Brave New World

Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars

Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (eds.)

Brave New World coverAfter WWI, Britain faced a number of challenges as it sought to adapt to domestic conditions of mass democracy whilst maintaining its position in the empire in the face of national independence movements. As politicians at home and abroad sought to legitimise their position, new efforts were made to conceptualise nationality and citizenship, with attempts to engage the public using mass media and greater emphasis on governing in the public interest.

Brave New World reappraises the domestic and imperial history of Britain in the interwar period, investigating how ‘nation building’ was given renewed impetus by the upheavals of WWI. The essays in this collection address how new technologies and approaches to governance were used to forge new national identities both at home and in the empire, covering a wide range of issues from the representation of empire on film to the convergence of politics and ‘star culture’.

The book is an invaluable resource for scholars of British social, political and imperial history, as well as being of interest to the general reader.

Price: c.£40.00 (tbc), hbk.
ISBN: 978-1-905165-58-2
Published: April 2012

Foreword - Ross McKibbin

Introduction - Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas 

I. Defining a democratic nation

Lucy Delap - Domestic service in interwar Britain: deferent workers, class divides?

Marc Matera - Performing blackness in late imperial London: black intellectuals and the representation of empire in British films during the 1930s and 1940s

Tamson Pietsch - 'Mending a broken world': the universities and the nation, 1918-36

Geraint Thomas - 1918 and 1931: moderation and modernity in the 'new' democracy

Daniel Ussishkin - Socializing the will to work: morale, worker and society between the wars

 

II. Speaking to the nation

Laura Beers - 'A timid disbelief in the equality to which lip-service is constantly paid': gender, politics and the press between the wars

Adrian Bingham - Representing the people? The Daily Mirror, class and political culture in inter-war Britain

Ellen Boucher - Inventing humanitarianism: the Save the Children Fund and the British appeal for enemy children, 1919-23 

Gary Love - 'The pen is mightier than the sword': literary conservatives, politics and the challenge of fascism in 1930s Britain 

Priya Satia - Inter-war agnotology: empire, democracy and the production of ignorance

Aaron Windel - Soviet borrowings and American capital: the British colonial state's experiment with African cinema