Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
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Title: Social paralysis and social change: British working-class education in the nineteenth century
Author: Smelser, Neil J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | History | European History | Education
Publisher's Description: Neil Smelser's Social Paralysis and Social Change is one of the most comprehensive histories of mass education ever written. It tells the story of how working-class education in nineteenth-century Britain - often paralyzed by class, religious, and economic conflict - struggled forward toward change.This book is ambitious in scope. It is both a detailed history of educational development and a theoretical study of social change, at once a case study of Britain and a comparative study of variations within Britain. Smelser simultaneously meets the scholarly standards of historians and critically addresses accepted theories of educational change - "progress," conflict, and functional theories. He also sheds new light on the process of secularization, the relations between industrialization and education, structural differentiation, and the role of the state in social change.This work marks a return for the author to the same historical arena - Victorian Britain - that inspired his classic work Social Change in the Industrial Revolution thirty-five years ago. Smelser's research has again been exhaustive. He has achieved a remarkable synthesis of the huge body of available materials, both primary and secondary.Smelser's latest book will be most controversial in its treatment of class as a primordial social grouping, beyond its economic significance. Indeed, his demonstration that class, ethnic, and religious groupings were decisive in determining the course of British working-class education has broad-ranging implications. These groupings remain at the heart of educational conflict, debate, and change in most societies - including our own - and prompt us to pose again and again the chronic question: who controls the educational terrain?   [brief]
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Title: Licensing entertainment: the elevation of novel reading in Britain, 1684-1750 
Author: Warner, William Beatty
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | European History | Print Media | English Literature
Publisher's Description: Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. William Warner shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety about the effects of new media on consumers.Warner uncovers a buried and neglected history of the way in which the idea of the novel was shaped in response to a newly vigorous market in popular narratives. In order to rein in the sexy and egotistical novel of amorous intrigue, novelists and critics redefined the novel as morally respectable, largely masculine in authorship, national in character, realistic in its claims, and finally, literary. Warner considers early novelists in their role as entertainers and media workers, and shows how the short, erotic, plot-driven novels written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood came to be absorbed and overwritten by the popular novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Considering these novels as entertainment as well as literature, Warner traces a different story - one that redefines the terms within which the British novel is to be understood and replaces the literary history of the rise of the novel with a more inclusive cultural history.   [brief]
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Title: The war come home: disabled veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939
Author: Cohen, Deborah 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European History | German Studies | Military History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Disabled veterans were the First World War's most conspicuous legacy. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned from the First World War permanently disabled by injury or disease. In The War Come Home, Deborah Cohen offers a comparative analysis of the very different ways in which two belligerent nations--Germany and Britain--cared for their disabled. At the heart of this book is an apparent paradox. Although postwar Germany provided its disabled veterans with generous benefits, they came to despise the state that favored them. Disabled men proved susceptible to the Nazi cause. By contrast, British ex-servicemen remained loyal subjects, though they received only meager material compensation. Cohen explores the meaning of this paradox by focusing on the interplay between state agencies and private philanthropies on one hand, and the evolving relationship between disabled men and the general public on the other. Written with verve and compassion, The War Come Home describes in affecting detail disabled veterans' lives and their treatment at the hands of government agencies and private charities in Britain and Germany. Cohen's study moves from the intimate confines of veterans' homes to the offices of high-level bureaucrats; she tells of veterans' protests, of disabled men's families, and of the well-heeled philanthropists who made a cause of the war's victims. This superbly researched book provides an important new perspective on the ways in which states and societies confront the consequences of industrialized warfare.   [brief]
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Title: Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain
Author: Walker, Pamela J 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Christianity | Victorian History | Religion | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.   [brief]
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Title: The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780
Author: Hunt, Margaret R 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | Social Science
Publisher's Description: To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed.Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.   [brief]
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Title: The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000
Author: Endelman, Todd M
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Jewish Studies | European History | Ethnic Studies | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In Todd Endelman's spare and elegant narrative, the history of British Jewry in the modern period is characterized by a curious mixture of prominence and inconspicuousness. British Jews have been central to the unfolding of key political events of the modern period, especially the establishment of the State of Israel, but inconspicuous in shaping the character and outlook of modern Jewry. Their story, less dramatic perhaps than that of other Jewish communities, is no less deserving of this comprehensive and finely balanced analytical account. Even though Jews were never completely absent from Britain after the expulsion of 1290, it was not until the mid- seventeenth century that a permanent community took root. Endelman devotes chapters to the resettlement; to the integration and acculturation that took place, more intensively than in other European states, during the eighteenth century; to the remarkable economic transformation of Anglo-Jewry between 1800 and 1870; to the tide of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1914 and the emergence of unprecedented hostility to Jews; to the effects of World War I and the turbulent events up to and including the Holocaust; and to the contradictory currents propelling Jewish life in Britain from 1948 to the end of the twentieth century. We discover not only the many ways in which the Anglo-Jewish experience was unique but also what it had in common with those of other Western Jewish communities.   [brief]
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Title: Secure from rash assault: sustaining the Victorian environment 
Author: Winter, James H 1925-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Victorian History | Ecology | Geography | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Nineteenth-century Britain led the world in technological innovation and urbanization, and unprecedented population growth contributed as well to the "rash assault," to quote Wordsworth, on Victorian countrysides. Yet James Winter finds that the British environment was generally spared widespread ecological damage.Drawing from a remarkable variety of sources and disciplines, Winter focuses on human intervention as it not only destroyed but also preserved the physical environment. Industrial blight could be contained, he says, because of Britain's capacity to import resources from elsewhere, the conservative effect of the estate system, and certain intrinsic limitations of steam engines. The rash assault was further blunted by traditional agricultural practices, preservation of forests, and a growing recreation industry that favored beloved landscapes. Winter's illumination of Victorian attitudes toward the exploitation of natural resources offers a valuable preamble to ongoing discussions of human intervention in the environment.   [brief]
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Title: The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class
Author: Clark, Anna
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Linking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a "struggle for the breeches." The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity, the sexual division of labor, and sexual mores, changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history.Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness, Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire, Glasgow, and London, she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers, demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies.Workers faced a "sexual crisis," Clark claims, as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability, others might be homophobes, wife-beaters, and tyrants at home; a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women, instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class.   [brief]
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Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 
Author: Biernacki, Richard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Sociology | Labor Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life.   [brief]
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Title: On her their lives depend: munitions workers in the Great War
Author: Woollacott, Angela 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this evocative book, Angela Woollacott analyzes oral histories, workers' writings, newspapers, official reports, and factory song lyrics to present an intimate view of women munitions workers in Britain during World War I.Munitions work offered working-class women - for the first time - independence, a reliable income, even an improved standard of living. But male employers and trade unionists brought them face-to-face with their subordination as women within their own class, while experiences with middle-class women co-workers and police reminded them of their status as working class.Woollacott sees the woman munitions worker as a powerful symbol of modernity who challenged the gender order through her patriotic work and challenged class differences through her increased spending power, mobility, and changing social behavior.   [brief]
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Title: Nobody's story: the vanishing acts of women writers in the marketplace, 1670-1820 
Author: Gallagher, Catherine
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers through the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. The terms "woman," "author," "marketplace," and "fiction" come to define each other reciprocally.Gallagher analyzes the provocative plays of Aphra Behn, the scandalous court chronicles of Delarivier Manley, the properly fictional nobodies of Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney, and finally Maria Edgeworth's attempts in the late eighteenth century to reform the unruly genre of the novel.   [brief]
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Title: Nerves and narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose 
Author: Logan, Peter Melville 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Literary Theory and Criticism | Victorian History | English Literature | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The British middle class of the early nineteenth century was defined by its nervous complaints - hysteria, hypochondria, vapours, melancholia, and other maladies. Peter Melville Logan explores the link between medical theories of nervous physiology and narrative issues central to the literary writing of the period. He examines the assumption, implicit in medical thinking at the time, that the nervous body - unlike its non-nervous counterpart - has a narrative inscribed on its nerve fibers. It becomes "the body with a story to tell."Logan takes up several literary works whose nervous narrators connect their present disorder with an unnatural, unhealthy social order. Concentrating on novels by Godwin, Hays, and Edgeworth, and on De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , Logan weaves cultural phenomena such as crowd psychology and attitudes toward opium addiction into the basic paradigm of the nervous narrative. He explains why these social critiques always tended to promote the same distempered civilization that brought them into being. He then looks at the emergence of the working-class body in the 1840s, changing medical theories, and George Eliot's treatment of medicine in Middlemarch .Logan's book is especially valuable for its rethinking of disciplinary categories that separate medicine from literature and for bringing to light lesser-known literary texts. With a foreword by Roy Porter, it will be a welcome addition to literary, gender, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Between craft and class: skilled workers and factory politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 
Author: Haydu, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | United States History | European History | Labor Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Between Craft and Class provides an incisive new look at workers' responses to the momentous economic changes surrounding them in the early years of the twentieth century. In this work, Haydu focuses on the reaction of skilled metal workers to new production methods that threatened time-honored craft traditions. He finds that the workers' responses to industrial change varied - some defended the status quo, while others agreed to trade customary rules for economic rewards. Under some conditions class protest arose, as workers of diverse skills and trades joined to demand a greater voice in the management of industry. Between Craft and Class explores how broadly based movements for workers' control developed during this critical period, and why they ultimately failed.Comparing workers in the United States and Britain, Haydu's scholarship is distinguished by extensive primary source research and provocative theoretical insights. In its scope and depth, this book will revise current notions of craft politics and working-class radicalism during this period.   [brief]
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Title: Storm over Mono: the Mono Lake battle and the California water future 
Author: Hart, John 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Environmental Studies | Natural History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: A dramatic environmental saga unfolds in John Hart's compelling story of the fight to save Mono Lake. This ancient inland sea, in the eastern Sierra near Yosemite National Park, is among the oldest in North America. But over the past fifty years, as its feeder streams were steadily drained to supply water to ever-growing, ever-thirsty Los Angeles, the lake's water volume eventually was reduced by half. Mono Lake's bizarre but productive ecosystem began to collapse: salinity greatly increased, nesting and migrating birds were threatened, and fierce alkali dust storms became a common occurrence.Then, in the mid-1970s, a handful of people, most of them students with minimal financial resources, began a campaign to save the dying lake. They took on not only Los Angeles but the entire state government and a whole way of thinking about water. Their fight seemed doomed in the beginning, but long years of grassroots education and effort finally paid off. In 1994, the California Water Resources Control Board ruled that Los Angeles's use of Mono Lake's waters be restricted. Over time, the lake will return to a healthy condition.John Hart integrates natural, social, and political history into a story that is a source of hope for anyone concerned about the environment. Storm over Mono demonstrates the important role of science in public policy debates and validates the concept of the public trust, the idea that certain things belong to us all, not metaphorically but in simple legal fact.Complementing Hart's narrative are 32 stunning color photographs by a dozen leading nature photographers, along with numerous black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and maps.   [brief]
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Title: A different shade of colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the mastery of the Sudan
Author: Powell, Eve Troutt
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This incisive study adds a new dimension to discussions of Egypt's nationalist response to the phenomenon of colonialism as well as to discussions of colonialism and nationalism in general. Eve M. Troutt Powell challenges many accepted tenets of the binary relationship between European empires and non-European colonies by examining the triangle of colonialism marked by Great Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan. She demonstrates how central the issue of the Sudan was to Egyptian nationalism and highlights the deep ambivalence in Egyptian attitudes toward empire and the resulting ambiguities and paradoxes that were an essential component of the nationalist movement. A Different Shade of Colonialism enriches our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptian attitudes toward slavery and race and expands our perspective of the "colonized colonizer."   [brief]
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Title: Opium regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952
Author: Brook, Timothy 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century, to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s. Together these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.   [brief]
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Title: Hermann von Helmholtz and the foundations of nineteenth-century science
Author: Cahan, David
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Science | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Victorian History
Publisher's Description: Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a polymath of dazzling intellectual range and energy. Renowned for his co-discovery of the second law of thermodynamics and his invention of the ophthalmoscope, Helmholtz also made many other contributions to physiology, physical theory, philosophy of science and mathematics, and aesthetic thought. During the late nineteenth century, Helmholtz was revered as a scientist-sage - much like Albert Einstein in this century.David Cahan has assembled an outstanding group of European and North American historians of science and philosophy for this intellectual biography of Helmholtz, the first ever to critically assess both his published and unpublished writings. It represents a significant contribution not only to Helmholtz scholarship but also to the history of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in general.   [brief]
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Title: The fountain of privilege: political foundations of markets in Old Regime France and England 
Author: Root, Hilton L
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | Economics and Business | European History | Sociology | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Hilton Root's new book applies contemporary economic and political theory to answer long-standing historical questions about modernization. It contrasts political stability in Georgian England with the collapse of the Old Regime in France. Why did a century of economic expansion rupture France's political foundations while leaving those of Britain intact? Comparing the political and financial institutions of the two states, Root argues that the French monarchy's tight control of markets created unresolvable social conflicts whereas England's broader power base permitted the wider distribution of economic favors, resulting in more flexible and efficient markets.   [brief]
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Title: The travels of Dean Mahomet: an eighteenth-Century journey through India 
Author: Mahomet, Sake Deen 1759-1851
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Travel | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole.Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.   [brief]
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