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This book provides the historical background to the rise of the Big Society, surveying the history of voluntarism over the last century. Politicians and commentators have long bemoaned the supposed decline of civic life, fretting about its health and its future. In fact, the real story of voluntarism over the last hundred years has not been decline, but constant evolution and change. Whether we use the terms charity, philanthropy, civil society, non-governmental organisations, the third sector or the Big Society, voluntary endeavour is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of British public life. The scholars featured in this collection show how the voluntary sector's role in society, and its relationship with the state, has constantly adapted to its surroundings. Volumtary groups have raised new agendas, tackled old problems in new ways, acted as alternatives to statutory provision and as catalysts for further government action. They have emerged out of citizens' concerns, independent of government, and yet have remained willing to work with politicians of all persuasions. By surveying the sheer extent and diversity of the sector since the start of the First World War, the book demonstrates that voluntarism not only continues to thrive, but is also far larger than any political agenda that may be imposed upon it.

The Union of the Crowns in 1603 is the cornerstone of the modern British state, but relations between England and Scotland did not always run smoothly in the following centuries. This volume examines how the neighbouring British nations regarded each other from 1603 to 1900. Why did this union last when many others in Europe fell apart? How close did it come to unravelling? What were the strengths and tricks that preserved it? As aggregations of individuals, as economies, or as systems of law and politics, how did England and Scotland mesh? Political, economic, legal, intellectual and literary historians examine the first three centuries of Union, including the reception of James in the south, the Civil Wars, the background to parliamentary union in 1707, the spoils of Empire, and the Victorian climax. Together with its companion Anglo-Scottish Relations, from 1900 to Devolution and Beyond, the volume provides a vivid account of two nations, which have often differed, remained very distinct, yet achieved endurance in European terms.

The chapters in this book trace the changing relationship between Scotland and England following the unifying reign of Queen Victoria, through the debates over devolution, and into a future where the Union will be under continuing pressure to evolve. Historians, social scientists and lawyers investigate the personal, social, financial and constitutional tensions between the Scots and the English, both before and after devolution, and ask have the Scots and the English been driven apart, or brought more closely together by this reconstruction of the Union?

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of women's involvement in British political culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is based on extensive archival research, but also engages with recent feminist theories in the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology. The volume looks at both rural and urban experiences of politics. The author throws new light on women's political activities and challenges many traditional assumptions about contemporary politics. The book gives fresh insights into the Reform Act of 1832, pays attention to continuities in political practice and ideas, and brings focus to the primary significance of parish politics within the day-to-day activities of the middling and gentry classes.

Exploring the role of credit is vital to understanding any economy. In the past two decades historians of many European regions have become increasingly aware that medieval credit, far from being the preserve of merchants, bankers, or monarchs, was actually of basic importance to the ordinary villagers who made up most of the population. This study is devoted to credit in rural England in the middle ages. Focusing in particular on seven well-documented villages, it examines in detail some of the many thousands of village credit transactions of this period, identifies the people who performed them, and explores the social relationships brought about by involvement in credit. The evidence comes primarily from inter-peasant debt litigation recorded in the proceedings of manor courts, which were the private legal jurisdictions of landlords. A comparative study that discusses the English evidence alongside findings from other parts of medieval and early modern Europe, the book argues that the prevailing view of medieval English credit as a marker of poverty and crisis is inadequate. In fact, the credit networks of the English countryside were surprisingly resilient in the face of the fourteenth-century crises associated with plague, famine, and economic depression.

This volume explores the commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar and Admiral Lord Nelson's death over the past two centuries. It includes the celebrations of 2005, which saw hundreds of official, commercial, and popular events celebrating and commemorating the bicentenary of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson. Leading historians of Britain and France reflect critically on complex notions of remembrance, celebration, honouring, and commemoration. Taking historical snapshots of the commemoration of Nelson at his death, a century later in 1905, and in contemporary Britain, the contributors ask: who drives the commemoration of historical anniversaries and to what ends? Which Nelson, or Nelsons, have had a role in national memory over the past two centuries? And who identifies with Nelson today? Focusing on Britain, but looking also at imperial and French contexts, the papers consider how memoirs, history writing, visual and modern media and museums, and official and unofficial interests, contribute to keeping and shaping memory. As the changing manner of memorializing key moments in national history allows historians to study cultural meanings and interpretations of national identity, the contributors to this volume exhort the wider profession to engage critically with ‘public history’. This work is about the history of memory and commemoration and will be of interest those with general interests in naval, maritime, cultural and public history.

Recently there has been an explosion of academic and popular interest in the history of how Britons have thought about their Empire. This book focuses on the ways in which the intellectual history and political thought of modern Britain have been saturated with imperial concerns. The chapters address thematic questions about size and scale, race, colonial emigration, and the ideological uses of the classical tradition, questions that are crucial for understanding the historical roots of British imperial thought. There are also studies of figures central to understanding the character of intellectual debates about the British Empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries: Edmund Burke, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Harold Laski. The book also shows how an awareness of these histories of the imperial past can provide numerous lessons for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of much contemporary political thinking about empire and imperialism.

This book explores the questions of what counted as knowledge in Victorian Britain, who defined knowledge and the knowledgeable, by what means and by what criteria. During the Victorian period, the structure of knowledge took on a new and recognizably modern form, and the disciplines that we now take for granted took shape. The ways in which knowledge was tested also took on a new form, with oral examinations and personal contacts giving way to formal written tests. New institutions of knowledge were created: museums were important at the start of the period (knowledge often meant classifying and collecting); by the end, universities had taken on a new prominence. Knowledge exploded and Victorians needed to make sense of the sheer scale of information, to popularize it, and at the same time to exclude ignorance and error — a role carried out by encyclopaedias and popular publications. The concept of knowledge is complex and much debated, with a multiplicity of meanings and troubling relationships. By studying the Victorian organization of knowledge in its institutional, social, and intellectual settings, this book aims to contribute to our consideration of these wider issues.

An in-depth and wide-ranging academic investigation of the reception of the Tudor period in the modern world, this book includes studies by many of the leading scholars in their fields, and considers the modern appropriation of the Tudors in art, music, architecture, design, religion, public history, social history, film and television, and internet networking sites. A noteworthy scholarly trend in recent decades has been a growing interest in the ways in which societies utilise the past as a cultural resource, as a repertoire of quotable designs and styles, as a vantage point from which to frame political and social critiques, as a source of identities, and as a refuge from present-day anxieties. There has been a great deal of academic interest, for example, in the reception of the ancient world in modern Western culture. Likewise, a growing body of scholarship is devoted to the study of medievalism, the images, and ideas that attach to the Middle Ages in the post-medieval imaginary. It is striking that, in stark contrast, very little attention has been paid to the cultural appropriation of the Tudor age, despite the pronounced and enduring popularity of the Tudors within the popular historical consciousness, not only in Britain but also in many other countries. Indeed, the Tudors supply many of the signature icons of Britishness and the British monarchy around the world.