The Working Class In England 1875 1914

First published in 1985. Too often aspects of working-class life have been treated as distinct and separate. The contributors to this volume are aware of the dangers of such atomisation and have attempted to bring together a collection of studies which add to our knowledge of life in that time. The examinations of family, health, work, leisure and criminal trends form the basis of this work, and suggest that the everyday lives and values of the working-class were even more varied, creative and complex than is generally believed. This title will be of interest to students of history.

First published in 1985. Too often aspects of working-class life have been treated as distinct and separate. The contributors to this volume are aware of the dangers of such atomisation and have attempted to bring together a collection of studies which add to our knowledge of life in that time. The examinations of family, health, work, leisure and criminal trends form the basis of this work, and suggest that the everyday lives and values of the working-class were even more varied, creative and complex than is generally believed. This title will be of interest to students of history.

Who made up the working class in Britain, who were the ordinary men and women and what were their aspirations? The first generation of postwar British labour historians tended to be preoccupied with working class activism. This texts attempts to chart not only this struggle, but to describe and analyse the rich and varied tapestry of working-class history as a whole. It demonstrates that "class" both existed and mattered although ordinary men and women had diverse lives and lifestyles. Professor Benson examines work, wages, incomes and the cost of living, family, kinship and community relations and the individual in the context of nation and class.

EU security governance assesses the effectiveness of the EU as a security actor. The book has two distinct features. Firstly, it is the first systematic study of the different economic, political and military instruments employed by the EU in the performance of four different security functions. The book demonstrates that the EU has emerged as an important security actor, not only in the non-traditional areas of security, but increasingly as an entity with force projection capabilities. Secondly, the book represents an important step towards redressing conceptual gaps in the study of security governance, particularly as it pertains to the European Union. The book links the challenges of governing Europe's security to the changing nature of the state, the evolutionary expansion of the security agenda, and the growing obsolescence of the traditional forms and concepts of security cooperation.

First published in 1977. This book records the emergence of a lower middle class in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Victorian society had always contained a marginal middle class of shopkeepers and small businessmen, but in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the growth of white-collar salaried occupations created a new and distinctive force in the social structure. These essays look at the place of the lower middle class within British society and examine its ideals and values. Some essays concentrate on occupational groups – clerks and shopkeepers – while others focus on aspects of lower middle class life – religion, housing and jingoism. This title will be of interest to students of history.

In this insightful new study, Andrew August examines the British working class in the period when Britain became a mature industrial power, working men and women dominated massive new urban populations, and the extension of suffrage brought them into the political nation for the first time. Framing his subject chronologically, but treating it thematically, August gives a vivid account of working class life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, examining the issues and concerns central to working-class identity. Identifying shared patterns of experience in the lives of workers, he avoids the limitations of both traditional historiography dominated by economic determinism and party politics, and the revisionism which too readily dismisses the importance of class in British society.

Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity. Each self contained chapter consists of an essay of historical analysis, introducing students to the ways historians use evidence to understand change, as well as useful chronologies, statistics and tables, suggested topics for discussion, and selective further reading.