Manchester University Press blog

Ben Bernanke and Wall Street Executives

2015-11-13T09:03:00.000+00:00

By Dr Oonagh McDonald CBE

In a widely quoted interview with USA Today, Bernanke said that ‘It would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.’ He makes it clear that he thought some Wall Street executives should have gone to jail. However, ‘ the Fed is not a law enforcement agency. The Department of Justice are responsible for that, and a lot of their efforts have been to indict or threaten to indict financial firms. Now a financial firm is of course a legal fiction; it’s not a person. You can’t put a financial firm in jail.’

Going after firms is precisely what the Department of Justice has been doing in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It was nothing new. For some decades, prosecutors have preferred to go after companies rather than individuals, partly because of the alleged difficulties in prosecuting individuals, but also on the grounds that this was an attempt to change the ‘corporate culture’ so as to prevent future crimes, The result has been ‘deferred prosecution agreements’ and even ‘non-prosecution agreements’ in which companies agree to undertake various reforms to prevent future wrong doing. Such agreements became the mainstay of white-collar criminal law enforcement. There is little evidence that such an approach, including the imposition of heavy fines, does actually change the behaviour of companies. It did, however, bring in billions of dollars ($220 bn by March 2015) and kept government housing policy, which required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy ever-increasing proportions of subprime loans from the lenders, out of the picture in any cases brought against the lenders.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Department of Justice brought many high profile case against leading banks, but these were settled out of court, as they resulted in the kind of negotiations which were roundly condemned by Judge Jed Rakoff. He described just going after the company is ‘both technically and morally suspect’, since the prosecutors can only threaten to prosecute the company if there is sufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that fraud has been committed, and, if that can be established then the managers concerned should be indicted.

Such condemnation from a judge and from the politicians and media led to a radical change of direction announced by the deputy Attorney General in her Memorandum on September 9^th.. Sally Quillian Yates announced that in the future, the Department of Justice will turn its attention to individual accountability, since it is one of the ‘most effective ways to combat corporate misconduct is by seeking accountability from the individuals who perpetrated the wrongdoing’. She argued that this ‘deters future illegal activity; it incentivizes changes in corporate behaviour, it ensures that the proper parties are held responsible for their actions, and it promotes the public’s confidence in our justice system’. Ben Bernanke’s remarks are certainly in line with the changing views about law enforcement.

However, that is not the fundamental issue concerning the past. It would, of course, have been possible to bring criminal charges against senior executives if they could be shown to have been guilty of fraud as individuals, but the charges were always against the company. The real question is: if senior executives are to be held accountable, then the laws and regulations should be clear and of course in force at the time to ensure that administrative actions or prosecutions could take place. For Bernanke to say that some senior executives should be in prison implies that he considers that it was possible to do under the regulations or the laws in existence at the time, but that the regulatory authorities did not refer any case to the Department of Justice nor take the administrative actions open to them at the time or in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Bernanke was in a position to ensure that regulations were in place so that senior executives could be called to account., but his speeches and the full minutes of the Federal Open Markets Committee indicate that he did not see the risks in the growth of the subprime market and weak regulation. Indeed, Bernanke seemed unaware of the extent of subprime lending and its impact on the economy or even on the banking sector. Even as late as May 2007, he stated, we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or the financial system’. In June 2007, he announced a review of the rules governing lending practices and supervision. It was too little, too late. Looking back later, Bernanke admitted that ‘stronger regulation and supervision aimed at the problems with underwriting practices and risk management would have been more effective in containing the housing bubble. The Big Five investment banks voluntarily agreed to be supervised by the SEC under a special, undemanding regulatory regime. Inadequate regulatory frameworks and an unwillingness to take action against individuals meant that senior executives would not, and often could not be taken to task for their alleged misdeeds.

Dr Oonagh McDonald is author of Lehman Brothers: A Crisis of Value (978-1-7849-9340-5)

Peter Barry, author of the landmark MUP book, Beginning theory, reflects on how his twenty year old creation came to be

2015-11-12T13:37:00.000+00:00

By Peter Barry

I am delighted to be asked to do a blog piece on ‘BT at 20’, and also struck by an echo of how BT started, around 1982. At the time I was teaching at LSU College in Southampton. We never had classes on Friday afternoons, and the Friday lunchtime custom of academic staff was a visit to a local pub. On one occasion, I had settled down with a pint and a ploughman’s at The Wellington in Park Road, when Paul Gardner, our convivial HoD, asked casually, if I might be interested in devising an undergraduate course in literary theory. Being young and naïve, I expressed enthusiasm, and Paul said, as if casually, ‘Could you do it for Monday?’ My weekend ended there, and on the Monday I gave him the outline syllabus for a theory course. It went through a fast-track validation route that Paul had set up, and by the following September I was teaching it, as part of a new degree scheme. It was the first undergraduate course in literary theory in the UK, and in due course (pun intended), it became Beginning Theory. On Friday last week, more than thirty years after that lunchtime in The Wellington (still naïve, but no longer young), I got an email from MUP inviting me to do a blog piece. I had already agreed to do it before scrolling down to the punch-line, which read, as I should have anticipated, ‘But we will need it by Monday’.

Over the weekend, I got out my BT file from way back then, and took a look. There are several readers’ reports on the BT proposal from circa 1993, all of them pretty snooty about the possibility (perhaps even the desirability) of writing about literary theory in a way that students can understand. The idea for the book had come to me in 1992, when I encountered a woman just outside Sussex University, on the platform of Falmer Station. She was reading one of the two (postgraduate) student-directed books about literary theory which then existed. She was in tears, and I had the distinct thought that it must be possible to write about theory without provoking that reaction. It’s a bizarre idea, I know, and (with the obvious exception of Terry Eagleton, who instigated it) it never really caught on, except with (at most) half a dozen people worldwide.

When I write, I talk to myself (which is OK, so long as you say the right things). One of the things I often tell myself is ‘It’s not extreme enough – make it more extreme’. When I come back to a piece that I thought I had pushed to an extreme, it usually feels more normative than it did when I was writing it, but (I hope) it never just feels standard, run-of-the-mill academic normal. Being extreme in the context of literary theory means using ordinary language, explaining fully, finding the example that works, then working it all the way through, and never pretending to be a full believer in what I only half believe.

Anita Roy, who was the MUP commissioning editor in the early 1990s, sent me the bundle of readers’ reports, saying that I should use anything in them that seemed helpful. She came to LSU shortly afterwards at my invitation to do a talk to the Humanities Research Group, which I had set up with Dr Jane McDermid (now Reader in History at Southampton University). No official letter had yet been sent, and I had assumed that MUP wasn’t going to do the book. During the meal afterwards, at a pizza house in Rochester Place, Anita Roy said something that made me ask in surprise ‘Do you mean you’re commissioning it?’ and she looked puzzled and said, yes, of course we are. So that was that - I’ve been with MUP ever since, and have never wanted to be anywhere else.

The chapters began with the typed out lectures which by that time I had been delivering on the theory course for several years. The period of expanding them into a book is vivid in the memory. For over a decade, my room in college had been spacious and beautiful, with a pair of lofty windows overlooking the Avenue in Southampton. In the early 1990s – the era known in higher education as ‘massification’ – student enrolment at colleges and universities greatly increased. New staff had to be appointed, and my room, with several others, was sliced into two. Over the summer I wrote in the corridor, listening to the noise of builders drilling through to make extra doors and flimsy dividing walls. I had the feeling that I wanted to be somewhere else, and by the time the book was published in 1995 I had moved to Aberystwyth University.

Anyone who writes a high-selling academic book has to pay a price – it is the sin for which there is no absolution. But when I lecture, and I see people nodding with understanding, I feel that I can want nothing better. As a writer and teacher, the only quality I value is clarity – as Ezra Pound said, clarity is the writer’s only morality. I have no interest in accolades from professors, and the ones I like come from students worldwide in emails. The nicest always tell the same basic story – I was enjoying English, and then in Year 2 we were hit by the theory course, and I was about to give up the subject – tears are often mentioned – then someone told me about your book. There was one email I wanted to have quoted on the front cover – it was from America and it read in full ‘This book is the real fucking dope – I’m pissed my profs didn’t tell me about it sooner’. Others come from readers of humbling erudition – one explained the three transmission errors I had made in a single-line Latin quotation – we silently corrected them, and I imagined the pain my Latin teacher would have felt on seeing them. As we have gone through numerous re-prints over twenty years, errors we corrected a decade earlier sometimes rise from the dead to haunt us, going unnoticed through two or three reprints before we realise they are back, and need to be weeded out all over again.

At a deeper level, revising and updating a book of one’s own seems straight-forward, in theory, but in practice re-entering the mind-set of a quarter of a century ago is nearly impossible. I feel about for the way back into a certain line of argument, but am often defeated. It’s easier to write a new book than to revise an old one, though I am pressing on anyway towards the goal of the 4^th edition. I’m sometimes asked how it feels to have written a book that everyone seems to know about, and I say that it feels nice. All I mean is that I like the fact that people know my name – it’s as elemental as that. Sometimes I have to confess that I’m not the author of illustrated books with titles like How to Photograph Your Girlfriend, and I imagine that my namesake may occasionally have to explain that he is not responsible for the faults of Beginning Theory. I remain extremely grateful for the twenty-year support and friendship of Commissioning Editor Matthew Frost at MUP, and likewise that of John McLeod, ex-LSU, and now Prof at Leeds University, who is co-editor of the Beginnings series. Being from Liverpool, my lifelong ambition was to be a paperback writer, and I’m pleased that it has happened. Also, I remain constantly optimistic that, as it says in the Beatles song, ‘I'll be writing more in a week or two’.

Peter Barry is Professor of English at Aberystwyth University and is the author of Beginning Theory (3e) (ISBN 978-0-7190-7927-6) and Reading Poetry (ISBN 978-0-7190-8851-3)

Happy Halloween!

2015-10-30T11:01:00.000+00:00

No tricks, just treats from MUP this Halloween! Enjoy 20% off the above reads.

To take advantage of this spooktacular discount simply return your completed order form to our distributors at the address below, or contact them on +44 (0)1752 202301, or by emailing orders@nbninternational.com and quoting discount code OTH568.

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Offer ends 13th November 2015.

Refractions of Bob Dylan

2015-10-27T09:29:00.002+00:00

To celebrate Bob Dylan coming to Manchester, we are offering Refractions of Bob Dylan at a special price of £10*!

To take advantage of this fabulous discount simply return your completed order form to our distributors at the address below, or contact them on +44 (0)1752 202301, or by emailing orders@nbninternational.com and quoting discount code OTH569.

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Open Access Week - James Baldwin Review

2015-10-22T10:50:00.001+01:00

By Justin A. Joyce and Douglas Field

James Baldwin Review is proud to announce the publication of its inaugural volume. James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual, peer-reviewed journal that brings together a wide array of critical and creative work on the life, writings, and legacy of a groundbreaking 20^th century American author, James Baldwin. Extending discussion of Baldwin’s writing and its impacts beyond academia is one of the core aims of JBR. Towards this end, the journal is published online, available for free, in an open access partnership between Northwestern University, Manchester University Press, and the University of Manchester Library.

Although James Baldwin's work has started to receive considerable scholarly attention, and though he is cited widely on the Internet in epigraphic and aphoristic ways, his legacy has been far from secure. While there are smatterings of his archive at the Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture in New York City, for example, the collection is less significant than his peers, including that of Richard Wright, an African American writer with whom he is frequently compared. Spurred on by two important collections of essays on Baldwin's work—D. Quentin Miller's 1999 volume, Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, and Dwight McBride's collection of essays, James Baldwin Now, published a year later—Baldwin scholars began to discuss in earnest ways how we might build on this important work, while also helping to cement the author's place as a central figure in 20^th century American culture. JBR sprang out of a perceived need to create an established forum for the exciting new scholarship that focused on the author, as well as encouraging participants at international conferences on Baldwin to develop their ideas (London 2007; Boston 2009; Montpellier, 2014; and Paris, 2016), in well-written, jargon-free prose that might appeal to non-academics, too. The aim of the journal, which carries echoes of The Henry James Review (Johns Hopkins University Press), one of Baldwin's literary heroes, is to gather together new and established critical writers in order to continue and develop the important scholarly work of previous generations, but also to look afresh at his less well-known work and to reassess his continuing political and cultural relevance.

It was determined from the outset that the journal would be a collaborative project; that it would involve a number of scholars and artists in order to reflect the multi-faceted nature of Baldwin's life and work. Approximately six years ago, Doug Field, a noted Baldwin scholar whose new book All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin is fresh out from Oxford University Press, formed a partnership with Dwight A. McBride and Justin A. Joyce, both with The Graduate School at Northwestern University. After nearly two years exploring different revenue models for founding and funding a journal, it became clear that with funding from our respective institutions (University of Manchester and Northwestern University), we could create our own model, thanks to the pioneering approach to Open Access publishing both at the University of Manchester Library and also at Manchester University Press. The Open Access model was not only a financially viable model, it’s more egalitarian ethos also fit well with the spirit of Baldwin's work, which continues to demand attention, not only from the Academy, but from a wide cross-section of society across the globe, which is a fitting tribute to this self-styled transatlantic commuter.

We are very proud to be able to announce our journal in conjunction with Open Access Week, and to join the global community of scientists, researchers, and scholars who are working to limit the barriers of access to knowledge by publishing in Open Access forums and repositories. Publishing our journal under a Creative Commons open access license allows Baldwin scholars, students, and enthusiasts an accessible forum for sustaining interest in the life, works, and legacies of this vital 20^th century American writer.

For a humanities journal, and specifically one concentrating on such a prophetic and inspiring voice, our aim is perhaps slightly different than the core of scientific journals utilizing Open Access to spread "knowledge". Opening the doors of access to current research can also touch us in profoundly emotional ways. As Baldwin himself once wrote, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” As Baldwin scholars, our push is to make as widely available as possible the voices, views, and lives that move us, to empathy, to understanding, to new ideas about ourselves, each other, and our places in the world. Words that move us, in short, to action.

The inaugural volume of JBR contains a mix of formal and informal tones, of experienced writers and new voices. These essays are accompanied by an award-winning graduate student essay, journalistic and autobiographical reflections, and a review of significant scholarly works on Baldwin. Our first volume also proudly features new words and new works to examine and explore, including an interview with Baldwin that has not previously been published in English and an essay on “The Hallelujah Chorus,” Baldwin’s largely forgotten collaboration with Ray Charles. Volume 1 also contains extended discussions of the importance of music to Baldwin’s life and work, along with instrumental and vocal performances on the JBR website.

Volume 1 (2015) of JBR can be found here:

http://jbr.openlibrary.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/jbr/issue/view/1

JBR is currently accepting submissions for its second volume (2016). The call for papers and information about submissions can be found on our website:

http://jbr.openlibrary.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/jbr/index

Celebrating Women's History

2015-10-08T11:37:00.000+01:00

Here at MUP we are getting excited about the release of Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan. And to celebrate, we are offering 20% off a selection of our women's history titles.

To take advantage of this fabulous discount simply return your completed order form to our distributors at the address below, or contact them on +44 (0)1752 202301, or by emailing orders@nbninternational.com, and quoting discount code OTH561.

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The Sociology of Unemployment: A choice between hard labour or destitution?

2015-08-20T16:58:00.000+01:00

Tom Boland and Ray Griffin, authors of The sociology of unemployment have a new article in The Irish Examiner this week...Since 2012 social welfare in Ireland has been radically reformed in ways that are not widely known or understood. The Government’s Pathways to Work policy has been consistently linked to the Action Plan for Jobs. Yet, the relationship between welfare and the economy and the consequences of welfare reform for individual lives has been subject to very little scrutiny.

Read the full article.

More about The sociology of unemployment

Oratory and the Labour Leadership Election

2015-08-06T12:02:00.001+01:00

By Andrew S. Crines,
British Politics Lecturer
University of Liverpool

One of the most fundamental necessities of a potential leader is the ability to communicate a political message to as broad an audience as possible. The construction of political discourse is the life-blood of the political process given it enables actors to persuade the electorate to lend them their vote. The ability to orate (deliver) a speech facilities this process, but also the rhetoric (content) of a speech must be appealing to the broader as well as immediate audience. As the speech travels into the broader demos, the orator may expect his/her impact to be felt amongst supporters and non-supporters alike. How these oratorical and rhetorical techniques function are explored in some detail in the edited collection Labour Orators from Bevan to Miliband, recently published by Manchester University Press (along with its sister volume, Conservative Orators from Baldwin to Cameron). See below for a special discount on both these titles.

The current leadership election is, of course, no different. The core strategy of each of the four candidates is to leave a positive impression upon the electorate, which in this case is the Labour membership and associates. The four contenders each have distinctive styles which they have used to try and convince the electorate to nominate them as their first choice. For example Liz Kendall has set out an empirical argument of how she believes Labour needs to change in order to address the concerns of the broader electorate concerning Labour’s electability. It is driven by the pragmatic need to embrace more closely the centrist voter, whilst arguing certain tenets of Labour principle may need to be sacrificed. Andy Burnham, in contrast, presents a more centre-left vision which accepts some changes are needed, however the core thrust of what comprises Labour values are vital in informing the future renewal strategy. This is similar to Yvette Cooper, however her style of delivery has a forceful edge which, potentially, could be problematic should she become leader. Finally Jeremy Corbyn’s rhetorical style aims to place a more fundamental interpretation of Labourism at the heart of Labour’s future, with a staunchly value-driven approach. Of these contenders, both Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn offer a distinctive alternative to the voters. Each have an entirely different vision of Labour, and how it can appeal. Burnham and Cooper each speak to the renewal strategies outlined by Miliband, however their distinctiveness comes in which policies they believe are deserving of the greatest attention.

Ultimately, these Labour orators are each striving to make an impression with asymmetrical results. Kendall’s campaign has not received the support which the Blairites may have been forgiven for anticipating. Similarly, Cooper’s campaign has not gained the momentum which a long-serving Labour cabinet member may have expected. Only Burnham and Corbyn have garnered sufficient prominence within the campaign for them to be in with a realistic chance of securing the top job. However, it must be remembered that second preferences are key in determining the outcome, and so it would be foolhardy to rely upon a single measure for anticipating the outcome. Despite this, Corbyn’s oratory has been most effective because his style inspires his audiences to listen. His is an epideictic style of oratory, with emotive rhetoric. Furthermore, he is supported by figures such as Owen Jones and Tony Mulhearn, which positions his rhetoric within a traditionalist left position. In concert with the £3 supporters, Corbyn’s momentum has developed to such an extent that it challenges the mainstream.

Looking at Labour oratory more broadly, it is unsurprising to find that Corbyn’s rhetoric rests within the Bennite tradition. The Bennite tradition believes in advancing socialist causes through direct action outside of the Parliamentary route. During the Benn period, this was through groups like the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy who, following the abolition of the Proscribed List in 1973, were able to mould the CLP’s towards a more radical interpretation of socialism. This is a very different tradition to Labour’s moderate left (such as Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle), who use the institution of Parliament to drive social change and promote a more egalitarian society.

Furthermore, the Corbynite perspective offers a very different interpretation of political power, which sees electoral victory as secondary to ideological cohesion. This conception of power is rooted far more within the demos, which believes the capacity to change society rests within the power of protest. This contrasts with Bevan, Foot, Castle, Burnham, Cooper, and Kendall’s belief that to change the direction of society towards equality necessitates political power expressed through the Parliamentary system.

As a consequence, although Corbyn’s message may be appealing to the current Labour electorate, it is unlikely to resonate with the broader electorate because it doesn’t include them. Corbyn’s conception of power is alien to the centrist voter who infrequently engages within the political process. However, given Burnham, Cooper, and Kendall each embrace ideological and rhetorical perspectives which have more successful traditions within Labour history, they have greater potential in making Labour electable again in 2020 or 2025. That said, whoever emerges as leader will have a very difficult five years ahead if Labour is to begin making its way back to the number of MPs required to secure a majority.

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Labour orators from Bevan to Miliband
Edited by Andrew S. Crines and Richard Hayton
978-0-7190-8980-0 £65.00

Conservative orators: From Baldwin to Cameron
Edited by Richard Hayton and Andrew S. Crines
978-0-7190-9724-9 £75.00

THE RESPONSE TO ‘ISLAMIC EXTREMISM’ THAT GOVERNMENTS DON’T WANT TO HEAR

2015-08-03T16:13:00.002+01:00

By Sarah Glynn, author of Class, ethnicity and religion in the Bengali East End

Almost every day we hear the question asked: why are people turning to ‘Islamic extremism’? But in mainstream discussion, no-one mentions the elephant in the room - or rather no longer in the room. The rise of Islamist politics, both reformist and revolutionary, is a relatively new phenomenon; so what has changed that has allowed this to happen? My historical and sociological research into immigrant politics, and especially the politics of the Bengalis in London’s East End, leads to an answer that few politicians want to hear. Islamism has been able to attract people looking for an escape from the brutality and banality of capitalism because the socialist alternative that would once have claimed them has been systematically traduced and undermined. The rise of Islamism has been made possible by the decline of socialism – which has been under constant attack from the same powers who publicly bemoan Islamist dominance. (And this is still going on, as the deliberate marginalisation of the secular and leftist Kurdish movement in northern Syria so poignantly demonstrates.) The 2002 article in which I first made these arguments has been

widely quoted, including in a paper commissioned by the UK Government; but my

inconvenient argument is never taken up or even discussed.

Of course, the process of this political evolution has been complicated; and, as the Bengali case history demonstrates, these realignments are a product of developments in progressive left politics as well as of the apparent triumph of neoliberal capitalism. Comparisons are often made between the Bengali East End and the Jewish East End of an earlier generation. That Jewish East End nurtured a tradition of active secular left politics, including strong support for the Communist Party. The Communist Party was a dominant influence on the political mobilisation of the early Bengali immigrants too, as it was in anti-colonial and post-colonial movements more generally. But, as in other similar movements, the popular-front politics promoted by the Communist international allowed socialist aims to be postponed into an indefinite future while activists focused on the ‘first stage’ of national liberation. For the people from East Bengal, their struggle for independence from the British Empire, which took place when the immigrant community numbered only one or two hundred, had been riven by religious sectarianism; but the bloody battle for an independent Bangladesh in 1971 was fought in the name of a secular socialist republic. The more radical left put aside their differences with the nationalists in the joint fight for independence, but when that independence was won, the left found themselves side-lined. This was true among the East-End Bengalis too. The left had been so busy campaigning for independence and organising day to day community work that their socialism had been left on the back burner.

These first London Bengali activists had built up a strong practice of grass-roots political organisation, but it was focused on the practical issues that beset a poor immigrant community facing increasingly racist immigration restrictions. It failed to aspire to make more ideological change.

Meanwhile, wider progressive politics was undergoing a cultural turn that downplayed the role of economic forces and class conflict and prioritised the politics of identity. In the East End, Black Radical activists from Race Today were instrumental in establishing the Bengali Housing Action Group that helped solidify campaigning along ethnic lines; and growing racism was countered by Bengali youth groups. These mobilisations achieved real improvements to people’s lives and to Bengali self-confidence, but they could not build bridges between different ethnicities as had been so deliberately achieved by the class-based politics of the 1930s. Nor could they address the fundamental economic inequalities that transcended different ethnic groups.

Black Radicalism opened a Pandora’s Box of separatist organisation, and as this approach became institutionalised into political multiculturalism, these different organisations were encouraged to compete with each other for portions of government funding. Lingering traces of radicalism were tamed and incorporated into the system. Meanwhile, the East End, like other immigrant areas, remained a significantly deprived area, and the Bengalis remained a disproportionately deprived group.

While the turn to religion can be understood as responding to the need for an ideological counter to a system that produced such deprivation, religious identity has also been encouraged by multicultural policies that have increasingly regarded people as members of religious groups and awarded prominent roles to religious organisations and leaders. Some left organisations have also been complicit in this, blurring the line between campaigning against religious discrimination and actively promoting religious groups. The Stop the War Movement and George Galloway’s Respect that emerged out of it allowed the popular front put together to oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq not just to eclipse much of their left ideology but also to strengthen political involvement via Muslim (and Bengali) identity.

The impact of Western foreign policy on Islamist radicalisation has been widely acknowledged, but the growth of British Islamism preceded 9/11. Islamist movements were already well established even before the boosts given by the perceived neglect of the suffering of Bosnian Muslims and the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. For young Bengalis growing up with limited prospects, Islamist idealism and the international brotherhood of the ummah (or Muslim community) can be seen as an inspiring alternative to the pointless selfishness of capitalist materialism – and an escape from the temptations of drugs and gang wars. The mainstream reformist Islamist groups around the East London Mosque have strengthened their position in the wider Bengali community through a well-ordered structure and active participation in grassroots community-work – aping the tactics of communist organisations. More revolutionary groups have been active in colleges and universities.

The inverse relationship between strong left movements and strong political Islam has long been understood by Islamists, just as it has by Marxists. They recognise each other as incompatible ideological systems, and they know that both will compete for supporters from the same disgruntled victims of capitalism. Among immigrants of Muslim background, just as in the countries of the Middle East, the effective counter to Islamic radicalism has been historically demonstrated to be a strong secular socialist movement. Try telling that to David Cameron.

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BOOK LAUNCH Grown but not made

2015-06-29T12:11:00.002+01:00

Congratulations to Edward Juler, who launched his new title Grown but not made last week at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Edward Juler speaking at the event

This title is the first detailed critical history of British Modernist sculpture’s interaction with modern biology. Discussing the significant influence of biologists and scientific philosophers such as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Julian Huxley, J. S. Haldane and Alfred North Whitehead on interwar Modernist practice, this book provides radical new interpretations of the work of key British Modernist artists and critics, including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Nash and Herbert Read.

Find out more about the book.

Emile and Isaac Pereire

2015-06-17T15:21:00.000+01:00

By Helen Davies

Why do the lives and careers of Emile Pereire (1800–75) and his brother Isaac (1806–1880) fascinate us? Certainly, their achievements as railway entrepreneurs and bankers were extraordinary, but the answer also lies in the place and the religion in which they were born, the circumstances of their birth, and the dynamic era in which they lived. The French Revolution determined the course of their lives.

The Pereires were Sephardic Jews, among the first generation of Jews emancipated when, in January 1790, they became free and equal citizens of France. Although the Revolution benefited them in many ways, it also helped to bring Bordeaux, the city in which they were born, to its knees. This eighteenth-century

trading power-house lost the Atlantic slave trade on which its vast mercantile success had depended, and it felt very deeply the impact of constant war waged by France’s enemies, especially Britain.

The Bordeaux Sephardic community was, however, close-knit and socially cohesive, providing support for those of its members who became impoverished. The Pereires were beneficiaries of Sephardic welfare throughout their childhood, raised in a single parent, observant, Jewish household by their mother, a devout Sephardic woman.

Moving to Paris in the early 1820s as young adults they were introduced to the economist and political philosopher, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, a significant meeting which had an immediate impact on Emile and Isaac. On Saint-Simon’s death they became ardent followers of the movement which took his name, Saint-Simonianism. The Pereires contributed to a system of ideas which focused upon the importance of technology to industry, and which emphasised improvement of the lives of the poorest in society. Individuals would be classed according to their capacities and compensated for their works,

according to the Saint-Simonians. The Pereires could thus be described as “early socialists”.

Saint-Simonianism generated ideas and projects which became very lucrative, and were to put the Pereires among the foremost capitalists in Europe. The sheer scope and spectacular nature of their business enterprises are sufficient to grasp our attention. Following their introduction of the first passenger rail line to France (in 1837) they went on to establish some of the most important railways in Europe, in Italy, Switzerland, Spain and the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as in France. To finance these enterprises they founded the first investment bank of any size in Europe, the Crédit Mobilier, which they replicated in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Rumania, Spain and the Ottoman Empire. Their shipping company, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, carried the first regular mail and

passenger services between France and North America. They were significant urban developers, their Compagnie Immobilière constructing for the Baron Georges Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine, huge swathes of Paris’ right bank. The Pereires also operated industrial laundries and companies distributing gas lighting, providing horse-drawn public transport and taxi services.

Their business interests generated enormous wealth and their style of living was

commensurate with others of France’s grande bourgeoisie --- an elaborately decorated mansion on the rue du Faubourg SaintHonoré; a château outside of Paris at Armainvilliers; a seaside resort at Arcachon; extensive collections of paintings and sculpture; extravagant entertainments. Their political association with and support for the Emperor Napoléon III, who had come to power after a coup d’état in 1851, was crucial to their business success, a relationship which had its murkier side. When the Crédit Mobilier failed in 1867, taking with it the savings of many small shareholders, this exacerbated a view popular in some circles that the brothers were corrupt, shady, buccaneers, intent on making themselves wealthy at the expense of poorer people. The truth was much more complex. Nevertheless, endless legal battles embroiled them.

Their personal story, while fascinating in its own right, also shows the dynamic change in the French economy over this period. It highlights the ideas which contributed to its shaping, and the equally radical transformation of French society and politics.

Emile and Isaac Pereire is available to buy now.

MUP to acquire forward collection from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

2015-06-02T09:11:00.000+01:00

Manchester University Press is pleased to announce that it has acquired 58 forward titles from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Earlier this year, Bloomsbury Academic took the decision to cease commissioning new book projects in the areas of academic Politics, International Relations and Sociology. MUP will engage the former Bloomsbury Senior Commissioning Editor, Caroline Wintersgill, to oversee the smooth transition of forthcoming titles already under contract through publication under the MUP imprint. This follows a strategic decision by MUP, which has a strong reputation within the Humanities, to increase the size and scope of its Social Science list.

Jonathan Glasspool, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Academic & Professional said, ‘We’re very pleased to have reached an agreement with Manchester University Press. The list will find a good home in MUP, which has a high-quality publishing programme in Politics and other Social Sciences – from monographs and edited collections to textbooks for course use. The decision will help us to invest further in core areas of academic publishing, on the back of our best year ever’.

Frances Pinter, CEO of Manchester University Press said, ‘MUP is thrilled to take these projects forward. The synergy of the books with our own publishing programme couldn’t be better. We greatly appreciate the editorial care taken by Bloomsbury in developing these projects and look forward to working with these excellent authors. The press has a commitment to marketing its books aggressively and creatively, and its books are distributed around the world (in the Americas, by Oxford University Press).’

About Manchester University Press:

Founded in 1904, MUP is the third oldest and third largest University Press in England, holding a global reputation as a publisher of international excellence. Focusing on the Humanities and Social Sciences, MUP publishes on average 160 new titles a year,16 journals and an active backlist of over 1,000 titles. With landmark titles such as Beginning Theory and acclaimed series such as the Revels Student Editions, MUP focuses on delivering independent thinking of the highest quality to a global audience, while continually seeking new ways to ensure that our publishing output is distinctive, innovative and responsive. We have actively led on applying new business models that facilitate Open Access for books as well as journals, working with outside partners and funding bodies. MUP has also partnered with the University of Manchester to develop Manchester Open Library (MOL). MUP’s innovative publishing has been recognised through the winning of many prizes. Our books are available increasingly in a variety of ebook formats and a major backlist digitisation project is underway.

Contact Details: Dr Frances Pinter,

frances.pinter@manchester.ac.uk; www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

About Bloomsbury Academic & Professional:

Bloomsbury Academic & Professional division has grown rapidly since its inception in 2008, and specialises in the humanities, social sciences, law and tax. Output of titles and services is over 1,400 per year. The division includes the active imprints of Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Professional, Methuen Drama, Arden Shakespeare, Hart, Fairchild Books, and the historic imprints of Berg Publishers, Bristol Classical Press, Continuum, and AVA Books. The division was winner of the IPG Independent Publisher of the Year Award and Frankfurt Book Fair Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year in 2013, and won Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year in both 2013 and 2014 at The Bookseller Annual UK Industry awards. Within the division, we publish many world-leading writers including Nobel laureates. A focus for the division is expanding its digital revenues. In addition to several thousand ebooks, we publish a rapidly-increasing range of digital subscription services, including the award-winning Berg Fashion Library, Bloomsbury Professional Tax and Law Online, the Churchill Archive, Drama Online, and Bloomsbury Collections.

Contact Details: Jonathan Glasspool, jonathan.glasspool@bloomsbury.com; www.bloomsbury.com

BOOK LAUNCH The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’ Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland

2015-05-27T11:34:00.000+01:00

***Author Professor Robert Savage is available for interviews in advance***

Friday, May 29th, 6pm

Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin

The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’ Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland, by Robert Savage, Professor of the Practice of History at Boston College, uses recently released archival material from the BBC and a variety of UK government archives to explore the contentious relationship between broadcasting officials, politicians, the army, police and civil service from the outbreak of violence through to the 1980s.

Professor Savage completed the new publication while a visiting research fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute in Trinity College Dublin. The book will be launched in Trinity Long Room Hub at 6pm on Friday, May 29^th, 2015.

Focusing on the incessant wrangling between political elites, civil servants, military officials, broadcasting authorities and journalists about what should and should not be featured on the BBC's regional and national networks, Professor Savage considers how the BBC’s broadcasts complicated the ‘Troubles' by challenging decisions, policies and tactics developed by governments trying to defeat a stubborn insurgency that threatened national security.

In many cases the anxiety and controversy created by these political skirmishes challenged the ability of the medium to accurately inform citizens of important events taking place, thereby undermining the BBC's role as a public service provider, according to Professor Savage.

The book illustrates that as the ‘Troubles’ escalated, the BBC was attacked, threatened and bullied, by a variety of actors but did its best to stand its ground and maintain editorial independence and journalistic credibility.

Key Points:

· In spite of the infamous broadcasting restrictions put in place in 1988, professional staff remained determined to provide the public with informed news and information about the conflict. Broadcasters resisted government efforts to silence voices that, although controversial, were critical to comprehending and eventually resolving a long and bloody conflict. The broadcasting ban was seen as despotic by many broadcasters who, with the support of senior staff, cleverly worked around it by using sub-titles and then hiring actors to read the words of Sinn Féin politicians. Reporting on ‘the Troubles’ became somewhat surreal as talented actors including Stephen Rea and Ian McElhinney found work dubbing the remarks of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

· The BBC in Northern Ireland slowly evolved to become more independent and less deferential to the Unionist Government at Stormont. By the late 1960s its managers and editors understood the need for an independent editorial posture and became more critical of the politics, policies and pronouncements of the Unionist Government.

· Labour and Conservative Governments alike tried to pressure, censor and bully the BBC both in Belfast and London. These governments were convinced that the BBC coverage of the turmoil in Northern Ireland undermined their efforts to defeat terrorism. These governments were acutely aware of the power of television to damage the image of the United Kingdom at home and abroad and struggled to succeed in winning the ‘propaganda war’.

· The national network knew little about the complexities of Northern Ireland until the beginning of the campaign for civil rights began to gain traction in the province. By providing informed, critical coverage of events the BBC helped undermine a regional parliament that had long governed without consensus.

Professor Savage commented: “Throughout the conflict British governments tried to shape the way in which television depicted the struggle against paramilitaries, especially the Provisional IRA. However, its relentless presence undermined government efforts to present a simple picture of the forces of law and order trying to defeat savage terrorists hell-bent on a campaign of murder and mayhem. All those involved in the conflict hoped to produce a narrative for both domestic and international audiences to justify their role in an increasingly bitter and violent struggle.”

“The propaganda war that ensued created much consternation for officials in London, Belfast, and Dublin who understood the conflict presented a real and immediate threat to social order. Rules, regulations and policies that tried to suppress, shape or ‘spin’ coverage of the conflict were intended to marginalise extremists. Governments were acutely aware of the power of television to encourage sympathy or support for the very organisations they sought to destroy.”

Professor Jürgen Barkoff, Director of Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute commented: “The Trinity Long Room Hub is proud to have supported, through its Visiting research Fellows programme, such a groundbreaking book. Professor Savage’s stay at the research institute was an enriching and highly stimulating experience for everyone involved and we are particularly pleased that new collaborations developed out his time with us such as the special edition of the journal Éire/Ireland, co-edited with Professor Christopher Morash from the School of English.”

Media Contact:
Fiona Tyrrell, Press Officer for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin | tyrrellf@tcd.ie | + 353 1 8964337 and + 353 87 6169056

Jack Dunn, Director, Office of News & Public Affairs, Boston College| jack.dunn@bc.edu | + 1 617 552 3350

About Robert Savage:

Robert Savage is Professor of the Practice of History at Boston College. He completed his latest publication while a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in 2012. Other publications include A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972

(2010), Sean Lemass: a biography (1999 revised and expanded edition 2014), Irish Television: the Political and Social Origins (1996). He is currently co-editing a special edition of the journal Éire/Ireland with Christopher Morash, Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity, and is writing a chapter on film and the broadcast media for the four volume Cambridge History of Ireland edited by Thomas Bartlett.

Making oneself at home: domestic life in the colonies of the British Empire

2015-05-11T11:48:00.000+01:00

By Dianne Lawrence

The people over the road are moving out, the whole kit and caboodle: the chairs and beds, the IT paraphernalia, cat-basket, books, tele’ and lawn mower. In the year I’ve lived here I’ve been aware of at least half a dozen such moves. Once an aquarium left and a drum kit moved in, though thankfully that was at the other end of the street. No sooner will this lot of vans and over-loaded cars drive away than the incomers will show up and carry in a set of belongings that are at one and the same time identical to the outgoings items and yet, utterly different. The items may be the same, but the assemblage and its meanings will be unique to that household.

I use the word ‘belongings’ in the preceding paragraph because I think that most accurately describes our relationship with our ‘stuff’. To speak of ‘possessions’ suggests it’s a one way arrangement, and fails to make due allowance for the power we grant to our objects, particularly those in our homes. They are an expression of our subjectivity, but because we set them within a mesh of associated practices they have agency in constructing our identity. They perform a mediating function in the circumstances of our lives, but they’re not impartial in that mediation.

It was an interest in such processes of domesticity that prompted my investigation into the home-making practices of a specific sort of British women living in colonies of the British Empire (Genteel women: empire and domestic material culture, 1840-1910). The women concerned were members of social elites, who adhered to a set of values, a highly nuanced form of knowledge known as gentility. Such individuals deemed themselves to be in a position of superiority, elevated above those around them, who were, by definition, considered to be ‘vulgar’. Genteel values were expressed through modes of behaviour in conjunction with material means. Put simply – they were accustomed to having access to, and using, a lot of ‘stuff’. Their ‘belongings’ were critical in negotiating the circumstances of their lives. How, I questioned, had such women not merely survived, but actually prospered when faced with the rigours of and, by their terms of reference, material deprivation of colonial life?

I wanted to see how their physical environments impacted on their cultural landscape. I identified genteel women who lived in the temperate zones of Aotearoa/New Zealand, south Australia and southern Africa and in the sub-tropical and tropical regions of northern Australia, India and West Africa. Selecting the geographical and temporal range – c1840-1910 - permitted inclusion of women living in long-established British communities in India, the expanding and consolidating colonies of southern Australia and New Zealand and in newly emergent settlements of northern Australia and West Africa.

All the women I wrote about had relocated to set up homes in the company of a man to whom they were related by either blood or marriage. Their menfolk were working ‘out in the colonies’ – be it in a military, commercial, administrative or agricultural capacity – and one of the women’s primary functions was to support the men in their endeavours. Certainly his successes or failures would have been hers, but so too her contribution could develop and extend – or, horror of horrors, actually undermine their joint enterprise.

With so much hanging on their domestic management how had these women gone about not just setting up home, but actually making themselves feel at home? Where did they source all that complex material culture they held so dear? I chose to investigate their dress, living rooms, gardens and food management because they were the four areas seen by contemporaries as being the quintessential elements of genteel womanhood.

I started with such questions as: how did they get hold of a new corset, a set of dinner plates, living room curtains or seeds for the garden, when a thousand miles or more and an ocean away from the retail riches of nineteenth century Britain, and what strategies evolved when one simply could not get hold of such items? The answers proved illuminating and a complex picture emerged, with gentility – both its ideology and expression – proving to have been responsive and adaptable to the many environmental changes it encountered. The women not only brought to bear a whole range of cultural competences acquired in their previous homes, they also developed different forms of genteel behaviours and practices as befitted their new location. Most striking of all, it’s evident that many women didn’t just become competent in the colonial site they developed a ‘sense of self’ in situ and became firmly attached to their new homes.

Perhaps it’s because the Spring sun is shining on my own garden that my thoughts turn to the work I did on the colonial women’s gardening practices. Initially I had my doubts as to whether I would be able to locate sufficient traces of this area of their homes, for by their very nature the gardens are long gone. My anxieties proved groundless, for the women so relished their gardens that they wrote about them constantly, and in great detail, in their letters and journals. Sarah Courage, who lived in New Zealand for 26 years, wrote ‘Whatever the employments of the day, I always contrived to find a little spare time for the flowers’ and Adela Stewart, who had been a complete novice on her arrival in the country subsequently reported ‘At the end of our 4^th year I had become an enthusiastic gardener, and so continued, finding far more pleasure in growing flowers, vegetables and trees than in any other occupation.’ In addition to the women’s personal writing I was able to draw on seed and plant catalogues from Britain, Australia and India, gardening manuals from India and South Africa, memoirs from Nigeria and paintings and photographs made in Australia, India and New Zealand. There is ample material to underpin the argument that the spaces and practices of the women’s gardens had agency for the expression of gentility, and were highly significant in furthering these migrants’ attachment and sense of being at home, though far from ‘Home’.

I’ve become aware that the street is quiet once more, so perhaps I’ll leave this employment and ‘contrive a little spare time for my flowers...’

Dianne Lawrence is an Independent Scholar and the current holder of the Meryl Huxtable Bursary, as awarded by the Wallpaper History Society.

Genteel women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 is now available in paperback.

Greece vs. the Eurozone

2015-04-21T17:09:00.002+01:00

By Costas Simitis

The new Greek government that took office in January 2015 made a commitment during the election campaign that Greece would stay in the Eurozone. At the same time, it also declared that Greece’s relations with its European partners would be put on a new footing. This did not materialize. The Greek government accepted the continuation of the existing agreement with its lenders, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. This was the only way of ensuring Greece would not run out of funding.
Throughout the negotiations, the crisis in Greece received intense media attention. Again, the very future of the Eurozone became a subject of much discussion on the international stage. Following days of uncertainty, public opinion in Greece appeared to have endorsed the softening of the government’s position vis-à-vis its lenders. But doubts about the future remain. The most pressing problem to be tackled by the government is covering its funding needs over the next few months. Greece will have to make a tremendous effort to meet the terms of the agreement. Within the Eurozone, there is a growing feeling that Greece is particularly problematic. The perception that the ‘Greek question’ has not yet been settled and that new difficulties will arise in the future still persists.
This most recent phase in the Greek crisis allows us to draw some general conclusions about the future of the Eurozone. The Eurozone is a project that goes well beyond the joint endeavors of its member states to implement a common monetary policy. The Eurozone has evolved into a very close form of cooperation, a joint system of addressing economic problems and building tools for its economic governance. In this context, wider political considerations cannot be disassociated from the economics of running Europe’s single currency. The recently enacted Banking Union is further evidence of the Eurozone’s continually expanding remit. In this new, more intensive form of cooperation, member states have far less room to act independently. Greece’s desire to be a part of the club without fully committing to its rules is increasingly out of touch with reality. All member states that are committed to this joint endeavor cannot neglect their responsibilities or pursue their own ‘independent’ agendas.
Despite its recent reforms and expanded remit, the Eurozone remains an unsatisfactory system of governance. While the Eurozone is now better prepared to deal with future financial crises, its ability to address their deep-rooted causes effectively is still limited. The pace of economic growth in Europe is sluggish, and—despite contrary proclamations—the problem has not yet been dealt with effectively. The initial reaction to the Greek debt crisis in 2010 failed to adequately assess the country’s economic problems, making a bad situation worse. The inability of the Eurozone’s political institutions to articulate a coherent response to the crisis put the spotlight on the European Central Bank (ECB) as a key player in overcoming the deadlock. In January 2015, the ECB launched a massive program of quantitative easing in order to boost economic growth. The ECB, however, is not a democratically accountable institution and its activities are not the subject of parliamentary scrutiny. In this sense, the ECB should not be permitted to assume the duties of a government.

“Exit from the Eurozone, it seems, is not a feasible option.”

During Syriza’s confrontation with the Eurozone, many predicted a ‘Grexit,’ or a Greek withdrawal from the Eurozone. Ultimately, Greece’s lenders did not push for it although there was incomprehension of the Greek stance. Hardliners back in Greece who had previously claimed that the Russians, the Chinese, or even the United States would come to Greece’s rescue also hesitated to press the ‘Grexit’ nuclear button. Exit from the Eurozone, it seems, is not a feasible option. Any country that attempts it will risk financial ruin. For the Eurozone itself, the financial cost of a potential exit may be manageable but the reputational damage to the project is too high to bear.
Despite the widespread belief that the Greek crisis highlighted the need for greater economic and political integration in Europe, recent developments in Athens point to the reverse. The Eurozone’s problems persist not because member states act too fast, but because they procrastinate. These problems will only multiply if each country continues to follow its own fiscal policy or implement Treaty provisions at its own discretion. A fiscal union encompassing a common budget and a common European tax regime, redistributive policies to mediate inequalities in the productive base of different countries, and the pooling of European debt in order to support the development of less successful economies, are both desirable and feasible. They must all be linked to the strengthening of the European Parliament or the creation of a Eurozone Parliament so that the leadership of the Union can be held accountable.

These developments will ensure that no member state—Greece, in particular—will be able to pursue its economic future outside the context of the Eurozone. It is only through cooperation with other member states that a country can improve its negotiating position and change the balance of power within the Eurozone. Greece’s own desire to remain in the ‘core’ of the European Union is inextricably linked to overcoming its own backwardness, pursuit of continuous reform in the public administration so that it is more cost-effective and productive, changes in its economy in order to enhance the productive and technological potential of the country, persistent efforts to defeat clientelistic networks and free-riding attitudes, as well as a new thinking on how to promote social justice and cohesion. Greece must also adopt a European policy that breaks away from its ‘traditional’ attitude of seeking exemptions and defending the self-defeating notion of its own exceptionalism. It is in every country’s interest not to be seen as a perpetual exception—a ‘problem’ that never goes away.

The European debt crisis: The Greek case
978-0-7190-9578-8 £17.99

England in 1820

2015-04-14T11:23:00.000+01:00

What can we learn from looking at England in 1820? On the one hand, a great deal, but having said that, our understanding of this period has been hobbled by habitual Anglo-centricity. Even broadening out the scope of things and examining all four kingdoms of the United Kingdom does not suffice.

Great Britain and Ireland have to be seen in the context of 1820 being a year of European revolution. In September of that year, a leading London radical wrote that Thomas Paine, who died over a decade earlier, had ‘thought that he lived in the age of revolution…but the present moment better deserves that epithet’.

The revolutionary climate of 1820 was without parallel until 1848 and the actions of the British government, led by a Prime Minister (Lord Liverpool) who had actually witnessed the storming of the Bastille in 1789, must be evaluated in that context.

The heir to the French throne was assassinated and there were revolutions in Spain, Portugal and much of present-day Italy. And if we look to the early months of 1821 as well, there was a further Italian insurgency, insurrections against the Ottomans in Moldavia and Wallachia, and the dramatic development of an independence movement in Greece.

1820 was the most testing year for any nineteenth-century peacetime government. Stringent measures to suppress radical political activity had been introduced by Liverpool’s Ministry in the wake of the Peterloo massacre the previous August. Their effect, however, was mainly to drive protest underground and make it harder to monitor, while simultaneously stimulating the popular press to yet-more innovative forms of expression. Against a widely rumoured background of revolutionary conspiracy, there were popular uprisings in Scotland and northern England. Bitter social conflict in western Ireland, expressed mainly through an elusive protest movement called the Ribbonmen, tied-down whole regiments of the army. Back in London elements within the Brigade of Guards were mutinous. And a conspiracy to assassinate the entire Cabinet was only narrowly averted.

On top of all this George IV forced an embattled and nervous government to secure his divorce from Queen Caroline. Unprecedented popular indignation ensued, much of it from women reflecting a new politics of gender. The Caroline affair also triggered what we would now call a media frenzy: an explosion of satirical cartoons and pamphleteering, often ribald and some of it downright obscene, but all of it pointing to a revolution in popular print and political opinion.

Yet the political and social stability of the United Kingdom was maintained. It’s very interesting to think about not only how government was tested to the limit, but also how the processes and mechanisms through which social and political stability were maintained. A sense of involvement in – and ownership of – government increased among ‘the middling sort’. Ratepayers, who fell below the threshold for parliamentary voting or for service as magistrates, were being given an increasing stake in the government of the communities in which they lived. This process even occasionally included women too.

However, this book suggests that the ‘age of reform’ was a drawing out of processes that had been established earlier. The survival of parliament’s authority in 1820 may have been severely tested but how it survived is enlightening about the social and political stability of the United Kingdom in the longer perspective.

My book, 1820: disorder and stability in the United Kingdom takes this single, fascinating year in the broader context of Europe, revolution, and the periods before and after, to give a far longer perspective on the social and political stability of the United Kingdom.

On the history of history teaching…

2015-04-13T11:47:00.000+01:00

Debate about the teaching of history is never far away. The former Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has sought since 2010 to reshape the history curriculum in schools by bringing in more coverage of British history and altering assessment techniques. His plans met with some serious resistance – including from academics and school teachers. The key areas of debate echoed those raised 25 years ago when a national curriculum for history was first introduced. The terms of the debate are also recognisable in contestation about the teaching of history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What are the aims of history teaching? Should politicians dictate the content of history lessons? What does the selection and omission of certain content reveal about the kind of national past we want children to grow up knowing? Should history be considered a conduit of citizenship education? Is there a direct correlation between the teaching of history and national identity? What influence should be given to specialist experts working in the educational sciences? What should be the relationship between the teaching of ‘facts’ over skills of historical enquiry and interpretation?

These debates – hostile and unresolved – are not new. The teaching of history has always been a topic for serious dispute. This was especially so in the period in which historical content was first taught as a compulsory component of the curriculum in the nation’s schools. In the late-Victorian period, educational provision was made compulsory and free and, given its vast cost, it is no surprise that contemporaries argued over its social and political functions. In the context of late-Victorian anxieties about the future of empire, it is little wonder moreover that the teaching of history specifically should have been the subject of such contentious discussion. Britain perceived itself threatened on two fronts: externally, she was concerned about the growth of economic and imperial competitors such as Germany; internally, the rise of an organised political Left coincided with fears about children’s emotional, moral and physical wellbeing. The combination of these factors meant that the teaching of history was prescribed, by some, as an antidote to a perceived crisis of national confidence. In such a context it is clear those seeking to promote ideologies of imperialism and patriotism saw in the teaching of history the opportunity to inculcate imperial values. To what extent was their influence the most significant? What were imperial ‘values’ and how was history intended to deliver these in a classroom context? These are just some of the questions that this book investigates.

The introduction of mass education also brought to the fore questions about how to teach. The late nineteenth century was also a period of deep-reaching investigations into pedagogy. Although there have been several studies into histories of history teaching, most have tended to focus on the content of resources used in the classroom – especially subject-specific history textbooks and historical reading books for younger children. But what of the sources used to instruct a new generation of teachers how to teach? ‘Manuals of Method’ have received less attention from researchers than they merit: these sources are valuable because, as a distinct genre of educational publishing, their authors are those who taught in teacher-training colleges, influenced the production of classroom resources, and were some of the loudest voices in debates about history teaching. In the absence of centralised state regulations on what history to teach, and how to teach it, these manuals serve ostensibly as documents of best practice. The study of these sources reveals that the intentions behind history teaching were far more complex than previously acknowledged. In addition, evidence from manuals exhibits the debt British educationists owed to continental educational theorists – in particular a little studied group called the Herbartians who came to dominate. Herbartians emphasised the centrality of history – as a subject that would mobilise the emotions – to the teaching of civic and moral values. These values, in turn of the twentieth-century England, could be made to tally with wider national and imperial objectives. In the book, I explore the extent of the Herbartian dominance of the curriculum. It appears that history teaching only became such a vital part of national-identity teaching because its teachers embraced cutting-edge educational psychology. We seem nowadays, with the state’s emphasis on facts over skills, to somewhat have reversed the ratchet.

Parallels with current disputes about history education are acute, especially so since the ‘history’ of history teaching is often mobilised in both sides of the debate. This book, therefore, aims to provide a history of the relationship between history teaching and pedagogy, and an investigation of the wider implications of this in debates about the contribution of history teaching to popular imperialism, citizenship, nation and identity.

Citizenship, nation, empire, by Peter Yeandle, is available now http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719080128

Can you help us find a copyright holder?

2015-03-12T10:44:00.002+00:00

We're asking our authors, readers and friends in the community at large to look at this map, which we'd like to use for a book project. If you know where it comes from, or who photographed it, or any information about it that might be useful in our search, then please get in touch with our Editorial Director: emma.brennan@manchester.ac.uk Thank you.

Wonder Women

2015-02-23T14:16:00.000+00:00

The Wonder Women 2015 festival begins soon, and Manchester will play host to a really exciting range of cultural events.

MUP’s list, meanwhile, is full of Wonder Women. Alongside backlist gems such as Patsy Stoneman’s book on Elizabeth Gaskell, and Janet Lee’s War Girls on the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, our history list boasts a wealth of biographies of pioneering female figures in the fight for women’s rights and in politics more generally, including Eva Gore-Booth, Evelyn Sharp, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, and most recently ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson. John Carter-Wood’s book The most remarkable woman in England follows the case of Beatrice Pace, who became a media celebrity in the 1920s after being accused of the murder of her husband. The 1920s were an important decade for Wonder Women, and Lucy Bland examines this period in Modern women on trial: sexual transgression in the age of the flapper. For those interested in how women’s protests affected early twentieth-century politics, Jill Liddington’s book Vanishing for the Vote is a very readable account of the suffragette census boycott in 1911. It uses engaging and thoroughly human stories to bring this key moment in women’s history to life, and explains the political context along with the reasons why key figures decided against the boycott.

The festival will coincide with International Women’s Day, and our catalogue boasts lots of international Wonder Women. Alistair Thomson’s Moving stories looks at four British women who embarked on new lives in Australia. It’s a remarkable collaboration between author and four ordinary women who were extraordinary letters-writers, family photographers and memoirists recording in intimate detail aspects of everyday life and women's experience that are often lost to history. Helen Boak’s Women in the Weimar Republic takes the First World War as a starting point, and explores the great changes in the lives, expectations and perceptions of German women, with new opportunities in employment, education and political life and greater freedoms in their private and social life, all played out in the media spotlight.

We’re very excited to be putting the finishing touches to Natalya Vince’s Our fighting sisters, which is based on oral interviews with Algerian women who were combatants in the fight to end French rule. We’ve also announced Eva Gore-Booth’s political writings in a single volume, edited by Sonja Tiernan, and a huge edition of Anne Clifford’s Great books of record, a wonderful 600-year history written by a fascinating seventeenth-century landowner and patron of the arts.

We’re very proud of our Wonder Women and we hope you’ll enjoy reading about them.

To celebrate the festival, enjoy this extract from the wonderful Vanishing for the Vote by Jill Liddington.

Jill will be speaking as part of the festival on Thursday 12th March. We hope to see you there!

Greece- The shape of things to come

2015-01-28T13:26:00.002+00:00

In the aftermath of the Greek general election, which put SYRIZA, an anti-austerity left wing party, into power in coalition with far-right Independent Greeks, Dimitris Papadimitriou Professor of European politics at The University of Manchester, explores the situation and assess the possible impact.So, there you have it! Greek bailout politics have come full circle. On Tuesday a new coalition government was sworn in in Athens. SYRIZA has won a landslide victory against their conservative rivals, New Democracy, but have failed to win an outright majority in parliament. The new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, was in need of a coalition partner and it did not take him long to find one. The right wing populist party, Independent Greeks, will join the new government and will be rewarded with a number of senior ministerial appointments. Earlier hopes of a coalition between SYRIZA and the moderate centre left party, To Potami, were dashed the day after the election. Apparently, To Potami was not ‘anti-bailout enough’ for Mr Tsipras.
In Panos Kammenos, the leader of Independent Greeks, the new Prime Minister of Greece finds a partner with impeccable anti-bailout credentials. Mr Kammenos and his party are indeed a product of Greece’s polarised bailout politics. He broke away from New Democracy in 2012 and since then has been a fierce critic of what he regards as Greece’s “occupation” by its creditors. Last year a prominent member of his party accused the EU of being a “bunch of gays”, prompting a humorous rebuff by the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Earlier, Mr Kammenos himself had warned Greeks that they were being sprayed with secret chemicals in order to subdue their opposition to the bailout. He is a die-hard defender of displaying paraphernalia of the Orthodox Church in public buildings and believes that Greece’s future lies in a strategic partnership with his political idol, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, Mr Tsipras became the EU’s youngest leader and the first PM in Greek history who refused to take a religious oath when he assumed office. How can these two agendas co-exist in the same government? Why didn’t Mr Tsipras opt for a more moderate partner? Drawing a parallel to Britain, recent developments in Athens are the equivalent of having Michael Foot and Nigel Farage in charge of renegotiating the UK’s membership of the European Union.
In understanding this farce, one has to look at the effects of the bailout programme on Greek politics. The two-party system that emerged following Greece’s transition to democracy in 1974 has been shattered by the austerity of the past five years. In 2009 the collective strength of the Greek Socialists, PASOK, and New Democracy was in excess of 77% of the vote. On Sunday their share of the vote was just over 31%. The old guard has been swept away, discredited in the eyes of ‘indignant citizens’ as corrupt and subservient to the demands of the ‘Troika’. The implementation of externally-prescribed austerity has led to the electoral annihilation of the mainstream. Anti-bailout rhetoric sells. Even if it comes wrapped in homophobia and religious fervour.
The arrival of Mr Tsipras’ colourful coalition in Greece is the shape of things to come across Europe. Above all it reflects the bankruptcy of the German moralistic austerity dogma. Mr Tsipras and Mrs Merkel are the opposite sides of the same coin. If Mr Tsipras succeeds in changing the dominant economic paradigm in the Eurozone, he will expose the shortcomings of German economic thinking over the past five years. If he fails, Greece’s descent into the abyss will remind Berlin what any good history book will tell you: extreme economics breeds extreme politics. Those who set the foundations of the German economic miracle after the war knew this very well.

Originally published on policy@manchester,
http://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/posts/2015/01/greece-the-shape-of-things-to-come/

Kudos

2015-01-13T12:55:00.001+00:00

Manchester University Press is very pleased to announce a new partnership with Kudos.

Kudos is a free web-based service that helps researchers and authors maximize the visibility and impact of their published articles online.

For the author and researcher, Kudos provides a platform for assembling and creating information to help search, filter, share and supplement their publications to drive discovery and create digital community. Just as importantly, it is used for measuring and monitoring the effect of these activities.

Kudos is for researchers who want assistance with increasing usage of, and citations to, their publications. It is also for institutions and funders looking to increase the impact of the research that they fund and to help analyse the success of their funding. It is also very useful for publishers who want to develop closer relationships with their author communities.

Kudos can helps authors and researchers in three easy steps:

Firstly, it allows you to add a simple, non-technical explanation of your publication which will make it easier to find, and more accessible to a broader audience. Kudos will deposit this additional information about your article with a range of discovery services, all linking back to your publication, to ensure it is even easier to find, read and cite.

Secondly, the platform enables the attachment of rich digital assets that relate to your publication – data, images, video, podcasts, blog entries – all things that explain an article and bring it to life. Not only does this enrich things for the reader but they become more inbound links to the article so it becomes more discoverable.

Thirdly, it helps authors broadcast their work more effectively. Kudos seeks to standardise the use of social media and support authors with their social media and online output to help share and distribute their work as much as possible.

If you are a Manchester University Press author and would like to explain, enrich and share links to your publications you can register for free at https://www.growkudos.com/about/researchers.

For more news and information you can visit the Kudos blog http://blog.growkudos.com/2014/11/18/kudos-growth-continues/.

If you have any questions about signing up please email robert.byron@manchester.ac.uk.

Britain's lost revolution?

2015-01-05T14:33:00.001+00:00

With the upcoming publication of Britain's lost revolution? author, Daniel Szechi, has written a blog post regarding the subject and the book.

Should Scotland be an independent nation? The Scots people were directly asked this question last September, and a majority said ‘No’. Had they been asked this question in the autumn of 1707, when the Scots Parliament was debating whether or not to enter a constitutional Union with England, there is little doubt that the answer would have been an overwhelming ‘Yes’. Yet the Act of Union, solemnly debated and carefully amended in both the Scots and English Parliaments, finally passed into law in May 1707 despite the clear hostility of the ordinary people of Scotland.

It was, of course, a very different world to our own, in which the wishes and aspirations of the common people counted for little. But it was not just the humble folk who were dismayed and angered by being ‘bought and sold for English gold’ in the words of a famous song, many of their social superiors were equally outraged. As far as a sizeable minority of the Scots elite were concerned Scotland had been betrayed, and it was their duty to rescue the nation and its birthright.

But how? In the early eighteenth century there was only one way to oppose a regime with a firm grip on power: armed rebellion. Therein, however, lay a complex of problems. The new British state was one of the most militarily powerful in Europe. A gaggle of Scots nobility and heritors (gentry) and their tenants and servants, no matter how enthusiastic for the national cause, would find it very hard to fight the British army and win. Scotland was also a poor nation and the Union offered the Scots people hope of a better life by commercial access to the English empire. This would end if the Scots rebelled. Then there was the question of what would happen next? If the anti-Unionist Scots rebelled and succeeded in defeating the British state, what kind of Scotland did they want to restore? In such an event the old regime in Scotland, subservient to Westminster and with an absentee monarch, was neither attractive nor feasible.

Britain’s Lost Revolution is about the answer a coalition of anti-Unionists from within the Scots elite came up with in answer to these questions and a host of others. We know them simply as the ‘Jacobites’, but there was a great deal more to their aims and ambitions than the simple restoration of the exiled Stuart dynasty. Sure, they were willing to bring back James ‘VIII’, the son of James II and VII, as the king of Scotland, but only as part of a package. This included full scale French military intervention to enable the rebels to fight the British army with some hope of success, privileged commercial access to the French colonial empire to replace the economic advantages of access to the English empire and James’s agreement to a raft of radical constitutional changes that would have turned Scotland into a noble republic that would never again be subservient to England. Had the would-be rebels of 1708 succeeded the British Isles would have been transformed and the modern United Kingdom would not exist. For a moment then, in March 1708, as the French invasion force set sail for Scotland the fate of everything we now assume is solid and certain about our constitution and its politics hung in the balance. This was Britain’s lost revolution.

Britain's lost revolution? will be available from 31st January 2015

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719089176

2014-11-27T09:57:00.000+00:00

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS and THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Introduction

Manchester University Press continued to publish during the First World War, and some of its output was clearly directed towards supporting Britain’s war aims. This was obviously the case with Ramsay Muir’s The Case Against Germany (1914), but it is also evident in other scholarly efforts, such as the initiative to restock Louvain’s library following its destruction after the German invasion. The book Germany in the Nineteenth Century was testament to a shattered belief, common in universities, that international cooperation might replace war and conflict between nations. Several psychological works addressed shell shock, the new nervous disorder afflicting thousands of British soldiers at the Front which was as yet poorly understood within military medicine. Manchester medics worked to explain its causes and treatment to the public, and stood at the cutting edge of the field.

The history department was perhaps most active, however, especially in the person of T. F. Tout, the prolific Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, who had been a key figure in the establishment of Manchester University Press. Tout published lectures on medieval society, drawing subtle parallels with the contemporary situation. He also edited a work on Chartism by a young MA student of his, whose life was cut short on the Somme. Tout prefaced this publication with an emotional tribute to the fledgling scholar, who was among many students-turned-soldiers who corresponded with him from the Front (their letters are in the collections of the John Rylands University Library).

Several works addressed the subject of Peterloo as the 1919 centenary approached. They emphasised Manchester’s radical tradition, celebrating the protesters and the subsequent progress of democracy, in the hope of similar gains after the war. Other writers demonstrated Manchester’s continued reforming instincts, looking to Manchester’s achievements in education (Maltby) or the possibility of ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ (Rowntree), a major theme of the postwar government. A strong sense of local pride pervades MUP’s output, as shown by the volume Manchester in 1915, which suggested that Manchester was a city that had done much to make the modern world, though it had also been fundamentally shaken by the war.

The following sections give an overview of some of the most significant MUP publications of this period.

1914 and the Eve of the War

Ramsay Muir, Britain’s Case Against Germany: An Examination of the Historical Background of the German Action in 1914 (1914)

Ramsay Muir was Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester, and later went on to work for the Liberal Party. This book is a work of popular history, although modern readers would probably be inclined to call it propaganda.

Muir set out the case that Germany was at fault for the decisions that had led to the outbreak of war in August, that Germany had long intended to go to war, and that Germany’s conduct in the war had been dishonourable and uncivilised. He used recently published government documents to argue that Germany was never sincere in its attempts to restrain Austria. All the belligerents published such documents in the years following 1914 in order to put the blame for the war on the other side. Muir refutes the arguments that Germany was simply defending itself from Slavic and British threats, although this treatment is brief and geared towards exonerating the Entente.

The main thrust of Muir’s argument is that ‘Prussian policy’ was ‘a poison which has been working in the European system for more than two centuries’. He talks of ‘Two Germanies’. One, the cultured south and west, had produced great minds like Kant, Goethe, Beethoven and Wagner. However, the efficient and militaristic Prussia had come to dominate this thoughtful, cosmopolitan Germany, particularly after the failure of the democratic revolution in 1848 (an event that A. J. P. Taylor would later call a ‘turning point where Germany failed to turn’). The German tendency to obedience, coupled with an arrogance bred from successful military and economic expansion and grandiose ideals, led Germany down the path to war. Muir emphasised the role of German academics in popularising the megalomaniacal idea of a ‘historical mission’ for the German nation. Just as poisonous was the complementary idea that the state stands above humanity, and that the state is power and nothing else.

Germany’s crime was not simply its desire to expand, but also its disregard for civilised conduct. The invasion of neutral Luxembourg and Belgium was a ‘deadly blow at the system of international law and international honour’. Muir listed Germany’s violations of the Hague conventions. The German army had pillaged banks, destroyed monuments and ‘shot whole masses of townspeople, and forcibly and without enquiry deported masses more into slavery in Germany’.

For Muir, a lifelong liberal, Britain represented an alternative to this ‘Doctrine of Power’. A civilised international system had been embodied in the Concert of Europe (the informal council of Great Powers in existence since the Napoleonic Wars) and more recent efforts to codify international law. In contrast to Germany, the ‘civilised world as a whole’ had made ‘genuine progress’ to realise these ideals.

Muir ends with a rousing defence of Britain’s war aims that leaves the reader in no doubt as to where he stands. The choice is ‘between honour and dishonour, between freedom supported by law and the tyranny of brute force, between the morality of civilisation and the morality of the jungle. That is an issue to which no man, and no state, can be indifferent.’

B. Seebohm Rowntree and A. C. Pigou, Lectures on Housing (1914)

B. Seebohm Rowntree was the son of the confectioner and philanthropist Joseph Rowntree and inherited his family’s zeal for social improvement. The first lecture in this book attempted to answer the question, ‘How far is it possible to provide Satisfactory Houses for the Working Classes at rents which they can afford to pay?’ The lecture, based on statistical studies of York, London and Middlesbrough of a kind that were increasingly employed on ‘social questions’, first sought to enlighten the public. Rowntree claimed that ‘We do not, as a nation, realise that one fourth of the dwellings of this country have less than four rooms … one person in ten is living under what are technically known as “overcrowded conditions” – that is, with more than two persons to every room in the house.’ He sought particularly to highlight living conditions in the ‘long dreary streets’ of ‘dismal rows without a vestige of greenery about them only characterised by their meanness and by their deadly monotony’, which were passed on any railway journey.

Rowntree showed that about 2–3 million people lived in ‘slums’, and that most working people spent one-sixth of their income on rent. His solutions focused on reducing rents, encouraging more and better house-building, and establishing better transport. According to Rowntree, by-laws should limit the number of houses per acre, taxes should be adjusted and loans provided to encourage building. ‘Why should we not town-plan the whole of England, instead of allowing the present utterly casual method of erecting houses?’ He claimed that people were anxious to live in garden cities, provided there was sufficient transport. Letchworth and Welwyn garden cities, built in the 1900s, aimed to be self-sufficient, spacious and green, and thus to liberate workers from squalid, dehumanising slums. Rowntree’s other argument for garden cities was that gardening could give those with seasonal or variable work a second occupation. His studies had shown that an average of £31 net per acre could be made from workers’ gardens.

Still, Rowntree recognised that the underlying problem was poverty. Extensions to workers’ rights and a minimum wage were therefore needed. This would leave only the ‘residuum’ – the ‘old, infirm and vicious’ – to be dealt with. Rowntree can be seen to share the optimism of many social reformers and welfare state advocates of the time.

A.C. Pigou, an economist, addressed in his lecture ‘some aspects of the housing problem’. While he was less definite in his conclusions than Rowntree, he nevertheless agreed with the increasingly accepted liberal principle that it was the ‘duty of a civilized State to lay down certain minimum conditions in every department of life, below which it refuses to allow any of its free citizens to fall’. Consequently, dilapidated and insanitary houses should be condemned and demolished, and laws against overcrowding should be introduced. Pigou shared the enthusiasm for town planning and garden cities and argued that the arrangement of houses was not an issue of aesthetics but ‘a matter of the character and of the health of the people as a whole’. He claimed that the park was the cathedral of the modern city.

Pigou also held an older view that one reason for poor conditions in many houses was ‘the low character and the want of training of those that inhabit them’. He used the example of the Victorian housing reformer Octavia Hill, who gave sympathy, advice and a good example, but seldom money. This method worked, as tenants ‘became her friends and lifted their ideal of living dimly towards hers’. Pigou also agreed that poverty was the underlying problem, however. And while he had no objection ‘on principle’ to subsidies, he used his economic training to show that they had to be deployed cleverly in order to not be counterproductive.

1915: Science, Democracy, the British Empire and Germany

H. M. McKechnie (ed.), Manchester in Nineteen Hundred and Fifteen, being the handbook for the eighty-fifth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Manchester September seven–ten 1915 (1915)

This volume was the yearly handbook of the Manchester branch of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now the British Association of Science). The war led it to narrow its usual focus from questions of general scientific interest to a ‘mere local programme containing short notices of those institutions which were peculiarly Manchester’. Manchester scholars and city councillors provided entries on key civic activities, including sewerage, charities, hospitals, the university, schools, libraries, museums, the Bridgewater Canal and the Manchester Ship Canal. The initiatives of business and private philanthropy sit alongside more recent municipal and state-led works to improve living conditions. The book was the product of the public-spirited association of contributors including the University of Manchester’s leading historians James Tait and Thomas Tout, city councillors and clergymen. The chapters show careful research into the origins of local landmarks and pride in Manchester’s achievements.

Trade and industry are naturally praised, with one author describing the ‘perpetual slow rolling of merchandise from the warehouse to the Docks. To read the directions on these hooped bales of fabrics is to have glimpses into the strange places of the earth … The plain, solid names on the door cheeks and the window blinds of Portland Street read, as they go on and on and on, like an epic – the brass plates would do for a frieze on a Parthenon of Victorian Commerce.’ Manchester’s scholarly and artistic institutions are also given their due – the John Rylands’ special collections, for instance, ‘have made of Manchester, not only a place of pilgrimage for the lover of rare and beautiful books, but a centre of attraction for scholars from all parts of the world’.

While the products of Victorian Manchester are unsurprisingly described at length, the volume’s introduction shows how the city is changing. The straight-talking, industrious ‘Manchester man’, represented by the manufacturer and campaigner Richard Cobden, is no longer the only representative of the city, now that it is too large and diverse to conform to a single type. The exodus of commuters ‘leaves central Manchester after dark to the policeman and the cats’, while the suburbs have distinct identities befitting a sprawling, global city: Kersal is ‘quite noticeably Levantine and Greek’, Withington is ‘a kind of upper middle-class Olympia’ and ‘Moss Side is middle-class and clerkly with ambitions inclining to the semi-detached, though it harbours in its temperate and insular zone a surprising settlement of Moors whose dress adds colour and variety to the panorama of the business streets’. Current challenges are held to include pollution, electricity supply and education.

The volume acknowledges that Manchester has contributed its fair share of soldiers to the war effort, making it ‘the curious fate of Manchester to be renowned at once for the theory of pacifism and the practice of arms’. The war does not, however, impinge on the volume too much, with only a few mentions interrupting the catalogue of civic achievement.

Henri Pirenne, trans. J. V. Saunders, Belgian Democracy, Its Early History (1915)

Written by Henri Pirenne, Professor of Medieval and Belgian History at the University of Ghent, this book chronicles the history of Belgian democracy from medieval times to the seventeenth century. Pirenne was a renowned medievalist whose nationalist histories, as well as his arrest and internment during the German occupation, had led to him being revered as a local hero. His son was killed during the battle of Yser in 1914.

Belgium was central to Britain’s war aims. Germany’s invasion of Belgium had led Britain to enter the war, and atrocities committed by the Germans in Belgium became cornerstones of Britain’s argument that it was fighting a just war. British families housed thousands of Belgian refugees. This history of Belgian democracy was part of the propaganda war.

Although it was written in 1910, this 1915 translation asked ‘May the English-speaking public extend to [Belgium’s] early history a little of the sympathy which it is lavishing on their present misfortunes!’ The Manchester Guardian’s review hinted that Pirenne’s scholarship had been shoehorned into the question of ‘Belgian democracy’ when it was really about ‘city commonwealths in the towns of the Low Countries, of which the famous towns now in Belgian territory were only the most important’. The book is a lively and accessible study of Belgian political history. The author does not exaggerate the success of Belgian democracy and is keen to suggest its piecemeal progress and regular stumbles. Nevertheless, Belgium is shown to have provided some of the most potent instances of democratic governance in the medieval and early modern eras.

It is not a work of propaganda. Pirenne is interested in the conditions for the growth of democracy. He argues that the dominance of merchants in the thriving Belgian cities was fertile ground for a ‘democratic spirit’. This was continually under threat as one interest sought to dominate others – the Church, the Emperor, dominant traders, Calvinists, capitalists – and Pirenne does not argue that the democratic spirit was inherently Belgian. The German invasion was the greatest threat to this spirit, however, and this is why the book had been translated into English.

A. S. Peake, B. Bosanquet and F. Bonavia, Germany in the Nineteenth Century (second series) (1915)

This book summarised the achievements of German theology, philosophy and music in the nineteenth century. The introduction by the historian T. F. Tout explains that it was first published in 1912 in the hope that ‘appreciations by British scholars of the part played by Germany in the development of modern civilisation might serve to promote more friendly feelings between the two nations’. Given the outbreak of war, ‘the writers can no longer take the optimistic line which they so recently felt justified in assuming, yet they do not regret that, in their anxiety to take a favourable view of Germany’s attitude, they under-estimated the sinister influences which for the present have proved triumphant’. Tout is clear that the current Germany is one of ‘militant aggression, of violated faith, of cynical self-seeking and disregard of the honourable traditions of civilised warfare’, but that it is still useful to offer this scholarship and pay tribute to the more civilised traditions in Germany.

The chapters detail important features of German intellectual life. A. S. Peake, a theological scholar at the university, covered theology. The philosopher and social theorist Bernard Bosanquet described philosophy. Finally, F. Bonavia contributed a chapter on music. German cultural strengths are seen as biblical criticism, Idealist philosophy and the music of Beethoven, Wagner and others. Bonavia goes as far as to say that the ‘history of the musical development of the nineteenth century is in the main the history of German music’.

The Manchester Guardian agreed that ‘there has never been a time when it was more necessary to remember that the German military class is far from representing the best thought of the German people’. The Athenaeum doubted whether the achievements described in the book were as distinctly German as the authors suggested, citing non-German influences on Mozart, Schopenhauer and others. They were in agreement with the aims of the book, however, sincerely thanking the authors ‘for reminding us that there are great and good Germans and that, when peace is restored, we shall do well not to stand aloof from those who survive as if they were lepers’.

Ramsay Muir (ed.), The Making of British India, 1756–1858, described in a series of dispatches, treaties, statutes, and other documents, selected and edited with introductions and notes (1915)

This history by Muir is based on East India Company reports and letters. The East India Company had begun trading with India in the seventeenth century and, starting with Bengal, began to have increasing control over the fragmented country until it was formally superseded by the British Crown in 1858. Muir offers a picture of the enlightened British governance of India. While it is based on primary documents, it is certainly one-sided and offers no platform for Indian voices.

Prior to British control,

India was a mere chaos of warring principalities; dynasties rose and fell; the patient peasant endured the ravages and exactions of one plundering master after another; the waste and carnage of war never ceased; and everywhere Might was Right, and the arbitrary will of the strongest prevailed. At the end of the century, after one final convulsion, war had altogether ceased … in every town and village, judges and magistrates administered one fixed and unvarying law, without bribes and without favour, to all who appealed to have their rights protected or their wrongs redressed.

Muir claims that the move from trade to empire was ‘accidental’. He praises the greater control taken on by Warren Hastings – perhaps the ‘greatest Englishman who has ever laboured in India’ – in the 1770s, based on sound principles, including no power without responsibility, respect for Indian customs and peasants’ rights. He has particular respect for the ‘remarkable group of men, perhaps the ablest group whom the Anglo-Indian service has ever produced’ who reformed Indian institutions in the 1820s and 30s. While they sought to ‘make the best of Indian usages’, they also worked to give India ‘all that was best in Western civilisation’, including law, railways, irrigation ‘on a scale unknown’ before, and a modern civil service, as well as eradicating barbarous Indian customs such as sati (the burning alive of widows, which was much exaggerated and criticised by the British press).

According to Muir, it was the too-rapid introduction of such innovations by Dalhousie (the ‘maker of modern India’) that offended ‘Oriental conservatism’ and led to the Mutiny in 1857. This was nothing more than a blip and a misunderstanding in the story of British tutelage, however. This paternalistic and patronising view would be strongly criticised by Indian and Western scholars today, and indicates that Muir had an extremely rose-tinted view of British rule. Muir is glowing in praise of empire, suggesting that ‘The pax Britannica has been a yet more wonderful thing than the pax Romana.’ In his view, British governance of India had been an act of benevolence, not greed. In 1824 it was officially stated that ‘the gradual preparation of the Indian peoples for self-government ought to be the aim of those who had the direction of Indian affairs, a view which, at this date, none but men of British race could have entertained’. The Government of India Act of 1833 stipulated that no native of India should be ‘debarrred by race, colour, or religion from holding any office whatsoever under the British Raj’. Nevertheless, this progressive policy came with the caveat that Indians as a whole had to be ‘sufficiently enlightened’ for self-rule – something not achieved until 1947 (when the Second World War had exhausted British resources).

Writing in 1915, Muir was sanguine about the ‘gradual substitution for the idea of dominion of the idea of partnership in that great brotherhood of free civilised nations which make up the British Empire’. We should remember that India was a key supplier of troops for the war effort, a source of revenue for the British, and of employment for Muir, who had had a visiting lectureship at the University of Punjab (1913–14) before moving to Manchester. Germany had attempted to foment revolt among India’s hundreds of millions of Muslims, and Muir’s history was therefore doing an important job in justifying British rule.

1918–19: Massacre and Radicalism in British History

F. A. Bruton, The Story of Peterloo, written for the centenary August 16, 1919 (1919)

F. A. Bruton (ed.), Three Accounts of Peterloo by Eyewitnesses Bishop Stanley, Lord Hylton and John Benjamin Smith (1921)

James Hindle Hudson, Peterloo: a history of the massacre an the condition which preceded it … A story for working people to teach their children. Written for the Peterloo Centenary Committee, with a preface by J. Bruce Glasier (1918)

These three books followed in MUP’s strong tradition of local history. Bruton was a teacher at Manchester Grammar School and produced two scholarly accounts of the massacre. Hudson’s was a more overtly political account, subtitled ‘a story for working people to teach their children’, and written for the Peterloo Centenary Committee, which comprised an array of left-wing groups.

Peterloo was a seminal event in both the history of Manchester and the democratic movement in Britain, and the massacre is still commemorated today. A peaceful protest in favour of parliamentary reform attended by thousands was attacked by mounted Yeomen and hussars, leaving 15 dead and hundreds injured. The demonstrators at Peterloo were campaigning for wider suffrage and better representation for Manchester. The immediate result was a crackdown on free speech and assembly. Small improvements were gained in 1832, 1867 and 1884. In 1918, just before these books were published, property qualifications for voting were removed and some married women over 30 were allowed to vote for the first time. Manchester’s liberal and working-class movements played leading roles in these developments, and the city as a whole can be said to have been progressive throughout the nineteenth century.

The Peterloo massacre occurred against a backdrop of economic depression and political radicalism. Bruton quotes from a contemporary report sent to the Home Secretary, warning of ‘deep distresses of the manufacturing classes of this extensive population … when the people are oppressed with hunger we do not wonder at their giving ear to any doctrines which they are told will redress their grievances’. The working classes and significant portions of the middle classes could not vote at this time. Workers had no recourse during periods of economic depression or in response to ill-treatment by bosses. Hudson noted that ‘All organisation for the improvement of wages by collective bargaining or “direct action” was forbidden’ from the 1790s, though the ‘friendly societies’ were trades unions in all but name and had 1 million members. From these came the Peterloo protestors. The authorities, worried by the war with revolutionary France, cracked down on political disturbances.

Hudson was positive about this form of political expression. Leading up to Peterloo,

[t]he greatest propaganda effort was the monster demonstration. For months before each demonstration, the people prepared by drills and marches, holding regular communication with each other, though separated by miles and miles of open country. Nothing could damp their enthusiasm. For them the Pennine Chain no longer existed. Great bodies of men swarmed over Blackstone Edge and Saddleworth Moor for the purpose of attending a political demonstration, with an ardour that is not even to be imagined by the man who to-day turns nonchalantly out from his home to listen to a few words of a political speech in the next street. Large numbers of working men gained great facility as speakers. They thundered against the rotten parliament elected by the rotten boroughs.

As Bruton notes, the poet-leader Bamford instructed these drilling parties to be pacific: ‘we would disarm the bitterness of our political opponents by a display of cleanliness, sobriety, and decorum such as we never before had exhibited’. However, the protestors’ rough treatment of government spies meant that the authorities were soon ‘in a panic’. Bruton agrees with the authorities responsible for the massacre that there had been plotting by some of the reformers, in some cases ‘decidedly dangerous’. He places more emphasis on a general estrangement between employers and workers and a mutual enmity.

Bruton’s 1921 book is scholarly rather than celebratory. It sets out the accounts provided by three eyewitnesses alongside short commentaries on the men and their testimonies. Appendices show relics of the event, maps, pictures and notes on the casualty figures. The book is therefore a valuable resource for students of the massacre. The accounts, while not exciting, provide an immediacy and a sense of the period that bring the reader closer to the famous event. Bishop Stanley’s account serves to exonerate the demonstrators: ‘I saw no symptoms of riot or disturbance before the meeting; the impression on my mind was that the people were sullenly peaceful.’ John Benjamin Smith, the first chairman of the Anti-Corn Law League which campaigned against the tariffs on corn imports supported by landowners to raise the price of corn, agreed: ‘crowds of people in all directions, full of good humour, laughing and shouting and making fun’. Both concur in placing the blame on the inexperienced Yeomen.

Sir William G. H. Jolliffe (Lord Hylton) was a lieutenant in the 15th Hussars, who rode on the crowd. His account, given in 1845, describes the bad planning on the part of the magistrates, which meant that when the horsemen were supposed to advance at a walk, they were surrounded by the crowd and therefore caused chaos and panic. The hussars used the flats of their swords but ‘sometimes, as is almost inevitably the case when men are placed in such situations, the edge was used’. Jolliffe reckoned the wounds received by protesters were few considering the situation; ‘beyond all doubt, however, the far greater amount of injuries were from the pressure of the routed multitude’. He detailed the aggressive behaviour of some of the mob.

Bruton’s sympathies ultimately lie with the protesters, showing the continued strength of the liberal tradition in Manchester.

It all seems so unfair. They were inarticulate. They had come, with all the hilarity of a general holiday, to ask that they might have a Voice. They were met by the bungling of incompetent authorities, behind whom loomed the great, strong, repressive Government, saying: ‘I am God, and King, and Law,’ backed by a House of Commons that was hopelessly unrepresentative. Yet their blood, as has been well said, proved in the end to be the seed of some of our most cherished liberties.

Hudson’s book is more directly political. He is lyrical about Peterloo itself:

There is no time in the history of modern democracy so moving as that hot summer morning of August 16th, 1819, when every Lancashire town round Manchester sent its contingent of poverty dressed in its Sunday best to Peterloo. The people, mainly, were weavers, spinners and hatters. Their hearts beat high with hope, for they were sure the way to the new heaven and new earth would be free to all, if only the gates of parliament were open. Full of a peaceful intent, they brought their wives and children with them as a proof that they neither expected nor desired riot and disorder. Their enemies made the presence of those women and children, after they had cut them down, a reproach against the people. To most of them Manchester was quite unknown. In these days of trains and trams it is hard to conceive the impressiveness of their great enterprise.

With respect to the time of writing, Hudson asked: ‘to what extend is the ruthless repression of popular movements at the time of Peterloo likely to be again attempted? How far, at the conclusion of a great war, can the workers retain and increase whatever political freedom they possess?’ He detailed the under-appreciated work of female reform societies, which was again coming to prominence in the context of the suffragettes.

As Bruton writes, Peterloo prompted an ‘avalanche’ of tracts for and against the reformers. Continuity with contemporary Manchester politics was suggested by the work of the Manchester Guardian’s founding editor in reporting the massacre. These books show the importance of Manchester’s history, and the seriousness with which it was taken by residents of the city in 1921.

Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement, by the late Mark Hovell. Edited and completed, with a memoir, by Professor T. F. Tout

Mark Hovell was a local working-class boy who had won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School. Although he left at 12 to work as a pupil teacher at Moston Lane Municipal School, he later won a Hulme scholarship to attend Manchester University. At the age of 24 he became assistant lecturer, in charge of workers’ education classes in Colne, Ashton and Leigh. Although a ‘slim, quiet, unassuming and nervous young man’, he quickly won the confidence of his audience as ‘one who sympathised with the sorrows and sufferings of the people’. In 1914 Hovell joined the Officer Training Corps, before becoming a second lieutenant in the 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters. Posted to the Somme, he died in 1916 at the age of 28 while trying to rescue one of his men from an explosion. Overcome by fumes, he fell down a mine shaft and died.

Hovell had written frequently to Professor T. F. Tout about his MA thesis from the frontline. Tout made sure the thesis was published and wrote a memoir of Hovell. Hovell’s main interest was British social history, particularly Chartism. Tout wrote that ‘much of the vividness and directness of his appeal was due to the fact that he was speaking on subjects which he himself was investigating at first hand’.

Before the war more friendly exchanges between Britain and the ‘other Germany’ of scholars and artists had been possible (as was emphasised by Peake, Bosanquet and Bonavia, as discussed above). Hovell had travelled to Germany to study social history (kulturgeschichte) under the innovative Professor Lamprecht. Even then German chauvinism was becoming apparent, however, and Tout notes that although stimulated intellectually, Hovell was unhappy at German militarism and ‘crass materialism’.

Tout also noted that when he began to work at the university, Hovell had to pay back the costs of his teacher training, as he was no longer teaching in schools. This, Tout said, put him in a similar position to an ‘indentured coolie’. Tout hoped for better funding for university lecturers and research and had hoped to set up an Institute of Historical Research in Manchester, before being pipped at the post by London University.

Summarising Hovell’s character, Tout wrote:

He had nothing of the bellicose or martial spirit; but he had a stern sense of obligation and a keen eye to realities. Like other contemporaries who had some experience in Germany, he fully realised the inevitableness [sic] of the struggle and knew that every man was bound to take his place in the grave and prolonged effort by which alone England could escape overwhelming disaster.

Yet Tout emphasised that the book was being published for its scholarly value, and not only for reasons of sentiment and commemoration.

Hovell contextualised Chartism in the long history of radical thought from the 1640s on. After Waterloo, such thought attracted working-class support. This radicalism aimed for natural rights as ends in themselves. After 1832, however, these had become means to the ‘social and economic regeneration of society’.

During the period 1815–40 industrialisation began in earnest. Large fluctuations in the economy occurred and new industrial systems meant the ‘social distance which separated employers and employed was widened as capital seemed to become more and more impersonal’. There was ‘hideous exploitation of women and children in mines and collieries as well as in other non-regulated industries. Working men might with reason feel that they were isolated, neglected, and exposed to the oppression of a social system which was not of their own making or choosing, but which, as they thought, was not beyond the control of their united power.’

The Chartist movement derived ideas from several sources, including the French Revolution. Its immediate ancestor was the London Working Men’s Association and Anti-Poor Law agitations. It was a nationwide movement with ‘ideas from London’, ‘organisation from Birmingham’ and ‘vehemence from Lancashire and Yorkshire’. The Charter was taken up with enthusiasm by working men’s clubs, especially after the poverty of 1838. Yet for all its force, there were splits in the ranks along class, regional and trade lines.

Although many see Chartism as one of the ‘lost causes of history’, Hovell shows how its principles have ‘gradually become parts of the British constitution’. Progress has been made and the ‘domination of the middle class, prepared for by the Act of 1832, is at least as much a matter of ancient history as the power of the landed aristocracy’. But while the political aims of the Chartists have mostly been realised, the vaguer ideas of ‘social regeneration’ behind Chartism have not. Indeed, Hovell argues that social Chartism was a protest and not a full vision. It contained a variety of views, from socialism to Jacobinism to individualism to a reactionary vision wherein ‘a nation of small farms, a contented peasantry, rooted to the soil, and capable by association of controlling its own destinies, was to replace the sordid industrialism of the factory system’. These diverse currents successfully made ‘common cause against some common and glaring evils’. Before Chartism it had been the ‘duty of the common man to obey his masters and be contented with his miserable lot’.

Hovell’s admiration for the Chartists is clear: ‘Every Chartist was fiercely independent and eager that the class for which he stood should work out its own salvation.’ It was the first modern movement to be controlled by working men and ‘its modest success taught elementary lessons of self-discipline and self-government that made the slow development of British democracy possible without danger to the national stability and well-being’. The current trend for state intervention, represented by national insurance, pensions and free school meals, is a ‘response on thoroughly Chartist lines for the improvement of social conditions by legislative means’. Chartism has also had an immense effect on Continental social democracy and has highlighted the importance of class war, now a prime mover of history.

1916: Art, Literature and War

Lawrence Haward, The Effect of War upon Art and Literature: A lecture delivered at the University of Manchester, February 28, 1916 (1916)

In this 1916 lecture, Haward probed the relationship between war and art in the hope of predicting what kind of art might be produced by the war going on in Europe. He used examples from Classical Greece to the present day to make his case. Haward was director of the Manchester Art Gallery and amassed a significant collection of war art directly from artists’ studios, such as the significant oil painting by Henry Lamb, Advanced Dressing Station on the Struma (1916) and Paul Nash’s Wounded, Passchendaele.

At the outset of his lecture he notes that the artist’s primary function is to ‘give expression to aesthetic emotion’, not to make moral or social comment. But artists are not separate from society. Indeed, the artist is sometimes a prophet, interpreter or spokesman: ‘His sensibilities being more acute, he catches the meaning of what [others] only dimly apprehend and gives precise and significant utterance to thoughts which they can only partially formulate or clothe in vague and halting phrases.’

Haward rejects Ruskin’s argument that war stimulates great art. For Haward, fighting and art are different types of expression, and not necessarily related. He goes further and suggests that art that explicitly seeks to portray war is often ‘stillborn’ and uninspired. Lady Butler and Eduard Dataille are given as examples of this stilted war art.

An existential war is more likely to affect the artist. Artists may seek to re-establish the ‘spiritual balance’ of a nation put off-kilter by war. For Haward, it is only poets who can express national feeling. Painters, sculptors and musicians are generally too personal to be able to produce art that matches the feelings of a nation. More generally, it is possible to produce good war art, and he praises Goya, Vereschagin, Zola, Tolstoi and Walt Whitman for turning their personal anti-war sentiments into meaningful works of art.

It was Haward’s opinion that the current war was more likely to prevent than cause masterpieces. He argues that as war is no longer a romantic adventure, as some had thought, it is now more likely to produce ‘anger and bitterness’ than ‘heroic emotions’. In consequence his audience should not expect to see any decent war art until it was possible to judge events ‘dispassionately’.

L. van der Essen, La bibliothèque de l’Université de Louvain / Henry Guppy, Steps Towards the Reconstitution of the Library of the University of Louvain (1915)

Louvain library was destroyed by the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. The John Rylands library sought to ‘give some practical expression of their deep feelings of sympathy with the authorities of the University of Louvain, in the irreparable loss which they have suffered, through the barbarous destruction of the University buildings and the famous library’. The library offered a gift of books, and a catalogue of these was published along with a record of the donors.

Leon van der Essen, a history professor at the University of Louvain, offered a short history of the library. It was founded in 1425 and grew through various legacies over the years. Although it was not known for certain how many books there were before the library was destroyed, it was certainly more than 230,000. The library’s catalogue was old and uncatalogued books were being found all the time, which made their loss all the more tragic. The library was particularly good on religious reformers and politico-religious pamphlets and had more than 350 incunables. It had good Jesuit and Jansenist collections, some recently found political pamphlets from the period of the Thirty Years War and unique examples of eighteenth-century polemical literature. There were more than 950 manuscripts including twelfth-century post-Carolingian examples, lives of saints, psalters, books of hours, liturgical manuals from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, magnificent illuminations and miniatures. The university archives were housed there, as well as cabinets of curiosities, maps from Mercator, signatures of famous visitors like Victor Hugo and portraits of Erasmus and others. ‘On 26 August 1914, in a few hours, the German soldiers brutally destroyed these treasures, which were not simply the patrimony of Louvain or Belgium, but of the civilised world.’

Van der Essen concluded by categorically denying ‘the claim made by some, including the journal of Chicago, that German soldiers attempted to save the library’. Again, here was an example of scholarship was being used to emphasise German barbarism.

Catalogue of an exhibition of the works of Shakespeare, his sources, and the writings of his principal comtemporaries, Tercentenary of the Death of Shakespeare 1616, April 23, 1916

This is an annotated bibliography of the early editions kept at the John Rylands library, with notes on likely influences, other books in Shakespeare’s library, and schoolbooks and other influential books of the time. The book aims to show ‘the unfolding of Shakespeare’s mind as it is reflected in his works’. It provides a short overview of his life and context, his predecessors who ‘fixed the form’ and some outline of his contribution to world culture. The editor comments that Shakespeare’s phrases, ‘only less numerous than those of the Bible, often the most plain and artless, have grown into household words’.

It is not a nationalistic book, except in a somewhat indirect way. The editor notes the popularity of Shakespeare all over the world, including among famous German writers such as Goethe and Heine. ‘Thus we see that it is in no narrow spirit of insularity that we put our illustrious countryman amongst the intellectual giants of the world. Who can deny that he stands incomparably the greatest dramatic writer of modern times, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known.’ This comment might perhaps be aimed at German claims of cultural superiority, which appeared in propaganda, including that attempting to get America to fight with Germany.

1917–18: Understanding the Impact of the War on the Mind

G. Elliot Smith and T. H. Pear, Shell Shock and its Lessons (1917)

Written by two members of the University of Manchester’s medical department, this work was published at the end of the war, and drew on journals from Britain, France, Russia and Germany. Elliot Smith had refused to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as a military psychiatrist because he believed that military discipline was counterproductive to therapy and even potentially fatal for psychoneurotic soldiers. For the authors, shell shock was ‘perhaps one of the saddest of the many grievances aspects of the war’, made worse because of the public’s ‘exaggerated’ distress at mental illness.

The book first defined shell shock. In it, the senses are not lost but rather exhibit a ‘painful efficiency’. Shell-shocked soldiers are still rational – the disturbance is purely emotional. The authors suggest that it is the same as other nervous disorders in its essence, and assert that since soldiers are more focused on bravery and precision, they feel the loss of emotional stability and exaggerated fear more acutely. The book comments that, in the minds of many, nervous disorders are imaginings of the ‘well-to-do woman living in the lap of luxury … This war has, however, removed from honest peoples’ minds the possibility of regarding these phenomena in such a shamelessly unscientific light.’ The authors rejected the common view that shell-shock patients were malingering.

According to Elliot Smith and Pear, there are three stages of shell shock. Following the initial shock the patient will exhibit severe loss of senses, mutism and other such symptoms. In stage 2, we see the residuum of these symptoms and subjective symptoms such as stammering, insomnia and bad dreams. It is best to arrest the disorder here, when it can be reasoned away. In stage 3 the sufferer rationalises his symptoms, and the fact that he perceives these symptoms will make him think he is mad.

The authors focused on a treatment method using persuasion, but were at pains to stress that this involved more than common sense. Knowledge and expertise of the mind were needed in order to interpret dreams, slips and other signs of the unconscious, as the disorder cannot be reasoned away consciously in stage 3. In practical terms, they argued that the ‘history of the trouble can be unravelled in conversation’ by a trained psychologist.

In helping the patient, ‘firmness and sympathy’ were needed. This was not the ‘misplaced emotion’ of ‘petting variety’ sympathy. Isolation and heavy-handedness were also bad. A genuine insight into the problem was required, which could only be gained by careful attention to the patient and knowledge of the mind. Hypnotism could also be useful to break down certain resistances.

Ordinary wards are said to offer only ‘fussy solicitude, gruelling pity or suspicious contempt’. Special clinics for the shell-shocked are held up as far more effective in offering the right care and removing the stigma found in asylums.

More generally the book is a plea to pay more heed to psychology. Current treatment is claimed to be too focused on those already fully insane and therefore ignores the many incipient cases which can be nipped in the bud. The Medico-Psychological Association report’s findings in 1914 had been put on hold by the war. The report suggested a need for more training of doctors, clinics for the treatment of early cases and a reform of the lunacy laws, as well as a ‘vast’ amount of research in psychology. The views of Pear and Elliot Smith challenged military psychiatry’s aim of returning ill men to the Front as quickly as possible.

Bernard Hart, The Modern Treatment of Mental & Nervous Disorders: A lecture delivered at the University of Manchester, on 25th March 1918 (1918)

In this public lecture for a lay audience, Bernard Hart set out the treatment options for victims of shell shock. Thousands of British soldiers were returning from the Front with this new disorder, leading many people either to question their courage or lament the inhumanity of modern war. Bernard Hart was a leading psychologist at the Maghull military hospital, along with T.H. Pear, Manchester University professor Grafton Elliot Smith and 25 other doctors. Experimental psychodynamic techniques were used at the hospital to treat patients with the most severe forms of shell shock.

Hart begins by explaining that ‘nervous disorders’ are distinct from ‘mental disorders’ (madness). Nervous disorders are not due to ‘demonstrable disease or injury of the nervous system’ but rather to mental causes. They include neurasthenia, hysteria, nervous breakdown, nerves and, recently, shell shock. He delves into history to show that the stigma of the medieval witch trial was still attached to mental disease. In the nineteenth century a ‘physiological conception’, which looked for physical causes, held sway. Now a ‘psychological conception’ has come to the fore as ‘mental causes are capable of exact scientific estimation’ – investigation and treatment can be achieved by these means.

By 1918, shell shock was understood by military medicine and the government as a major problem, although officers and ordinary soldiers were often diagnosed with different illnesses based on class assumptions. Psychology was still a fledging discipline and Hart and his Maghull colleagues’ use of experimentalism to combat the assumptions that military medicine made – about the origins of mental illness and that masculine courage and obedience to discipline were therapeutic – was particularly innovative.

Hart used the example of tears to explain the difference between physiological and psychological causes. Tears can be induced by an irritant or by emotions. The trick for doctors is to identify the right cause so that it can be fixed. He used diagrams to show the ‘chains of causation’ of physical and mental causes. In nervous disorders, it is ‘more and more certain that “mental” factors constitute the most important link in the chain of causation’. This emphasis on psychological factors was novel, and contrasted with the dominant physiological explanation.

The final picture shows the cause of nervous disorders: ‘mental causes’

Shell shock, although a new phenomenon, was, according to Hart, ‘in every essential respect identical’ with neurasthenia, hysteria and nervous breakdowns, but differed ‘in colouring due to the particular circumstances’ of the war. The problem in nervous patients is that parts of the mind are not in harmony. The shell-shocked soldier is ‘tortured by memories of the terrifying events he has experienced … one force tends to drag them into the full light of consciousness while another seeks to thrust them into oblivion’. As the causes are psychological, so should the treatment be: ‘The advice so often given to these unfortunate people, “Pull yourself together,” expresses literally and exactly what is required. It is, however, absolutely useless unless the patient knows what he has to pull together, and unless he is shown how to do it, and helped to do it.’

Hart argued that the patient often cannot describe the causes of his trouble – as indeed ‘most people do not fully understand the workings of their own minds’. Therefore ‘knowledge of the mechanisms of the mind’ was needed. The solution, according to Hart, was that the patient ‘must learn to regard the memories as part of the furniture of his mind, and as mere traces of events which are past’. He concluded by noting that psychological treatments had been ‘eminently successful’ but that more provision was needed.

1915–19: War and the Lessons of History

T. F. Tout, Mediaeval and Modern Warfare: A lecture delivered at the John Rylands Library on the 12th December, 1917 (1919)

Tout’s lecture makes thoughtful and lively comparisons between modern and medieval warfare, showing his commitment to using history to better understand the present. Using the fact that both the current war and the Hundred Years’ War had largely been played out in northern France and the Low Countries, Tout compared the style, destructiveness and morality of the two eras.

The scanty resources of the medieval state meant that battles never lasted for weeks and weeks. Moreover, medieval armies lacked unity and organisation, being commanded by different feudal lords. This meant that medieval tactics were much better than medieval strategy, which could often see armies roaming around the countryside for months. Yet some aspects of medieval warfare, according to Tout, had returned. Hand-to-hand fighting, once supplanted by guns, was again prevalent. Poison gas and flamethrowers had similarities with Greek fire and stink pots. Tout also identified a similar mixture of speed through open country and ultimate defensive advantage in both eras. He showed how militarism was not a new invention: England in the fourteenth century shared features with the Prussia of Tout’s time.

Was medieval war more civilised? To illustrate the best traditions of medieval chivalry, Tout provided an anecdote from the Hundred Years’ War. The English army was on the offensive, but the French had holed up in a walled city. The English demanded that they come out and ‘fight like men’. The French agreed to meet to fight fairly on a field, but then reneged and remained within the walls. The English were

bitterly disappointed when the French did not keep their promise, and angrily retired to their starting point, convinced that even if they had failed to conquer a rood of French land, they had proved themselves to be the better men. Their attitude reminds one of the boasts of German spokesmen nowadays that Germany had not been beaten. The French derived a more reasonable satisfaction from the retirement of their enemy. They may have defeated the invasion without having to fight for it, just as French and English have occupied western Germany by reason of the greatest military collapse in all history.

Thinking about his own time, Tout noted that the age of chivalry had died slowly. The Hague convention of 1899, which had sought to codify the laws of war, was largely in vain as the ‘refusal of our enemies to regard it as binding on others, has destroyed, perhaps for ever, the time-honoured conventions that made war tolerable to the moral consciousness because they mitigated some of its horrors’. War was now ‘infinitely more cruel and inhuman’ because atrocities like the use of poison gas are done ‘deliberately and consciously’.

Tout lamented that the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, observed since medieval times and reinforced by the Red Cross, was being ignored by the ‘glorious Teuton whose higher civilisation makes him a law unto himself’, meaning that the ‘other side was practically compelled to follow the example’. More optimistically, in air fighting ‘something like single combat is still possible; here courage, imagination, and individual initiative still have full play … [it shows the] best traditions on both sides of the ancient spirit of honourable rivalry’.

Tout concluded by saying that peace was needed now, based on a true ‘change of heart’. The middle ages had ‘truces of God and its leagues of peace … real internationalism in the Church and sham internationalism in the Empire’. Now we faced ‘fierce national jealousies’ in East Europe, anarchy in Russia and ‘German ascendency claims’, meaning that it was simplistic to talk solely of either progress or decline. He hoped that the ‘good sense of the average man, the general will of civilised humanity, will find a sound solution to all of these problems’.

T. F. Tout, The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century: A lecture delivered at the John Rylands Library on the 15th December, 1915

Tout’s lecture began by noting that we are not in a democracy, but a bureaucracy: ‘our masters are the demure and obscure gentlemen in neat black coats and tall hats who are seen every morning flocking to the government offices in Western London at hours varying inversely with their dignity’. He then moved on to weigh the merits of the old and new systems. Although the professional civil service came into being under Gladstone, it had existed without the name in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. It began as part of the King’s household, meaning there was no clear line between domestic and public administration. Most civil servants were clergy. Tout wryly notes that then as now:

diplomacy was the genteelest of professions. To this day the Foreign Office is spared the disastrous results on its manners and tone that might have followed had its officials, like those of less dignified departments, been selected by open competition. Perhaps brains and social graces do not always go together, and even nowadays a little more brains might have its use in diplomacy. But the practical mediaeval mind secured the happy mixture of good breeding and capacity necessary, let us say, to persuade or coerce a Balkan prince of German origin, by putting a great nobleman at the head of a foreign embassy, while associating with him a bishop, who had, perhaps begun life as a chancery clerk, to help out his intelligence, and a chancery clerk or two still on the make, to supply the necessary work and technical knowledge.

And given that for medieval men a lay clerk was the ‘last word in radicalism’ it ‘goes without saying’ that no women were admitted as was beginning to happen in Tout’s time.

Positions were sold and there was widespread nepotism. Yet even in Tout’s day, seven out of nine of the King’s Bench were related to judges, and ‘it would be impossible to draw from contemporary politics a more happy and complete survival of the mediaeval mind’. Tout saw the medieval system in context, however, noting that patronage was at that time the best surety of fidelity. While they ‘did a lot of business on their own account’, there was no outrage because this was normal and accepted.

Tout ended by sketching the lives of three ordinary clerks, arguing that a ‘good system makes the average man competent’ and that the personal is often unstressed in history. John Winwick was small gentry from Lancaster who rose to become keeper of the privy seal. His was the ‘prosperous, successful, public spirited though not particularly startling career of a good official who throve in all his undertakings and made the best of his chances in both worlds’. Geoffrey Chaucer could not make a living from writing in the days before copyright and printing. He thus used his literacy to work for the king in France and Italy. He absorbed the culture, and his good connections got him promoted. Despite the distractions of his writing, he worked hard and did well in the service. Thomas Hoccleve, a poet, was less successful. His writing tells us about the hard work of the clerk and the aches and pains and solitude. He frequented taverns and took his fair share of bribes, but worked hard.

Tout concluded ‘I cannot but record the impression that the business methods of the mediaeval official were not much worse than those of more recent and more self-complacent days.’ Of course they were corrupt, but ‘we have every reason to believe that even a modern government department might learn something from the wide knowledge, long service, corporate feeling, kindly indulgence, and sufficient devotion to the task in hand that are illustrated by the self-revelations of this obscure and unlucky public servant of the English state who died nearly 500 years ago’. He praised the neatness of the calligraphy, the correctness of the sums and the ‘respectably high level of general competence’ revealed by medieval records that he had spent many hours poring over.

What comes through most of all is Tout’s sympathy with the clerks’ lives and work. He is not blind to the merits of the antiquated system, or to the defects of the modern, professional one.

S. E. Maltby, Manchester and the Movement for National Elementary Education 1800–1870 (1918)

Maltby’s book charts the movement for educational improvement in Manchester. Throughout the period 1800–70, ‘no other single place was so much the focus of educational interest and the hotbed of educational proposals as Manchester and its neighbourhood’. The town’s rapid growth, the presence of child labour and the public-spirited citizens hoping to end this prompted an active movement. The Lancashire Public Schools Association, the Manchester and Salford Committee on Education and the Manchester Education Aid Society were important voices whose ideas were eventually taken up in the 1870 Education Act, which gave compulsory primary education to all.

There was very basic regulation of child labour in 1819, agitated for by Coleridge, the Manchester Board of Health and others. Yet until 1870 there were no publicly controlled schools or obligation to attend. Schools were either endowed schools, day schools, private schools or Sunday schools. Manchester educationalists were either voluntarists, religious or non-sectarian. Dissenters who wanted the disestablishment of Anglicanism were worried that state education would force Anglicanism on children. In addition, the Chartists had called for national education, meaning that it was associated with ‘godlessness’ for many middle-class reformers. Finally, free trade dominated the attention of many reformers until the 1850s.

Voluntarism and the religious question remained the biggest obstacles to state education. If the state was to provide education, how much scope would local interests have to shape that education? The Act was carried in 1870 under a liberal government, with a victory for the secular vision of education. Throughout the agitation the condition of Manchester – the first industrial city – was a reference point. Manchester men like Cobden were hugely influential. In Maltby’s words, Manchester was responsible for the new England and consequently ‘Manchester men felt their responsibility to make that new England good.’

Eventually a bill was passed,

providing all the factors which Manchester men had chiefly contended – viz. a system by which schools could be provided over the whole country, by a local rate aided by government grants, under local management but under state guidance and general regulation; by which all children could be brought to school without the excuse of either poverty or violation of conscience; and which was calculated to enlist in its support all parties equally despite the grave dissatisfaction of most of the Radical politicians.

Like many other authors, Maltby ends by linking the struggle against Germany with the subject of his book:

One would fain hope that England’s proud boast that she is fighting (albeit side by side with centralised and secular France) for right and liberty is but another aspect of that refusal at once either to allow the State to dictate without local control, or to exclude religious teaching from elementary schools.

1915–18: The University at War

From 1915, the Vice-Chancellor’s annual statements recorded the effects of the war on the university. He noted that ‘immediately on the commencement of the session [war] a large number of students had received commissions’. This significantly decreased the number of male students and the revenues of the university. So as not to put soldiers at a disadvantage, the university allowed scholarships to be deferred and teaching posts to be resumed after the war. The VC listed Manchester University staff and students who had died. He noted the charitable activities of female students, including Red Cross work and other social service. The university set up a committee to help Belgian refugees, and allowed them to use university facilities. The John Rylands’ University Library offered books to the destroyed Louvain library.

The university continued to function, but was geared towards the war effort. Lectures on Wednesdays and Saturdays were cancelled to allow for military drill. In addition, many departments dropped their research for war work. Economics students starting gathering statistics for the Board of Trade. Chemistry, electro-chemistry, metallurgical and engineering departments helped to develop explosives, materials for aeroplanes, work for the anthrax committee and treatments for shell shock. Although the VC was often coy about what this work actually entailed – saying, for instance, that Sir Ernest Rutherford was working ‘for the Admiralty’ – he was undoubtedly proud of the university’s contribution. At the war’s end, he noted: ‘one effect of the war has been to reveal to the official world the great intellectual and scientific resources of the Universities, and to show how they might be utilised for public benefit’.

For more details on the University’s activities during the war, including a list of all members killed, see http://www.ww1.manchester.ac.uk.

Henry Spenser Wilkinson, Learners as Leaders: An address delivered on 26th April, 1918, at a memorial service for members of Manchester university who have fallen in the war

Henry Spenser Wilkinson was born in Hulme in 1853 and was Professor of Military History at the University of Manchester and then the University of Oxford (1909), and a drama critic for London’s Morning Post. During the First World War he was an outspoken and influential critic of the British government’s strategy and policy.

‘Learners as Leaders’ was a patriotic and stirring lecture on the value of education and Manchester University in particular. The author praises the lecturers who have ‘made our community’. He makes general points about the value of learning: to ‘accustom the growing will to the habit of attention’ and help students ‘to take hold of the common stock of human knowledge’.

The lecture was given in honour of those who had fallen and emphasises the importance of duty: ‘we are Englishmen and our duty is to England. To the service of our country our University is dedicated, and its mission is to quicken our spiritual life, that we may be good and faithful citizens of the land which is our home, of the nation in which we live.’ The community and comradeship learnt at a university was suggested to be a vital stepping stone to a wider, national sense of duty. Wilkinson concluded by suggesting that the secret of leadership is the will to learn, and that this would be required for the ‘new’ England after the war.

For further information on First World War titles from Manchester University Press, please contact Simon Bell (simon.bell@manchester.ac.uk)

Why not check out, The origins of the First World War, by Annika Mombauer

BOOK LAUNCH William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse

2014-11-18T13:58:00.002+00:00

Congratulations to the editor, Charles Mollan, and the long list of contributors on the publication of William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, Astronomy and the castle in nineteenth-century Ireland

They were joined by many colleagues and friends, including Lord Rosse and the Countess of Rosse, to toast the arrival of the new book.

Margaret Hogan, Wolfgang Steinicke, Lord Rosse, Countess of Rosse, Daniel McDowell, Charles Mollan, Allan Chapman (speaker on the occasion).

The sacred work: Galsworthy's advocacy for WWI veterans

2014-11-14T16:17:00.001+00:00

POSTED BY CIRCULATING NOW ON NOVEMBER 10, 2014 IN COLLECTIONS

By Jeffrey S. Reznick

This Veterans Day is the first to occur during the four-year centenary anniversary of World War I. As media outlets feature stories about medical care and philanthropic support provided to men and women who have sustained permanent injury through military service in recent wars, we have an opportunity to look back to the Great War and remember its veterans and the many generous individuals who advocated for them on the road back to civilian life.

John Galsworthy, 1919
Courtesy Library of Congress

One of those individuals was John Galsworthy (1867–1933), recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize in literature for his authorship of the The Forsyte Saga, an epic sequence of novels and ‘interludes’ about the upper-middle-class Forsyte family. While Galsworthy is best known for this literary achievement, he should also be remembered for his humanitarian support for and his writings about soldiers disabled in the “war to end all wars.”

For Galsworthy, the weeks running up to the Great War were a time of depression and paralysis. “These war-clouds are monstrous,” he wrote in his diary about the impending conflict. “If Europe is involved in an Austro-Servian [sic] quarrel, one will cease to believe in anything.” He recorded in his diary shortly thereafter: “I wish to Heaven I could work.” Such thoughts about the impending war combined with his marriage (which he viewed as “paralyzing”), with his poor physical health (which involved a “game shoulder” and “short-sightedness”) and with his age of forty-seven (which disqualified him from enlistment) to shape Galsworthy’s perception of himself as disabled.

Inter-Allied Conference on the After-Care of Disabled Men, 1918 National Library of Medicine

Galsworthy eventually overcame his sense of disability, and made sense of the war he hated while supporting the nation he loved by embracing his very ability to write as “the most substantial thing” he could do to support “relief funds.” For the duration of the war and through the middle of 1919, therefore, he composed essays of fiction and non-fiction that were not merely descriptive of that damage and efforts to repair it but also personally-reflective as they revealed the thoughts of an observer who was set apart from, but nonetheless wished to participate in, the events of the day.

One of Galsworthy’s most thought-provoking essays was “The Sacred Work,” which he wrote during the spring of 1918 upon request of the Ministry of Pensions for the official proceedings of the second annualInter-Allied Conference and Exhibition on the After-Care of Disabled Men. This piece argued that soldiers who were “broken in war” were a vital portion of the public deserving of health in the postwar era, and that the other segment of the public—namely those civilian noncombatants who remained at home, including Galsworthy himself—had in front of them not only the task of maintaining the public’s health writ large but also “the sacred work” of providing health to the “stricken heroes of the war [who] in every township and village of our countries…will dwell for the next half-century.” Galsworthy continued:

The figure of Youth must go one-footed, one-armed, blind of an eye, lesioned and stunned, on the home where it once danced. Half of a generation can never again step into the sunlight of full health and the priceless freedom of unharmed limbs. So comes the sacred work…Niggardliness and delay in restoring all of life that can be given back is sin against the human spirit, a smear on the face of honour…The ‘scared work’ begins…in special hospitals, orthopaedic, paraplegic, neurasthenic, [where] we shall give back functional ability, solidity or nerve or lung. The flesh torn away, the lost sight, the broken ear-drum, the destroyed nerve,…it is true, we cannot give back; but we shall so re-create and fortify the rest of him that he shall leave hospital ready for a new career. Then we shall teach him how to tread the road of it, so that he fits again into the national life, becomes once more a workman with pride in his work, a stake in the country, and the consciousness that, handicapped though he be, he runs the race level with his fellows, and is by that, so much the better man than they.

The reprinting of this essay in several American publications during the final months of the war reflected what was by then Galsworthy’s international reputation as an advocate for disabled soldiers. Major figures of the day who wrote about rehabilitation programs for wounded soldiers—including Garrard Harris, Cecil W. Hutt, and Douglas McMurtrie—acknowledged Galsworthy’s contributions.

Handbook for the Limbless, 1921
National Library of Medicine

When the Great War ended in November 1918, Galsworthy did not publicly address the subject of disabled soldiers again until 1921, when The Disabled Society published his nine-paragraph foreword to its Handbook for the Limbless. Suggesting the very therapeutic value of his words and theHandbook itself—both for himself and for the nation—Galsworthy wrote that “…It will do a lot of us, who still have all our limbs, good to read this Handbook, and be reminded of what so many thousands are now up against, and of how sturdily they are withstanding discouragement.”

The fact that this short piece was apparently Galsworthy’s final public statement relating to disabled soldiers should not be surprising. Like so many individuals of the “generation of 1914” who survived the Great War, Galsworthy had wanted to forget the trauma of the conflict and the rhetoric of the contemporary culture of care-giving surrounding disabled soldiers, including the promises of artificial limbs, curative workshops, and propaganda that envisioned a positive future for all disabled veterans. Put simply, Galsworthy was through with the war. As correctly prophetic as his wartime compositions were, the empty rhetoric of heroism and false promises of the day prevailed.

So disillusioned was Galsworthy with the war—and so disenchanted was he with his wartime advocacy, which he judged as merely a drop in the flood of propaganda which overtook the nation—that from 1921 until his death in 1933 he never again took up the subject of disabled soldiers in any original way. The war, Galsworthy observed privately in a letter to a friend shortly before his death, “killed a terrible lot of—I don’t know what to call it—self-importance, faith, idealism, in me…”

The experiences and words of John Galsworthy offer a lesson in how quickly wars and veterans can be forgotten. On this first Veterans Day during the centenary anniversary of the Great War, this chapter in the history of that conflict should inspire us not only to remember disabled veterans of subsequent and current wars but also to invest for the long term in “the sacred work” of renewing their health and enabling their full participation in society.

Learn more about John Galsworthy and his work on behalf of soldiers disabled in the Great War, from the BBC World War One at Home, a growing collection of stories that show how WW1 affected the people and places of the UK and Ireland.

Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, is Chief of the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.

John Galsworthy and disabled soldiers of the Great War, available in paperback, December 2014
http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719096754