Over five million service personnel were demobilised by Great Britain and her four self-governing Dominions after World War I. For some their reintroduction to civilian life was straightforward and uneventful. Many simply returned to the jobs they had previously occupied before the war. For others their readjustment to civilian life was difficult, full of despair and bitter disappointment. Similarly, the repatriation, resettlement and rehabilitation of the empire's soldiers and sailors presented post-war administrations with a host of social, political and economic problems. So far as they were concerned reconstruction was a daunting challenge which had to be met with the greatest possible energy, efficiency and decisiveness. Moreover, solutions developed by the Imperial and Dominion authorities were seen as the cornerstone of a new and dynamic post-war society and empire. Soldier settlement was one of these solutions. This period in imperial history provides a detailed study of the political manoeuvres and economic initiatives which formed the basis of a new period in Commonwealth relations. Primarily a study of social and economic policy, it draws together previously untapped primary sources and explores several important aspects of the transition of Anglo-Dominion relations between the onset of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression.

The advent of urban history is noteworthy for its early success, longevity, and the dominant personality of H.J. Dyos. Much that has been written on the rise of urban history in Britain emerged following Dyos’ death in 1978. These texts do not provide a neutral assessment of Dyos’ role, nor do they consider the underlying factors behind the emergence of the field. The establishment of the Urban History Group and urban history in Britain are inextricably linked. A distinct sub-field of History, urban history emerged in the post-war decades that saw aspects of British society undergoing rapid transformation. Higher education opened up to previously under-represented sectors of society. Scholars arrived wanting to explore a wider range of topics that reflected their diverse social and economic backgrounds. To cope with the increased range, the discipline of History underwent a period of fragmentation into specialist subject areas. Urban history was one such area. Past urban societies provided historians with a location in which they could study class structure and social mobility. The built legacy of Britain’s urban past underwent reassessment, with formerly ignored remnants subject to contemporary valorisation and demands for protection. For some, the urban was a neutral location in which to study social systems. For urban historians, the urban milieu and the processes of urbanization were the determining factors that fashioned urban society. The establishment of the Urban History Group and the rise of urban history was a reflection of increased interest in the urban past and urban society. Unravelling the underlying factors behind the appearance of urban history revealed the process of disciplinary sub-field formation, the main actors, their role, their motives, and the importance of academic structures. The research places the post-war formation of urban history within the wider context of Britain’s shifting social structures and urban agenda.

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The motivation for this thesis was the simultaneous increase of 'national feeling' and flourishing of the arts in Scotland from the 1980's. From this period - increasing through the 1990's towards the Referendum on Devolution in 1997 - the Scottish cultural community began to relate identity, art and politics, and frequent use was made of the word 'confidence'. As this implied a previous lack of it, the view that there was a sense of Scottish cultural inferiority is a thread running through this study, which examines beliefs about the relationship between cultural 'confidence' and support for political autonomy by focussing on the role of cultural representations of Scottish identity. The study concentrates on ideas about Scottish identity among a number of people from the Scottish cultural sphere - several of whom can be described as key figures in terms of the representation of Scottish identity - on how these have been influenced by existing representations, and how they have been understood and legitimated. Data was gathered by interviewing individuals in the arts and broadcasting in Scotland, attending debates and conferences, exhibitions and plays, and by examining key 'texts' in the field, from analyses of Scotland and Scottish identity, to plays and novels. Theories and analyses other than those specifically on Scotland (for example, on nationalism) were also reviewed because of their availability to influence ideas on the Scottish situation; therefore, while background data is presented in a 'Thematic review' chapter which is similar to a traditional literature review, the literature review is actually a process continued throughout the thesis. The thesis focussed on how 'history' has been used by people in Scottish cultural life to legitimate beliefs about cultural 'differences' between the Scots and English and a 'power imbalance' between the two nations, and that the representation of Scottish identity had 'suffered' as a result of the England's dominance. A few Scottish artists have represented this in terms of colonisation, but it was found that most interviewees saw it as symptomatic of being the small neighbour of a powerful culture. A strong link was perceived as existing between class and negative representations of Scottish culture, and most interviewees, particularly younger ones, represented Britishness as having been culturally English, and English cultural dominance (and hence, any sense of Scottish cultural inferiority) as having been influenced and perpetuated by metropolitanism and elitism. The period of Conservative governance from 1979 were found to be crucial in terms of the development of such 'ideas' about Scottishness; 'Thatcherism', Conservatism, and the south-east of England being represented as culturally - and, to an extent, morally - 'alien' to Scottish society and 'values'. It is noted that a number of analyses (and stereotypes) from prior to the 1990's, which had represented Scottish identity as flawed, were now interpreted as 'positives' or advantages. Overall, Scottish culture was perceived as 'more' democratic, egalitarian, and socialist than 'English' culture, and the majority of interviewees felt that Scottish artists and other cultural interpreters had a role to play in redressing 'misrepresentations', and in further breaking down elitism. It was found that the re-presentation of Scottish cultural identity from the early 1980's acted with and upon a 'new' Scottish confidence provoked by Thatcherism, which can ultimately be argued to have influenced the 'Yes/Yes' vote in the Devolution Referendum of 1997.

Interwar Britain has traditionally been understood as featuring anti-Victorianism through the influence of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and the Great War. Strachey is associated with the Bloomsbury Set, wartime experiences created the 'Lost Generation', but less attention has been given to Victorian generational identities in the twentieth century. Therefore, this thesis explores the survival of Victorian identities and accounts for the resurgence of the appeal of Victorian representations, especially amongst the 'middlebrow', c.1901-39. The time period studied in this thesis includes the emergence of a new way of understanding society: as generations. How the Victorian and immediate post-Victorian generations understood their place in time, space, and in relation to one another will be demonstrated. Furthermore, a close reading of Victorian representations in popular culture will explore the emergence of a reappraisal of the Victorians. Traditionally, inter-generational tension in this period has focused on Bloomsbury and the Intellectual Aristocracy. This thesis will supplement this focus with cultural material indicating generational identities and interest in Victorian representations in wider society. These include the emergence of a new form of literature, the genealogical novel, opinions found in popular daily newspapers and other periodicals, and visual representations such as films, stage plays, art and museum exhibitions. This thesis challenges the argument that the appeal of Victorian identities and representations was vanquished in this period. It will be shown that it remained the dominant force in shaping early twentieth-century identities and held a significant role in popular culture during the 1930s.

This thesis investigates ‘the death of penal welfare’ in Britain. It traces the fortunes of penal welfare from c. 1930 to c. 1980. The term refers to measures promoting the reformation and welfare of offenders through the framework of the criminal justice system. Thus the institutions of criminal justice are not just punitive but also part of the state’s involvement in the welfare of its citizens through social services. The main contention of this thesis is that the raison d´être of penal welfare was the creation of Christian citizens and that its moral legitimacy came out of the widely accepted idea of Britain as a Christian nation. Furthermore, this study locates ‘the death of penal welfare’ as a consequence of secularisation. When the idea of Britain as a Christian community collapsed in the early 1960s, the set of beliefs that had allowed penal welfare to thrive and had enabled it to reconcile the tension between societal and personal responsibility fell apart as well. In offering an original framework for understanding the success and collapse of penal welfare, this thesis draws heavily on the historiography on British secularisation that has emerged throughout the last one and half decades. However, studying penal welfare also offers ways of challenging some of the understandings generated by the scholarship – not just on secularisation – but also on the welfare state and its relationship to voluntary religious organisations.

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Early twentieth-century public health campaigns provide a useful means of examining the role that scientific knowledge has played in urban governance. By invoking the authority of science, public health experts and executives could claim that the way in which they analyzed and organized the life of the city was above class antagonisms, gender conflicts, ethnic tensions and the politics of age relations, serving the best interest of the whole community. This study, which compares infant welfare and anti-tuberculosis campaigns in the second cities of Britain and Sweden, Birmingham and Gothenburg, shows how health authorities used 'apolitical' scientific knowledge to regulate their city and to advance political aims. The study examines the role which infant welfare campaigns played in regulating urban family life and family relations. While the Birmingham campaign promoted full-time motherhood, in Gothenburg, where many households were dependent on women's wages and where industries were concerned to employ female labour, the authorities argued that the well-being of infants could be secured by helping poor mothers reconcile paid work with motherhood. Both these campaigns, though reflecting local economic arrangements and social structures, were anchored in 'universal' scientific knowledge. By comparing the anti-tuberculosis campaigns in Birmingham and Gothenburg, this study shows that these campaigns served to justify the central tenets of the municipal housing policies. The way in which tuberculosis was defined legitimated intervention in the homes and intervention or non-intervention in the housing market. The health campaigns enhanced the interests of medical doctors. In Gothenburg, where the majority of doctors worked in the public sector, public health problems were often defined as medical matters which were to be resolved by professionals. The Birmingham authorities, reluctant to damage the interests of independent practitioners, confined their activities to preventive medicine. Finally, the study examines how middle-class women and working -class women and men challenged the authorities' views.

This research discusses pictorial publicity released in Britain during the period of the First World War. Based on the historic ‘War Publicity’ collection at IWM, it analyses a wealth of imagery produced by official, charitable and commercial concerns to assess the meanings about war that were absorbed and circulated by posters, propaganda and advertisements between 1914 and 1918. It provides an extensive examination of First World War pictorial publicity, and proposes a new methodology for looking at such material within both a visual and a historical context. The study proposes that as spaces of power, museum archives affect the way that their holdings are viewed and interpreted. It argues that the way that the ‘War Publicity’ collection has been negotiated and taxonomised at IWM has influenced how the visual culture of the First World War has consequently been considered. Exceptional examples of well-designed posters have achieved an elevated status, while commonplace imagery encountered in the everyday by the British public has been ignored. This thesis rectifies this by examining the ‘War Publicity’ collection as it would have been viewed: as a mass. In doing so, it is able to consider the narratives and discourses present in the visual culture of the war, and deduce how such meanings worked visually to convince the British public to support war aims. This research contributes to discussions in patriotism and citizenship during the First World War through the development of the concept of ‘patriotic citizenship’. ‘Patriotic citizenship’ describes the core visual language present in First World War publicity. It relied on convincing the viewer that in order to be a good British citizen, one must participate in prescribed forms of war-related activities such as joining the army, donating to wartime charities, economizing in food and buying war bonds and savings. This thesis examines how publicity worked visually to persuade the British public to subscribe to defined forms of participatory citizenship in the form of complying with British war aims, and the new representations that pictorial publicity was able to necessitate in the process.

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