Structures and Transformations in Modern British History

This major collection of essays challenges many of our preconceptions about British political and social history from the late eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, twelve leading scholars explore both the long-term structures – social, political and intellectual – of modern British history, and the forces that have transformed those structures at key moments. The result is a series of insightful, original essays presenting new research within a broad historical context. Subjects covered include the consequences of rapid demographic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the forces shaping transnational networks, especially those between Britain and its empire; and the recurrent problem of how we connect cultural politics to social change. An introductory essay situates Stedman Jones's work within the broader historiographical trends of the past thirty years, drawing important conclusions about new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.

David Feldman teaches history at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He has written on Jewish history as well as on the history of migration, immigration and emigration in early modern and modern Britain. He is the author of Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (1994) and most recently (together with Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer) he edited Paths of Integration: Migrants in Western Europe, 1880–2004 (2006). He is currently writing a book on immigration and public policy in Britain since 1600.

Jon Lawrence lectures in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He has written widely on the social, political and cultural history of modern Britain, and is the author of Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (1998), Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (2009), and with Miles Taylor, Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (1997). He is currently writing a book on class and the politics of social identity in modern Britain.