This thesis is a study of anti-communism and its impact on the trade unIon movement in Britain and internationally in the earlyCold War years. It shows how the United States of America (US) and British Governments, with the active collusion of right wing trade union leaders, were able to intervene in labour movement affairs both nationally and internationally in order to promote their political and economic strategies and head off the growing challenge of.the left in alliance with the national liberation movement. It is based mainly on archival research including the study of newly ~pened, or previously inaccessible collections. Its interpretation of other well-trawled archives differs significantly from many academic authorities. The thesis is centred on three case studies which are often inter-related. The first study is of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the British and US led campaign to split the first ever global trade union organisation. This section ' includes interviews with veteran Soviet tr~de unionists. The second study is of the deportation of Communist trade union leader Albert Fava from his native Gibraltar and shows how the Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Council and the Colonial Office worked together to undermine the movement for workers' rights and national sovereignty. And the final study is of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) whose Communist leadership fought off TUC encouraged efforts to promote disunity and weaken its anti-establishment campaigning. The conclusions draw out the main findings of the research and point to its contemporary relevance. They also identify areas in which further research would be helpful in broadening understandi£'!g of the dangers for working people of practices and ideologies which undermine democratic values and trade union independence.

Over the last fifty years, the previously dominant military interpretations of the First World War have increasingly lost their ascendancy, and understandings of this event have been broadened through the addition of social, economic and cultural scholarship of the conflict. These have frequently sought to locate and retrieve the missing voices and unheard stories of groups and individuals, and to assess the long and short-term consequences of the War. Yet such attempts can be considered to be fundamentally flawed, for they fail to recognise that the aim of clarifying the national experience of war cannot be achieved without recognition that the conflict was also experienced diversely as a regional conflict, and that responses to it were therefore shaped by a regional identity. This oversight has resulted from the establishment of a hierarchy in the social sciences in which 'the national' and 'national identities' have been elevated as an area for research whilst conversely the concepts of 'the region' an.d 'regional identities' have largely remained stagnant. This study therefore initially explores the significance, complexities and contradictions of the concept of regional identity within historical research through taking an interdisciplinary approach to create a methodology for its exploration. This methodology is then applied in an analysis of the region and spatial identities of Hull in East Yorkshire in the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War and subsequently during the voluntary recruitment campaigns of 1914 to 1916. This research reveals that, rather than the response to war being dominated by a national spatial identity, the sense of regional identity was of far greater significance in shaping the organisation and rhetoric of recruitment campaigns than current scholarship on the First World War would suggest.

The experience of total war and reconstruction in 1940s Britain brought the idea of the nation to the forefront of public consciousness. At the same time, the day-to-day, often mundane, routines of life continued as people negotiated their lives and relationships, experiencing personal struggles, triumphs and tragedies. This thesis explores tve broad social and cultural experiences of the national endeavours of the 1940s, as well as everyday lives and identities, through the life writing of seven women. I argue that the broad forces of history and identity, in particular ideas of nation and gender, impacted people's lives; but individuals equally interpreted and shaped these forces for themselves as they attempted to make sense of their own lives and experiences. Therefore in this thesis, I consider both the cultural discourses of nation and domesticity and the private experiences of the same, balancing the two against each other. . This thesis argues that while societal discourses and expectations of domesticity during this period were powerfully salient for women, they were not always captive to this ideology. Instead, while some felt enslaved in a cage of domesticity, some found empowering spaces within domesticity, others manipulated it for their own benefits and still others rejected it entirely. Additionally, domesticity did not wholly circumscribe women's lives or identities. During the war and immediate postwar period, the nation was also powerfully evident in their everyday lives and identities, and in fact, with the elevation of domesticity to national importance at this time, domesticity as national service could further bolster a feeling of empowerment in some women. As a result housewives' lives did not revolve entirely on their private,experiences ofhome and family, but also on broader communal, national, and international forces which were equally crucial in the shaping of their experiences and identities.

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