Since the Second World War, Marxism in Britain has declined almost to the point of oblivion. The Communist Party of Great Britain had more than 50,000 members in the early 1940s, but less than 5,000 when it disbanded in 1991. Dissenting and Trotskyist organisations experienced a very similar decline, although there has been a late flowering of Marxism in Scotland.

Based on the Communist Party archives at Manchester, this text examines the decline over the last sixty years. Dealing with the impact of the Cold War upon British Marxism, the book looks at how international events such as...

This book illuminates the origins and development of violence as a social issue by examining a critical period in the evolution of attitudes towards violence. It explores the meaning of violence through an accessible mixture of detailed empirical research and a broad survey of cutting-edge historical theory.

The author discusses topics such as street fighting, policing, sports, community discipline and domestic violence and shows how the nineteenth century established enduring patterns in views of violence.

Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England will be essential reading...

General Charles James Napier was sent to confront the tens of thousands of Chartist protestors marching through the cities of the North of England in the late 1830s. A well-known leftist who agreed with the Chartist demands for democracy, Napier managed to keep the peace. In South Asia, the same man would later provoke a war and conquer Sind. In this first-ever scholarly biography of Napier, Edward Beasley asks how the conventional depictions of the man as a peacemaker in England and a warmonger in Asia can be reconciled. Employing deep archival research and close readings of Napier's...

This book traces the history of the "Church Crisis," a conflict between the Protestant and Anglo-Catholic (Ritualist) parties within the Church of England between 1898 and 1906. During this period, increasing numbers of Britons embraced Anglo-Catholicism and even converted to Roman Catholicism. Consequent fears that Catholicism was undermining the "Protestant" heritage of the established church led to a moral panic.

The Crisis led to a temporary revival of Erastianism as protestant groups sought to stamp out Catholicism within the established church through legislation whilst...

The regular Mounted Infantry was one of the most important innovations of the late Victorian and Edwardian British Army. Rather than fight on horseback in the traditional manner of cavalry, they used horses primarily to move swiftly about the battlefield, where they would then dismount and fight on foot, thus anticipating the development of mechanised infantry tactics during the twentieth century. Yet despite this apparent foresight, the mounted infantry concept was abandoned by the British Army in 1913, just at the point when it may have made the transition from a colonial to a...

The book covers the period from 1812, when the Tron Riot in Edinburgh dramatically drew attention to the lamentable extent of juvenile depravity, up to 1872, when the Education Act (Scotland) inaugurated a system of universal schooling.

During the 1840s and 1850s in particular there was a move away from a punitive approach to young offenders to one based on reformation and prevention. Scotland played a key role in developing reformatory institutions notably the Glasgow House of Refuge, the largest of its type in the UK and industrial schools which provided meals and...

This volume recounts the experiences of female missionaries who worked in Uganda in and after 1895. It examines the personal stories of those women who were faced with a stubbornly masculine administration representative of a wider masculine administrative network in Westminster and other outposts of the British Empire. Encounters with Ugandan women and men of a range of ethnicities, the gender relations in those societies and relations between the British Protectorate administration and Ugandan Christina women are all explored in detail. The analysis is offset by the author s experience...

This book draws together essays on modern British history, empire, liberalism and conservatism in honour of Trevor O. Lloyd, Emeritus Professor of Modern British history at the University of Toronto for some thirty years beginning in the 1960s. With Lloyd best known for his two histories of the Empire and of domestic Britain, published in the Short Oxford History of the Modern World series, as well as his pioneering psephological study of the 1880 General Election, the essays include analyses of Anglo-Irish relations, Florence Nightingale, Canada, muckrackers, the Primrose League and...

This book provides the first biographical study of Charles Pelham Villiers (1802-1898), whose long UK parliamentary career spanned numerous government administrations under twenty different prime ministers.

An aristocrat from a privileged background, Villiers was elected to Parliament as a Radical in 1835 and subsequently served the constituency of Wolverhampton for sixty-three years until his death in 1898. A staunch Liberal free trader throughout his life, Villiers played a pre-eminent role in the Anti-Corn Law League as its parliamentary champion, introduced an important series...