Black Market Britain

The first study of the underground economy in austerity Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including recently declassified material, it reveals the nature and extent of black marketeering in rationed and price controlled goods during the 1940s and early 1950s.

Britain's underground economy flourished during the 1940s and early 1950s thanks to rationing and price control, producers, traders, and professional criminals helped consumers to get a little extra on the side, from under the counter, or off the back of a lorry. Yet widespread evasion of regulations designed to ensure fair shares for all did not undermine the austerity policies that characterised these years and its vital role in securing compliance with economic regulation. In Black Market Britain, Mark Roodhouse argues that Britons showed self-restraint in their illegal dealings. The means, motives, and opportunities for evasion were not lacking. The shortages were real, regulations were not watertight, and enforcement was haphazard. Fairness, not patriotism and respect for the law, is the key to understanding this self-restraint. By invoking popular notions of a fair price, a fair profit, and a fair share, government rhetoric limited black marketeering as would-be evaders had to justify their offences both to themselves and others. Black Market Britain underlines the importance of fairness to those seeking a richer understanding of economic life in modern Britain.

'[A] comprehensive and important history of black Britain . . . Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' – Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean. This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put black British history at the centre of urgent national debate. Black and British is vivid confirmation that black history can no longer be kept separate and marginalised. It is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation and it belongs to us all. Drawing on new genealogical research, original records, and expert testimony, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, Elizabethan ‘blackamoors’ and the global slave-trading empire. It shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars. Black British history is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. It is not a singular history, but one that belongs to us all. Unflinching, confronting taboos, and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how the lives of black and white Britons have been entwined for centuries. Winner of the 2017 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Winner of the Longman History Today Trustees’ Award. A Waterstones History Book of the Year. Longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Shortlisted for the inaugural Jhalak Prize.

This volume examines conflicts over food and their implications for European societies in the first half of the Twentieth century. Food shortages and famines, fears of deprivation, and food regulations and controls were a shared European experience in this period. Conflicts over food, however, developed differently in different regions, under different regimes, and within different social groups. These developments had stark consequences for social solidarity and physical survival. Ranging across Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain to Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, this volume explores the political, economic and cultural dynamics that shaped conflicts over food and their legacies.

Black artists of African and Caribbean descent and major contributions to the British art scene Black artists have been making major contributions to the global art scene since at least the middle of the 20th century. While some of these artists of African and Caribbean descent have been embraced at times by the art world, they have mostly been neglected or have not received the recognition they deserve. Taking its starting point as the Windrush-era Caribbean Artists Movement, and considering and contextualizing the political, cultural, and artistic climate from which it emerged, this concise introduction showcases the work of 70 Black-British artists from the 1930s to the present. Artwork in a range of media offer a lens through which to understand some of the events and issues confronted and explored, shedding light on the Black-British experience. Constructed around contemporary ideas on race, national identity, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics in Britain, this book interrogates themes at the heart of Black-British art, revealing art in dialogue with a complex past and present. Featuring some of the most prominent and influential Black-British artists of recent decades, as well as less well-known artists, it also includes work from a new generation of artists on the cutting edge of contemporary art. At a time when visibility within the art world has taken on a renewed urgency, this is a timely and accessible introduction celebrating Black-British artists and their outstanding contribution to art history.

One of The Times Books of the Year 2020 _____________ 'Fascinating and entertaining - a pleasure to read.' Claudia Roden As a nation of food-lovers we have been munching on fruit and veg, drinking tea and coffee and adorning our dishes with oils and spices for generations, but have you ever stopped to wonder how our most beloved foods came to be the way they are now? In this series of enlightening and highly entertaining essays, award-winning food writer Mark Riddaway travels back through the centuries to tell the fascinating, surprising and often downright bizarre stories of some of the everyday ingredients found at London's Borough Market. Discover how the strawberries we eat today had their roots in a clandestine trip to South America by a French spy whose surname happened to be Strawberry, why three-quarters of Britain's late-18th-century intake of tea was sold on the black market, and what Sigmund Freud found so fascinating about eel genitalia. From the humble apples and onions that we've grown on these shores for centuries, to more exotic ingredients like cinnamon and bananas that travel from across the world to finesse our food, Borough Market: Edible Histories offers a chance to digest the charming stories behind every last morsel.

Austerity in Britain is the first book to explore the entire episode of rationing, austerity, and fair shares from 1939 until 1955. These policies were central to the British war effort and to post-war reconstruction. The book analyses the connections between government policy, consumption, gender, and party politics during and after the Second World War. The economic background to austerity, the policy's administration, and changes in consumption standards are examined. Rationing resulted in at times extensive black markets and popular attitudes to the policy ranged from wartime acquiescence to post-war discontent. Austerity in Britain qualifies the myth of common sacrifice on the home front and highlights the limitations of the fair-shares policy which failed to achieve genuine equality between classes or between men and women. The continuation of rationing and austerity policies after 1945 was central to party politics. Disaffection, particularly among women, undermined Labour's popularity while the Conservatives' critique of austerity was instrumental to the party's victories at the general elections of 1951 and 1955.

Based on deep analysis of Mass Observation wartime diaries, Food in Wartime Britain explores the food experience of the British middle classes in their own words throughout the course of the Second World War. It reveals that, while the food practices of the population were modified by rationing and food scarcity, social class and personal circumstances were key dimensions of the wartime food experience that demand to be taken into account in the historical narrative of the Home Front.