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The purpose of this study is to examine in depth the role which propaganda played in forcing Walpole's government to start the War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739. There are a number of features which make this episode particularly interesting both as an example of the power of propaganda and as an example of the way in which a study of propaganda techniques throws new light on the political and artistic history of a particular period. Firstly it is unusual for an opposition rather than a government party to be going out of its way to create popular demand for a war. Secondly it is unusual to find so many writers, artists and musicians of the highest quality being recruited to assist in a propaganda campaign of any kind. Pope, Swift, Johnson, Gay, Chesterfield, Arne, Handel and Hogarth were among the list of contributors which included many other highly competent if less well known talents. Thirdly, while not unique, this campaign is nevertheless rare in providing an example of the use of a very wide range of media to achieve its ends: drama, ballad-opera, journalism, poetry, prose, satire, history, biography, painting, engraving, ceramics, sculpture and even architecture. Fourthly it provides a very interesting range of psychological techniques with heavy use of irony, a penchant for exotic metaphor and considerable reliance on the crude tools of tribal motivation. Finally the campaign provides an example of the way in which public hysteria can be created and developed by a group of leaders whose real short term objectives bear no relationship to the topic of the hysteria, who are substantially removed from its immediate consequences and totally regardless as to its long term effects. The study is beset by two problems. It has perforce to straddle a number of different disciplines in that it must dovetail a historical causality with the content of literature, drama, music and the visual arts. There is not and can never be any direct proof that the propaganda actually caused the event, only an accumulation of numerous pieces of evidence which support a high degree of probability. Equally there is unlikely ever to be any conclusive proof that the huge outpouring of patriotic propaganda in the 1719 - 1739 period was all part of a concerted deliberate plan, only that there was a whole range of personal contacts suggesting a pattern of mutual influences and common objectives, a mixture of political jealousy, ideology and commercial pressures which combined to sustain a united effort towards a single end. However, detailed study should produce sensible pointers to the motivation, structure, organisation and technical proficiency of the campaign. Overall the campaign must be seen as a classic example of the way in which the power of propaganda, particularly nationalistic propaganda, is divorced from the responsibility for its consequences. The emotive connotations of the contrast between the patriotic opposition's aggressive posture against Spain and Walpole's apparent appeasement run very deep. The nurturing of corporate vanity in nations is one of the most common real causes of wars throughout history.

In recent decades, regional pressures for stronger autonomy have encouraged a number of central and federal governments around the world to devolve powers and resources downwards to the regional level. The contemporary revival of regionalist movements and the simultaneous tendency towards greater government decentralisation have received considerable academic attention. Most of these contributions present detailed accounts of the processes of regional mobilisation and devolution in a specific region or set of regions. Although these analytical stories tell us a lot about the distinctive aspects of a particular case, they do not, in general, present a coherent theoretical account that would allow us to study the origins of these two interrelated but distinctive trends in a structured way. This thesis aims to make a contribution towards such an account. Building on the literature on political legitimacy and social movements, this study develops a tripartite typology of regionalisms which allows us to analyse and compare the origins of regional autonomy movements across different contexts. In addition, it seeks to show that an actor1based rational choice approach to the process of regionalist accommodation and non1accommodation can help us gain a better understanding of the mechanisms through which such demands influence the shape of the government system. The usefulness of the resulting theoretical framework is demonstrated by applying it to the contemporary history of regionalism and devolution in mainland Britain.

This research seeks to understand the process of technological development in the UK and the specific role of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’ in that process. The concept of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’ will be developed throughout the thesis through a study into the computer industry in the UK in the post-war period. Specifically, the thesis discusses the threat of America, or how actors in the network of innovation within the British computer industry perceived it as a threat and the effect that this perception had on actors operating in the networks of construction in the British computer industry. However, the reaction to this threat was not a simple one. Rather this story is marked by sectional interests and technopolitical machination attempting to capture this rhetoric of ‘threat’ and ‘falling behind’. In this thesis the concept of ‘threat’ and ‘falling behind’, or more simply the ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’, will be explored in detail and the effect this had on the development of the British computer industry. What form did the process of capture and modification by sectional interests within government and industry take and what impact did this have on the British computer industry? In answering these questions, the thesis will first develop a concept of a British culture of computing which acts as the surface of emergence for various ideologies of innovation within the social networks that made up the computer industry in the UK. In developing this understanding of a culture of computing, the fundamental distinction between the US and UK culture of computing will be explored. This in turn allows us to develop a concept of how Americanisation emerged as rhetorical construct. With the influence of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’, the culture of computing in the UK began to change and the process through which government and industry interacted in the development of computing technologies also began to change. In this second half of the thesis a more nuanced and complete view of the nature of innovation in computing in the UK in the sixties will be developed. This will be achieved through an understanding of the networks of interaction between government and industry and how these networks were reconfigured through a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’. As a result of this, the thesis will arrive at a more complete view of change and development within the British computer industry and how interaction with government influences that change.

Statistical methods have provided insight into the post-1860 fertility decline, but the deeper explanations lie in the choices of individuals, shaped by the cultures of local communities. This thesis combines the use of statistical and qualitative information, each form of enquiry guiding the other. It gains analytical strength by comparing three differing towns, Bradford, Leeds and Middlesbrough. Relationships between culture, employment, and fertility are examined by studying differences in local cultures and local labour markets, including female and child employment. The main argument of the thesis is for the impact of rising expectations about how a working-class family should live, underestimated by existing accounts. Working-class parents pursued higher living standards, not to emulate the better-off but, for example, to give their children better lives than they had experienced. To make these goals achievable, they chose to have fewer children, allowing more resources and attention for each family member. Such an explanation places a new stress on the nature of rising working-class consumption. In all three towns, evidence is put forward for a strong growth in expectations about standards. This is demonstrated in relation to diet, housing, clothing, and leisure: the impacts of compulsory education and changing views of family life are also shown. The thesis shows that mothers and fathers came to see family limitation as a necessary part of pursuing these standards. Differences between the towns mainly reflect the varying frequency of female full-time work. Expectations of rising living standards placed the greatest pressures on working mothers, who had to pursue them by both wage labour and domestic labour. This made them the most susceptible to the appeal of family limitation. The study also shows, however, that fathers too had incentives to family limitation, which previous studies have underestimated. For sources, qualitative evidence comes from cheap local newspapers with a substantial working-class readership. These new sources make evidence available which has never previously been used in research into the fertility decline. This is also true of the Bradford and Middlesbrough oral history collections used here. Materials in the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies at Brunel University are also utilised. Use is made, too, of advice literature directed at the working class of the three towns, and reports of social conditions by, for example, doctors and social reformers. These materials are combined with quantitative evidence from the registration of births, Census Reports, Parliamentary Papers, and the Census Enumerators’ Books. This thesis is significant because it is one of a surprisingly small number of studies which investigate the cultural causes of the fertility decline, a need identified by leading researchers. By placing attention, as it should, on the behaviour of the majority rather than better-researched elites, the thesis brings new sources such as cheap newspapers into the study of the fertility decline. Above all, its description of rising expectations about consumption and their impact sheds new light on the causes of the fertility decline, drawing attention to the adoption by working-class people of more demanding goals for the quality of family life, which they met with a shift to smaller families.

This thesis is an investigation of sociological, documentary and literary texts whose central concerns are the social conditions in London during the period 1880-1899. London is chosen as a focus because during this time it was perceived as being in a state of crisis which produced an unprecedented amount of writing in response. The investigation has two complementary objectives: (i) to analyse, through the changing presentation of London in literary texts, the response of novelists working within the realistic tradition to the challenge of divesting language and form of inherited social meanings; (ii) to ascertain how conditions in London were articulated in a wide range of non-fictional writings, and to assess the role played by discourses inherited from Christian perspectives of society in absorbing, hindering, expressing or developing radical thought. The first part of the thesis will establish what the dominant images of London were. It will concentrate on the inner city texts of the 1880s and the suburban texts of the 1890s. What these images reveal about changing moral and political responses to social issues are assessed. The second part will be concerned with a London of spiritual and moral significance. Certain doctrinal, sociological and fictional works which attempted to make Christian terminology appropriate to the contemporary city will be considered. The impact of Socialism on religious and fictional discourses is evaluated. The thesis will conclude with a discussion of London as a political construct and assess how far such a perception sets up a break with tradition. Fictional texts assume a peculiar importance here since they are strongly differentiated from each other and from their literary tradition. In fictional texts in particular, images of London highlight the particular difficulty of redeploying a tradition of realism to accommodate radical ideas and the consequent formal challenges. The presentation of London in a diverse body of literature can therefore be seen to offer a variety of perspectives on the process of change in both language and form.

This thesis explores the relationship between age, class and gender among female munitions workers at the government explosives factory at Gretna in south-west Scotland during World War I. The Ministry of Munitions not only organised the construction of a factory nine miles in length, but also built two new townships to house a migrant workforce, which was drawn from all parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Teenage girls comprised a considerable proportion of this workforce. Significantly, welfare provision at Gretna, both inside and outside the factory, was far more extensive than at many other munitions establishments. This thesis focuses on the relationship between welfare supervisors, women police, social reformers and the female workers. While some middle and upper-class women attempted to claim new areas of social space during World War I, by embracing industrial welfare work or police work, their authority was often defined by their relationship with young, working-class females. Class was important in this relationship. However, welfare workers, for example, not only claimed authority because of their superior social standing, but also because they were often significantly older than much of the female workforce. The thesis concludes that the youthfulness of Gretna munitions workers was a significant component of their wartime identities and experience.

This thesis examines the relationship between activist subjectivities and the shaping of Britain’s late sixties extra-parliamentary left cultures. Based on the oral narratives of ninety men and women, it traces the activist trajectory from child to adulthood to understand the social, psychological, and cultural processes informing the political and personal transformation of young adults within the new left cultures that emerged in the wake of Britain’s anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC). To this end the study charts the development of the political and cultural shifts on the left over the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. It shows how throughout this period dialogue between inner and outer activist life occurred against a background of ongoing realignment on the left from a fluid, eclectic cultural network around the VSC to a demarcated post- VSC left after 1969, that saw increasing divergence between a non-aligned libertarian New Left on the one hand and a Trotskyist far left milieu on the other. The study seeks to claim a valid space for Britain’s left activist landscape within the political, social and cultural framework of ‘1968’ and British post-war historiography. Privileging individual and collective subjectivities, the thesis examines ways of belonging inside Trotskyist and non-aligned left milieux by situating the respondents, their radical histories and activist cultures within the changing post-war fabric. It shows that investigating individual and collective memories provides deeper understanding of the ‘cognitive maps’ that young men and women created, as they attempted to situate themselves as radical, global beings as well as local, gendered social citizens. As micro-studies the individual stories reveal how the experience of social, emotional and political maturation from child to adult intersected with a specific social and political moment – the formation of a new and distinctive left culture that came to full fruition only in the aftermath of 1968 with the arrival of Women’s Liberation and the new personal politics. Exploring the social and psychological impact of post-war childhood and youth, the study engages with the political and emotional impact of Women’s Liberation on the men and women within the cultural context of the different left milieux. Overall, the thesis questions how, from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the variant cultures of the milieux penetrated public and private spaces, and shaped early life experiences of work, political activity, family, and political and personal relations in order to understand how activism shaped social patterns and psychic being.

During the 1930s the massive expansion of London and fears over the uncontrolled, unplanned modernity of the city coincided with fears over the ability of the new technology of the bomber and aerial warfare to decimate cities. This thesis explores the relationship between London as a governed, practiced and represented site, and aerial bombardment. It considers the impact of the new technology of aerial bombing on city space, by looking at the policies that emerged to deal with the consequences of bombardment, specifically through analysis of Air Raid Precautions. It follows these policies on a trajectory through to the actual bombing of the city and the public commemoration of that bombing in 1943. The thesis explores the competing visions of city life opened up by the lens of aerial warfare, providing a cultural history of the defence of London. It considers how fears about how to protect the city from bombs offered the opportunity for political commentators, local authorities, architects, engineers and planners to voice their concerns about how to protect the urban population at war. Contained within these debates are particular visualisations of the population of London. The thesis thus considers social imaginations of London between 1932 and 1943. It sugests that ARP offered a means to present and articulate different ideas about how to govern and manage an urban population. It also reflects on how these ideas changed over time. Ultimately it seeks to move between the universal and the particular, exploring how and why blitzed London came to stand for the nation during the war, and in so doing provided a collective consciousness for the nation at war. At the same time by interrogating the representations that made up that collective consciousness, I move to the particular, considering how representations of London under fire were mediated by local experiences and urban practices. The thesis seeks to offer a nuanced account of London's modernity through showing the compexity of responses to the problem of managing and imagining a city under fire.

This thesis is focused on the smaller, lesser-known risings throughout southern, eastern and midland England, investigating the nature, scale and experience of rebellion in the years 1548-49. More specifically, it aims to demonstrate the significance of the risings outside Norfolk, Suffolk and the West and, in giving these so-called 'lesser stirs' the more systematic analysis they deserve, to build up a more complete picture of the mid- Tudor 'crisis' of 1549. It is argued that this wider geographical focus is the key to understanding the 'commotion time'. The analysis is organised according to broad geographical clusters of risings. Beginning with a detailed case study of the insurrection at Northaw, Hertfordshire in 1548, the thesis sweeps across the 1549 disorders in southern England; the eastern counties; the Thames Valley; Hertfordshire, Middlesex and London; and the Midlands and the North. Microhistories of local disorder are linked to the general picture to convey the movement's significance. This 'episodic' approach results largely from the extraordinarily fragmented evidence relating to the risings. The rich body of evidence in the records of the prerogative courts has been supplemented by State Paper material, elite correspondence, chamberlains' accounts, consistory court depositions, books of remembrance, proceedings of courts of Burghmote, aldermen and common council, and chronicle accounts, among other sources. An alternative typology of protest is offered, which takes seriously the sheer scale of disorder, elaborates the response of the authorities, and recognises important generic similarities in the rebels' organisation, action and mentalities. The thesis concludes that the commotion time's significance lies not only in its sheer scale but also in its 'halflife'. Even after the movement had been quelled, its spirit lived on in popular and official memory, allowing a number of after-shocks to trouble the realm between 1550 and 1596 and leaving a permanent mark on the authorities' response to disorder.