporary British culture can be traced back hundreds of years, and the centrality of our parliamentary state to the 13th century. When the country has faced economic, social and political challenges, there have always been incremental reforms and various adjustments to structures and our way of life. That is pretty well illustrated from the Reform Acts to the enfranchisement of women; from the creation of the welfare state to membership of the European Union. The British instinct is to respond in a pragmatic way to particular challenges. That is consistent with our political culture.

  Reform Acts

  Acts of Parliament in the nineteenth century to increase the number of people (mainly male) granted the right to vote in elections.

  enfranchisement of women

  The gradual granting of the vote to women, finally achieved for all adult women in 1928.

  welfare state

  Essentially created by the Labour government from 1945, although the earlier Liberal government had already implemented many welfare reforms.

  European Union

  Britain joined the then European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.

  Yes, there has been significant change. Yes, there will continue to be change. We have had to come to terms with the loss of an empire. We have had to think through the consequences of European Union and are still doing so. We are progressively more meritocratic than before.

  Yet the remarkable thing is that there has been no fundamental collapse of our political culture. Our institutions have adapted to the needs of the time. Nor do we have closed institutions. We have open élites, with multiple routes to the top…

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  The Challenge of Democracy

  Britain 1832-1918

  • Hugh Cunningham(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Britain in the 1830s

  The United Kingdom and its governance

  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into existence in 1801. In that year Ireland was added to what had been, since the abolition of the Scottish Parliament in 1707, the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Wales had been linked to England since the sixteenth century. The key characteristic of the political formation of the United Kingdom was that each of the four nations of which it consisted had representation in the Parliament which met at Westminster – and that none retained its own distinctive representative institutions, for, like the Scottish Parliament before it, the Irish Parliament was abolished with the Act of Union. But Ireland, although now part of the United Kingdom, was not included within Great Britain, a term reserved for England, Scotland, Wales and a scattering of small offshore islands. British history, the theme of this book, is therefore the history of England, Scotland and Wales. Ireland, however, cannot be ignored in British history, for the course of British political history was frequently affected and sometimes determined by Irish events, just as British society was affected by the presence of large numbers of Irish people. The term ‘United Kingdom’, moreover, must even from the beginning of our period have a question mark attached to it, for, already in the 1830s, there were powerful voices in Ireland demanding repeal of the Act of Union. And if Ireland demands a place in a ‘British’ history, so also does the ‘British empire’, whose expansion was a crucial ingredient of the British experience between 1832 and 1918.

  England was in every respect the dominant element within the United Kingdom, and became increasingly so. As the table below shows, compared to its population, England was over-represented in terms of number of MPs in the immediate post-reform period, and Ireland was under-represented. In the course of the nineteenth century this imbalance between population and number of MPs was to be rectified, at least as far as England was concerned: by 1901 its share of the UK population had risen considerably, while that of Ireland, hard hit by the potato famine of the 1840s, had dropped; within Great Britain, too, England’s share of population had risen from 80.6 per cent in 1832 to 82.5 per cent in 1901. It is not surprising, in view of this increasing concentration of population in England – and with population went power and wealth – that many English people tended to equate ‘England’ with ‘Britain’. Lord Palmerston, who was Anglo-Irish (and Prime Minister), could not understand why Scots should object to being called English.1 ‘England’ and ‘the English’ were, as we shall see, frequently used by contemporaries when they meant to refer to Britain and the British. On the whole the Scots and the Welsh offered few protests, though in 1914 the following notice appeared in the personal column of The Times : ‘Englishmen!’ it read, ‘Please use “Britain”, “British”, and “Briton”, when the United Kingdom or the Empire is in question – at least during the war.’2

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  History and Cultural Theory

  • Simon Gunn(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Since the early 1990s, however, they have begun to engage, more or less tentatively, with the idea of modernity. In the Anglo-American world historians of science led the way, followed by social and cultural historians. Nevertheless, the concept of modernity has been received differently in particular national historiographies. In the case of British history, for example, recent historians have tended to emphasise the continuity between pre-modern and modern periods, so that the issue appears one of explaining a ‘deferred modernity’ (Conekin et al. 1999, 20). In the United States modernity is rendered invisible by its apparent ubiquity; not only has the United States epitomised modernity for much of the twentieth century, it has no existence as an independent nation state that is not in some sense ‘modern’ (Novick 1988). In parts of Continental Europe, by contrast, notably post-fascist and post-communist states, the question of modernity has an urgency that is directly related to the sense of rupture caused by political upheavals and the necessity of coming to terms with a problematic past (Hobsbawm 1995 ; Bessel 1996). Yet this differentiation on national lines is paradoxical, for while the nation-state is often understood as the creation of modernity, the concept of modernity itself assumes processes that are transnational and even global in scope. Much of the importance of modernity, and its heuristic value, reside in the fact that the concept overrides local and national contexts and encourages the historian to think about processes and frameworks that are simultaneously more wide-scale and fundamental (Bayly 2004). The aim of this chapter is to explore the concept of modernity from an historian’s perspective. In the process I shall look at some of the key debates in social and cultural theory about the modern and postmodern, though not as an end in themselves

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