After John Buchan, Nevil Shute. In the long progression of popular British writers who have woven stories around the social facts and cultural values of empire, a progression which extends from Charles Kingsley and G. A. Henty through Paul Scott and, arguably, Ian Fleming, Nevil Shute occupies a distinguishable and important place. Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt. This essay offers the elements of such an analysis and suggests some lines along which further inquiry might proceed.

For at least a decade before his death in January 1960, Nevil Shute had been the best selling of English novelists. Altogether, his nearly two dozen works of light fiction have sold over 14 million copies. When he died his books were earning him an income of about $175,000 a year. Such extended popularity can hardly have been fortuitous. Without venturing too far into the psychology of literary response, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shute must have gauged accurately the issues and situations which, imaginatively presented, would interest his readers, and further, that he must have expressed in his work a pattern of values which conformed generally to their moral predispositions (or at least did not offend them.) Hence it should prove worthwhile to take a close and comprehensive look at his themes and ideas on the premise that they can tell us something useful about his audience.

At the time of the Restoration, Charles II seemed to give every indication that his first and most important alliance as King of England would be with Spain. Contemporary circumstances were such that this policy would have been logical, and Charles's behavior in 1660 encouraged Europeans to expect it. Yet, within a year of his return, Charles had not only failed to forge the Spanish alliance, he had entered into a marriage-alliance with Spain's rebellious province, Portugal. The events surrounding this apparent change of attitude encouraged the Spanish government and others to misinterpret Charles's intentions. At best, the new King was seen as a weak monarch who was lured into a comfortable dependence on Spain's natural enemy and self-appointed protector of Portugal, Louis XIV, King of France. At worst, Charles was accused of duplicity, of falsely courting Spain while maneuvering into an anti-Spanish coalition being constructed by France. In both interpretations, Charles was believed to have been seduced by the French King very early in his reign. The Portuguese alliance raises the question of the nature of Charles's foreign policy immediately after the Restoration. What were his relationships with France and Spain? What did he intend by the Portuguese alliance? The key to understanding his behavior lies in his treatment of Spain, and from an examination of his Spanish policy in light of the controversial alliance, it is possible to see both reason and consistency in Charles II's initial diplomacy.

The Whig educational proposals of 1839 are regarded as an important step in the centralization and growth of state control over the education of English working-class children. Introduced by Lord John Russell on February 12, the plan called for state supervision of education by a committee of the Privy Council, the erection of a nondenominational state normal school and two model schools, state inspection of all schools in receipt of the grants established in 1833, and a new system of allocation of those grants based not on the size of the voluntary contributions raised by the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) but on the local needs as ascertained by any “reputable” school society. Historians have viewed the proposals as the inevitable outcome of popular pressures brought to bear on government. Unable to resist their own Erastian urge to attack the privileged position of the church, and persuaded by Brougham, who figured prominently in the 1833 grant and had unsuccessfully proposed a national system as recently as the autumn of 1837, or alternatively by the Radicals J. A. Roebuck and Thomas Wyse, themselves supporters of the Central Society for Education's plans for a national secular system of education, the Whigs are regarded as having responded to popular, reformist demands. “In 1839,” wrote Halevy, “the cabinet yielded.” England was last among the Protestant countries in the matter of primary education; Roebuck, Wyse, and Brougham had failed in their separate efforts to promote the cause; and the government could do little other than propose a remedy for 3 million uneducated children.

To many of his contemporaries and to most of the historians who have subsequently dealt with him, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768), represents unredeemed mediocrity, or even the buffoon, in power. Lord Hervey ridiculed his “egregious folly and formal absurdity”; Horace Walpole described him as “a Secretary of State without intelligence, a duke without money, a man of infinite intrigue, without secrecy or policy, and a Minister despised and hated by his master, by all parties and Ministers”; Lord Waldegrave concluded that he “wants both spirit and capacity to be first in command: neither has he the smallest particle of that elevation of mind, or of that dignity of behaviour, which command respect and characterise the great statesman.”

More recent commentators, while often readier to look for redeeming characteristics in the Duke, have likewise tended to come to negative assessments. Basil Williams dismissed Newcastle as “woolly-minded and touchy … an essentially weak man without clear conceptions of his own”; Sir Lewis Namier wrote that “his nature and mind were warped, twisted, and stunted” and that “there was unconscious self-mortification in Newcastle's tenure of office”; J. H. Plumb portrayed a “dithering and twittering” Newcastle, a minister of unprepossessing intellectual gifts and given to excessive complaining and anxiety.

All these criticisms must face, however, one serious and recurring counterargument. Newcastle held major office for almost forty years – as Secretary of State (1724-54), as First Lord of the Treasury (1754-56, 1757-62), and as Lord Privy Seal (1765-66). Moreover, as early as 1717 he had been appointed to the Privy Council and been made Lord Chamberlain.

Students of inter-war foreign relations have long recognized the role played by the British public's disapproval of the Treaty of Versailles in the burgeoning of the appeasement policy of the 1930's. The peace settlement, once generally viewed as “stern but just,” came to be perceived by all political parties and by the public at large as unduly harsh and punitive in its treatment of Germany. Hitler's rearmament of the Fatherland, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the occupation of the Sudetenland were all significant attacks on the Versailles system which most groups in Britain had come to consider unworthy of defense.

The influences which brought the Treaty into disrepute were various. For one thing, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations tended to foster an increasingly sympathetic attitude towards Germany. Then, too, the problems of the British economy led to an awareness that the stability of Britain's former trading partner in Central Europe was essential to her own prosperity and to a corresponding desire to soften those features of the peace settlement which might be impeding German recovery. In addition, John Maynard Keynes' brilliant polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), not only made the case that the reparation clauses were unfair and impossible of fulfillment, but, with its withering portraits of the peacemakers, also tended to undermine respect for the Treaty as a whole. Finally, criticisms of various aspects of the peace settlement by elite groups ranging from bankers to bishops of the Church of England contributed heavily to the public's increasingly negative perception of the entire Treaty.

The history of religion in Britain—as distinct from church or ecclesiastical history—is making an impressive comeback in the consciousness of historians, with important implications for British cultural and social history. Not least affected is the history of Britain in the twentieth century. Fifteen years ago, the well-known social historian Alan Gilbert published his The Making of Post-Christian Britain, which soon became the standard account of the secularization of British society since the eighteenth century. Taking off from careful statistical surveys of Christian church membership and participation that he had done in two earlier books, and looking for explanation to a very broad range of cultural, economic, and social factors, Gilbert presented an argument that has seemed so powerful as to be an almost irresistible account of the apparent fact of the secularization of Britain. More recently, however, both religious historians and sociologists of religion have begun to question not only Gilbert's premises and argument, but also the very concept of secularization. The result of this questioning, exemplified by the books here reviewed, is a major controversy concerning the recent history of religion in Britain.

This article responds to the pieces collected in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies, all of which seek to take some notion of the politics of the public sphere and either apply it to, or break it upon the wheel of, various versions of British history during the post-Reformation period. It seeks to bring the other articles into conversation both with one another as well as with existing work on the topic.

This article opens up a new perspective on market liberalism's triumph in the late twentieth century through an examination of the political battles that were fought in Britain over the regulation of homework. Ubiquitous in the late Victorian era, this form of waged labor was curtailed by Edwardian wage regulations but resurged in the 1970s as a result of competition from low-wage economies abroad and fast-changing consumer tastes. Alongside growing use of homeworkers in consumer industries, new information technologies made it increasingly possible for some forms of professional work to move into the home. This article explores the debates that swirled around these different forms of homework, pitting antipoverty campaigners, feminists, and activists against ministers, employers, and civil servants. It shows how Conservative and New Labour governments failed to recognize the structural similarities between Victorian-style “sweated” labor and the emerging world of telework, freelancing, and self-employment, and how the intellectual excitement generated by Britain's transition toward a postindustrial future dovetailed with the New Right commitment to deregulation and the creation of “flexible” labor markets. A brief comparison with homework in the United States underlines the value of local, particular histories to our larger understanding of ideological change in modern societies.

Immigration was essential to trades reliant on fashion and high skill in London around the turn of the sixteenth century. This article explores the patterns of migration to the city by continental goldsmiths between 1480 and 1540 and the structure of the communities they formed. It argues that attitudes to migration within the London Goldsmiths’ Company, which governed the trade, were complex and shifted in response to evolving national legislation. A social network analysis of the relationships between alien masters and servants indicates how the alien community changed and adapted. Taking a view across the traditional late medieval and early modern period boundary allows for a deeper understanding of how attitudes to migration and to migrant communities changed as London's population began to grow.

Few in Britain were suprised by Quaker opposition to the Great War; the Society of Friends had traditionally condemned war and violence. Many, however, were startled by the nature and intensity of Quaker resistance, which far exceeded anything they had previously attempted. One possible explanation for the militancy of the Society's anti-war stand certainly would be the prospect of enforced military service, a contingency that had not seriously confronted Friends since the seventeenth century. However, this article will argue that the attitudes and actions of Quaker war-resisters were most significantly influenced by a revitalization of the peace testimony that had remained dormant for nearly a century. In her study of Victorian Quakers, Elizabeth Isichei has already noted that the “patterns of world history have made pacifism, which was a peripheral importance in the nineteenth century, one of Quakerism's … central beliefs, and, for some, its most essential element.” The aim here is to show how this development not only transformed British Quakerism, but also gave the Society of Friends—a religious body of less than 20,000 members—a crucial role in shaping the first significant peace movement of the modern era.

Cecil Roth (1899–1970), the dominant figure in the writing of English Jewish history in the mid-twentieth century, served as president of the Jewish Historical Society of England nine times. In his valedictory presidential address in September 1968, which he titled “Why Anglo-Jewish History?” Roth defended the enterprise—and the society and himself, by extension—against critics who considered it “petty and unimportant” and believed that “after all that has been written on the subject there is nothing more to be discovered.” In his apologia, Roth referred to discoveries made by members of the society that proved that “industrious cultivation of our own modest cabbage patch” contributed to knowledge of both British history and Jewish history in general. In Roth's metaphor, “the inconspicuous inlet of Anglo-Jewish historical research” sometimes branched out into “majestic and…unexplored rivers.” But, in closing, he admitted frankly that what motivated his choice above all was “the pleasure of the thing” rather than high-minded ideals.

The temperance efforts of Joseph Chamberlain during the 1870's have been a largely ignored facet of the great Birmingham politician's career. The latest of his biographers, Dr. Peter Fraser, did not feel that the temperance aspect of his subject deserved even the attention of a citation. Perhaps the fact that Chamberlain's program of temperance reform was so easily defeated explains this general sketchiness of historical treatment. It is the contention of this paper, however, that the defeat of Chamberlain's proposals would exercise an important — if malevolent — effect on the future of the Liberal party.

These temperance proposals of Chamberlain exhibited many of the characteristics described in the Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government literature. While mayor of Birmingham, Chamberlain created a public house inspectorship when he discovered that the average constable could not be trusted within the walls of a drink shop. As part of his vision for central Birmingham, the Corporation next purchased 120 public houses. Although civically owned, these houses were leased to private management. And finally as a fledgling M.P. in 1877, Chamberlain argued for the complete municipalization of the drink trade. He now felt that the city should become a monopolist in both ownership and management of alcohol. Socialization of the drink traffic would offer two advantages. In the first place, abolition of the profit motive would lessen drunkeness; the customer would no longer be pressured into “drinking for the good of the house.” Secondly, elimination of over-entry and excess competition through public ownership would make the municpalized trade a lucrative source of civic revenue.

The Great Reform Act has received a great deal of much needed attention in the last decade. One mode of getting at its significance has, however, been largely ignored. The mode usually followed, particularly recently, has been to examine what the Whig framers of the Act thought they were about, and then, by means of electoral analysis, whether they achieved their object. The two questions are not necessarily the same, of course. For example, most historians of the period would now agree that Professor D. C. Moore, however valuable and stimulating his contribution to the debate, is wrong about Whig intentions. Some may suspect he is also at least in part wrong about the electoral system which grew out of the Act. That, however, has yet to be proven. Yet, even if we could know all about the reformed electoral system, we would still not know all about the impact of the Great Reform Act. For in history what is important is not only what actually happened, but what people of the time believe happened. It is to this sort of question that I want to turn my attention in this paper. Because one of the best ways to appreciate the great significance of the Reform Act is to examine the change it wrought in the attitudes of politicians, particularly of Tory politicians.

Undoubtedly, the two most important of the recent works on the Act are the books of Professors Brock and Cannon. Essentially, both represent a vindication of the main outlines of the old “Whig interpretation.” Thus, both Brock and Cannon see the Act as a response to mounting pressures out-of-doors, the culmination of a long historical process, and an important turning point in the emergence of a more liberal and broadly based political system. Nor does either doubt that the Act marked an important concession to the middle classes, or that it deserves its old designation of “Great.”

Studies of post-1945 Britain have often concentrated upon political and foreign policy history and are only just now beginning to address the question of the restructuring of the British economy and domestic policy. Civil aviation, a subject of considerable interest to historians of interwar Britain, has not been given a similar degree of attention in the post-1945 era. Civil aviation policy was, however, given a very high priority by both the 1945-51 Labour government and its Conservative successors. Civil aviation represented part of the effort to return Britain to a peacetime economy by transferring resources from the military into the civil aircraft industry, while at the same time holding for Britain a position of pre-eminence in the postwar expansion of civil flying. As such, aviation was a matter of great interest to reconstruction planners during World War Two, and was an important part of the Attlee government's plans for nationalization.

Civil aviation was expected to grow rapidly into a major global economic force, which accounted for the great attention paid it in the 1940s and 1950s. Its importance to Britain in the postwar era lay in the value of air connections to North America, Europe, and the Empire and Commonwealth, and also in the economic importance of Britain's aircraft industry. In a period when the United States was by far the largest producer of commercial aircraft, the task of Labour and Conservative governments was to maintain a viable British position against strong American competition. What is particularly interesting is the wide degree of consensus that existed in both parties on the role the state should play in the maintenance and enhancement of this position.