Books in the Berkeley Series in British Studies series

In response to the French revolution and British radicalism, political propagandists adopted a scientific vocabulary and medical images for their own purposes. This book explores the connection between medicine and political culture that often have been overlooked.

"In this excellent book, Edwards reveals that there was no top-down project to financialize British society. Instead, there were people looking to sell financial products, drive up newspaper circulation, build new businesses or careers, experience the thrill of making a quick buck, or feel the satisfaction of taking control of one's finances. We see investment as fantasy, aspiration, lifestyle, and play, and as a component of new kinds of risk-taking masculinity and economically empowered womanhood. Are We Rich Yet? is the book that the field has been waiting for."--Helen McCarthy, Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History, University of Cambridge "Focusing on the revolution in consumer financial services, the emergence of mass investment culture in British society, and the cultivation of financial institutions that became 'too big to fail, ' Amy Edwards's fascinating study expertly guides readers through the history of how those changes were brought about--and with what effects--in a decade that was the fulcrum around which the country's post-1945 history moved."--Hugh Pemberton, Emeritus Professor of Contemporary British History, University of Bristol "How did the personal become financial? Are We Rich Yet? asks how investment became everyone's business in the 1980s and 1990s. Not just a Thatcherite policy, financialization was premised on much larger shifts in mass culture and the global economy. It promised riches for all, but Edwards forensically reveals how inequalities of power and wealth were cemented by powerful investors and trading institutions. This brilliant history of the present is urgently needed to understand how inequality and precarity became locked into the contemporary UK economy."--Lucy Delap, Professor in Modern British and Gender History, Deputy Chair of History, University of Cambridge "This is a fascinating account of how financial investment moved from the rarefied world of the boardroom and the stock exchange to something embedded in ordinary life in Britain. It is a major contribution to modern British history, showing how the emergence of popular investment in the late twentieth century was as much a social and cultural transformation as a political and economic one."--Stephen Brooke, York University, Toronto "This book ingeniously joins modern British history with Economic Humanities. By applying the methods of cultural history to the subject of neoliberalism, it delivers a rich, bottom-up, and entirely fresh account of one of the twentieth century's most significant transformations."--Guy Ortolano, Professor of History, New York University "Edwards brilliantly undercuts the myth of the sustained explosion of popular share ownership under Thatcher, demonstrating how large financial institutions tightened their hold over ordinary investors' access to markets, even as they constructed a narrative of the democratization of investing. As Edwards shows, the pivotal shift in the 1980s was, in fact, a reimagining of individual share ownership as not so much an investment, but a form of consumption and even a mode of entertainment."--Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century British History, University College London

"Thinking Black is the new reference text on Britain's extended Black Power moment, but its insights extend well beyond. It places young black Britons and politicized blackness at the forefront of the political battles and social, cultural, and intellectual shifts that defined the 1960s and 1970s. The book makes a substantial contribution to postwar, post-imperial British history and to our appreciation of the interconnected political cultures of the black Atlantic."--Marc Matera, author of Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century "Thinking Black positions blackness and the conditions shaping the lives of those who embodied, imagined, and mobilized blackness in many forms at the center of analysis. From this vantage point, the book offers a view of contemporary British history and transnational race politics that has largely been ignored by historians."--Kennetta Hammond Perry, author of London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race "Anyone committed to decolonising contemporary British politics and society must read Rob Waters' book. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, Waters tells the story of when 'thinking black' in Britain promised the birth of a new, postcolonial society. This is a history buzzing with life, with intellectual ferment, with well-known and lesser-known black activists and intellectuals transforming the very terrain of British politics and culture. The book sheds important new light on the global history of postcolonial thought and activism. And, by rightly situating black radicalism at the center of public debate in Britain in the 1970s, Waters reveals that its history is truly essential to our understanding of wider transformations in British society at this time." --Camilla Schofield, author of Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

When and how did public health become modern? InGoverning Systems, TomCrook offers a fresh answer to this question through an examination of Victorian and Edwardian England, long considered one of the critical birthplaces of modern public health. This birth, Crook argues, should be located not in the rise of professional expertise or a centralized bureacratic state, but in the contested formation and functioning of multiple systems, both human and material, administrative and technological. Theoretically ambitious but empirically grounded, Governing Systems will be of interest to historians of modern public health and modern Britain, as well as to anyone interested in the complex gestation of the governmental dimensions of modernity.

Traces British imperial efforts to engage metropolitan activists who could improve its knowledge of colonial demography and design programs to influence colonial population trends. This book examines how imperial state attempted to control colonial populations using new agricultural and public health policies.

Features leading scholars across several disciplines who investigate the nature of liberalism and modernity in imperial Britain since the eighteenth century. This book shows how Britain's liberal version of modernity was the product of a peculiar set of historical circumstances that continues to haunt our neoliberal present.

What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern? In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers. Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.

In just three decades, Great Britain's place in world politics was transformed. In 1945, it was the world's preeminent imperial power with global interests. This book assesses their responses to this predicament and explores the different ways British thinkers came to understand the international relations of the postwar period.

Using a wealth of recently declassified files from the National Archives, oral histories, court cases, press reports, social science writings, and photographs, this book focuses on the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial.

While the need for a history of liberalism that goes beyond its conventional European limits is well recognized, the agrarian backwaters of the British Empire might seem an unlikely place to start. Yet specifically liberal preoccupations with property and freedom evolved as central to agrarian policy and politics in colonial Bengal. Liberalism in Empire explores the generative crisis in understanding property's role in the constitution of a liberal polity, which intersected in Bengal with a new politics of peasant independence based on practices of commodity exchange. Thus the conditions for a new kind of vernacular liberalism were created. Andrew Sartori's examination shows the workings of a section of liberal policy makers and agrarian leaders who insisted that norms governing agrarian social relations be premised on the property-constituting powers of labor, which opened a new conceptual space for appeals to both political economy and the normative significance of property. It is conventional to see liberalism as traveling through the space of empire with the extension of colonial institutions and intellectual networks. Sartori's focus on the Lockeanism of agrarian discourses of property, however, allows readers to grasp how liberalism could serve as a normative framework for both a triumphant colonial capitalism and a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of peasant property.

The West tends to understand the Middle East primarily in terms of geopolitics: Islam, oil, and nuclear weapons. But in the nineteenth century it was imagined differently. This book re-evaluates how this story of the Eastern Question shaped the cultural politics of geography, and genocide in the mapping of a larger Middle East after World War I.

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O'Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreoverand against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatismO'Neill demonstrates that Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between ';civilized' societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing ';savage' societies from their ';civilized' counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism.

In eighteenth-century Britain, the appearance of "savages" from the New World provoked intense fascination. This book shows why the phenomenon grew and how it related to bitter debates over the morality of imperial expansion.