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What's New About New Labour?
Historian article
In the 1980s it was often argued that the Labour party was finished as a major force in British politics. Yet on 1st May 1997 it won a landslide victory, securing an overall majority of 179 in parliament. Two years into its term of office, it retains a strong lead...
What's New About New Labour?
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Britain and the Formation of NATO
Article
Carl Watts outlines the shift in British security policy and examines the role played by the Foreign Office during the post-War period. April 1999 marks the 50th anniversary of the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty, which came into effect in August 1949. The Cold War is over, but NATO...
Britain and the Formation of NATO
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The Press and the Public during the Boer War 1899-1902
Article
Dr Jacqueline Beaumont Hughes considers some aspects of the role of the Press during the Boer War. The conflict between Great Britain and the Republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State which slipped into war in October 1899 was to become the most significant since the Crimean war. It...
The Press and the Public during the Boer War 1899-1902
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Vichy France and the Jews
Article
Dr Julian Jackson examines the position and treatment of Jews in Occupied France. When in 1945 France came to try those who had ‘collaborated’ during the war, the fate of the Jews was not central. It was even possible for Xavier Vallat, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, to defend himself...
Vichy France and the Jews
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The Resistable Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte
Article
Malcolm Crook examines the remarkable ascent to power of Napoleon at the turn of the nineteenth century. The great Bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789 may be drawing to a close, but that of Napoleon is about to commence. So now is an opportune moment to present a critical...
The Resistable Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte
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The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Press, 1858-1860
Article
Amy de Gruchy provides an account of a short-lived newspaper of the Conservative Right which published work by Charlotte Yonge. The Constitutional Press was born in March 1858 following the formation of the second minority Conservative government under Lord Derby. It was a weekly paper containing Parliamentary reports, British and...
The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Press, 1858-1860
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Women in the Tramway Industry 1914-1919
Article
Rosemary Thacker writes about one unusual area of expansion of war-time work for women in the Great War.
Women in the Tramway Industry 1914-1919
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Photography in Korea, The Hermit Kingdom
Article
Terry Bennett provides an introduction to the earliest surviving photographs of Korea. It is, on the face of it, remarkable how late it was before the camera ventured into Korea. If we accept that photography effectively began with Louis Daguerre’s invention in 1839, it was a full 32 years later,...
Photography in Korea, The Hermit Kingdom
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Jawaharlal Nehru: The Last Viceroy?
Article
Judith M. Brown spoke on Nehru as her subject for the 1998 Cust lecture at the University of Nottingham. Her portrait of this major Indian statesman is published here for the first time.
Jawaharlal Nehru: The Last Viceroy?
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Stalin, Propaganda, and Soviet Society during the Great Terror
Historian article
Sarah Davies explores the evidence that even in the most repressive phases of Stalin’s rule, there existed a flourishing ‘shadow culture’, a lively and efficient unofficial network of information and ideas. 'Today a man only talks freely with his wife — at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.’...
Stalin, Propaganda, and Soviet Society during the Great Terror
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Quixotically Generous...Economically Worthless'
Article
William Kenefick considers two views of the dockers and the dockland community in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 'Quixotically generous and economically worthless’! But what does this mean? How does this curious descriptor help us understand the docker or the waterside community? Indeed, does it tell us...
Quixotically Generous...Economically Worthless'
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Jane Austen: a writer for all seasons
Article
Irene Collins provides a fresh assessment of the life and work of one of this country’s greatest novelists, whose own wit and charm, combined with a deep insight into human nature, is reflected in her novels. Jane Austen was not the first woman novelist in England to achieve popularity and...
Jane Austen: a writer for all seasons
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British Cooperation with the Zionist Agency in Palestine 1940-42
Article
Nicholas Hammond provides an account of a little known Strategic Operations Executive intervention in the Middle East. In the summer of 1940, when Italy joined Germany, it was clear that attacks on the British position in the Middle East might be made from Italian bases in Africa and in Rhodes...
British Cooperation with the Zionist Agency in Palestine 1940-42
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Western Dress and Ambivalence in the South Pacific
Article
Michael Sturma examines an aspect of the cultural impact of the West in the South Pacific. ‘States of undress, or the partially clad body, invite particularly ambivalent responses.’ One of the main preoccupation’s of early European visitors to the South Pacific was the nudity or partial nudity of the indigenous...
Western Dress and Ambivalence in the South Pacific
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Painted Advertisements on Houses
Article
A.D. Harvey discusses a once-familiar feature of the inner city landscape. A generation ago one often saw advertisements, or the names of commercial enterprises, painted directly on to the brickwork of old buildings. With the destruction, or renovation, of the older sections of most British towns, these advertisements are now...
Painted Advertisements on Houses
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The Handing Back of Hong Kong: 1945 and 1997
Article
Andrew Whitfield examines the recovery of Hong Kong from the Japanese, 52 years before its return to China. As the clock ticks ever closer to midnight on 30 June 1997, the sun will set on Britain’s last major colonial outpost. Thousands of miles from the motherland, the colony originally acted...
The Handing Back of Hong Kong: 1945 and 1997
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The Migration of Indians to Guiana and Surinam
Article
While migration from Europe to North America and elsewhere is well known, that from India is less familiar to Western readers. Ananda Dulal Sarkar provides an account of Indian migrants to the former British and Dutch Guianas. Within India, particularly during British rule, young and able-bodied males migrated hundreds of...
The Migration of Indians to Guiana and Surinam
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The 'Era of the Dictators' Reconsidered
Article
Kenneth Thomson reflects on major aspects of the ‘era of the dictators’ after the collapse of Soviet Communism and its satellite regimes. In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, almost the whole of continental Europe was ruled by dictatorships of various political hues. Even countries, like France,...
The 'Era of the Dictators' Reconsidered
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Queen Victoria
Article
A century ago Britain celebrated Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee – her reign having provided 60 years of stability at the height of Britain’s imperial power. Dorothy Thompson profiles the woman at the heart of the Empire. More than any other British monarch, with the possible exception of her one-time model,...
Queen Victoria
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Football and British-Soviet Relations
Article
Following the recent ‘Euro 96’ championship, Jim Phillips looks at two earlier international football tours which had major political and ideological connotations. In November 1945 Moscow Dynamo became the first Soviet football team to visit Britain, playing in Cardiff, Glasgow and twice in London. With English, Welsh and Scottish crowds...
Football and British-Soviet Relations
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Napoleon III and the French Second Empire
Article
The French Second Empire has been variously described as a precursor of Twentieth Century Fascism and a prime example of a modernising regime. Roger Price continues recents efforts to achieve a more balanced assessment by setting the regime within its particular social and political context. The origins of the Second...
Napoleon III and the French Second Empire
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Minority rights and wrongs in Eastern Europe in the 20th century
Article
Mark Cornwall reflects on past and present attempts by the international community to protect national minorities in Eastern Europe. On 19 March 1995, the Prime Ministers of Hungary and Slovakia met in Paris to sign a ‘Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation’ between their two countries; on 13 June it was...
Minority rights and wrongs in Eastern Europe in the 20th century
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Faster, Higher, Stronger: The Birth of the Modern Olympics
Article
As the leading athletes of all nations prepare to come together this summer in Atlanta, the global communications media of the late twentieth century are constantly reminding us that 1996 marks the first centenary of the modern Olympic Games. The worldwide impact now made by these sporting festivals is all...
Faster, Higher, Stronger: The Birth of the Modern Olympics
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Recorded Webinar: Ukraine and the Soviet Politics of Empire
Article
Dr Zbigniew Wojnowski is a historian based at the University of Oxford. He specialises in the history of the Cold War and is particularly interested in the history of Soviet social, cultural, and political interactions with Eastern Europe after 1945. In 2017, he published a book entitled The Near Abroad:...
Recorded Webinar: Ukraine and the Soviet Politics of Empire
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Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War
Article
Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War. Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the West where a Euro/US-centric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. What was it like...
Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War
