The thesis is a political history and a history of ideas. It is an account of social feminism in the early twentieth century as it sought to extend the ideal of equality to the family and social citizenshp to women in their family roles. Although first-wave feminism has been seen as predominantlv concerned with equality in public life. I argue that women's position in the farmly especially as mothers raised questions for the women's movement whch were addressed in a number of ways. At a time when state solutions to social problems seemed increasingly convincing this contributed to a shift in the relationshp between families and the state and suggests that organised women's advocacy may have played a greater part in creatlng a political consensus for state welfare provision than has been recognised. Ths forms the context for social-liberal feminism after 1918, exemplified by the Edinburgh Women Citizens' Association. The papers of the EWCA add a new dimension to knowledge of the women's movement in the inter-war period. They show an ambitious autonomous women's organisabon active at a time when feminism is believed to have been in almost terminal decline. They gave a strong sense of what citizenshp meant to newly enfranchsed women and the purposes to whch thev wished to put their new rights: their view of a distinctive women's citizenship drew on both a Victorian tradition of women's activism and on ideas wbch had been developed in pre-war socialist feminism. As a claim to influence in previously wholly male fora it was embedded within the discursive strengths and limitatlons of women's traditional arenas of power/knowledge, family and morality. My approach to these issues is through an analysis of primary texts including The Economic Foundations of the Women's Movement (1914) by Mabel Atkinson and Women: An Inquiry (1925) by Willa Muir, and secondary sources, mainly from recent feminist scholarship. My discussion of the interwar women's movement in Scotland is based on the papers of the EWCA (1918-1939). The thesis reflects on approaches to political theory and to history and argues that categorisations of the political and of feminism create problems of analysis. Ths calls for a theoretical framework whch situates political ideas and strategy within the disourses of gender of the time rather than in a privileged position outside and counter to it: I draw on aspects of cultural theory to develop this argument. A problematic relationshp between familv interests and women's equality runs through, and is made visible through women's movement history. This opposition is formed by the dichotomous positioning of private and public and of difference and equality and hence of the categories family and state. Atkinson's articulation of the demand bv women for love (sexual relationships and children) and work (economic and personal independence) names a refusal to resolve tlus opposition through a separation between those women who marry and have children and those who have public careers. Attempts to renegotiate the gender settlement as it affects private and family life have proved to be a great deal more difficult to carry through than is creatng a greater role for women in the public sphere, hard though that also may be. The repeated identfication of feminism with equality as access to public life is a consequence of the relative success of arguments from equality, but questions about how a 'male standard' creates difficulties for women in public life continue to be relevant. Redrawing the conceptual boundaries whch form ths tension calls for not a reassertion of difference or equality- but a parallel assertion of both: that equality is brought to the family and that at the same time the differences associated with family and caring roles are insistently brought into public life. In conclusion I comment on how the opposition between family responsibilities and gender equality has become one of the 'self-evidences' of our age and that it poses one of the most central questions for philosophy and politics: how to reconcile social and indvidual interests.

Despite a wealth of scholarship on the Tudors’ printed and visual propaganda, little has been written on how the population received this material. Doubts over how far either media penetrated a largely illiterate society with questionable access to the visual arts have likely been partly responsible, but as studies increasingly disprove these assumptions the need to address this gap becomes more pressing. After establishing that the governments from Henry VIII to Elizabeth were interested, to varying extents, in propagating particular messages to their subjects, this thesis employs a diverse range of sources to analyse popular responses to official pamphlets, portraits and other visual iconography. Primarily using inventories, the ownership of these different types is examined, in particular exploring the mixed motives that underlay the display of monarchical portraits and royal devices. Broadly positive reactions to propaganda are then discussed, similarly uncovering the different, potentially subversive reasons that drove people to accept government materials. The evidence of marginalia in surviving copies of polemical works is then used to show both the different approaches taken to reading official books, and how people engaged with several specific pamphlets, illuminating the success of particular arguments and propagandistic techniques. Finally, negative reactions to government images and books are investigated, highlighting not only opposition but, conversely, more evidence of propaganda’s positive impact. Analysing reception in these ways not only permits judgements about the extent and nature of propaganda’s success; it also provides valuable insights into important historiographical debates, like the progress of the English Reformation and the potential emergence of a public sphere, besides more generally revealing widely-held attitudes that underpinned sixteenth-century society and conditioned the relationship between rulers and ruled.

This thesis considers the civic elite in Coventry during the Reformation, from 1530-1580. It describes how the presence of a longstanding civic and political culture, dating back to the late middle ages, helped to mitigate religious change and bring other economic and social priorities to the fore during this period. The thesis looks at contemporary understanding of ideas of the city, including civic history and political power, as well as the economic forces which shaped the civic government?s interaction with other political hierarchies and the broader social world of the kingdom. It is argued that, although the corporation was keen to protect and define the political and physical boundaries of the city, they lived in an environment that was permeable to outside influence and the presence of geographically broad social and political networks. Urban political disputes are also examined, with the aim of elucidating those principles which ensured the smooth running of civic government and the control of the city by the corporation and the civic elite. Religious disagreements during the 1540s and 1550s are examined in detail, to show why, despite the potential for turmoil, the city never saw the breakdown of order or the political hierarchy. The spread of protestantism during later decades is dissected, alongside attempts to maintain urban religious provision at an acceptable standard, and to preserve the structures and hierarchies of civic religion. The thesis concludes that, even in cities like Coventry, where the effects of the dispute and dissonance that came with the growth of a new religion were strongest, it was possible for the traditional moral rules of urban governance to ensure that the city was an ordered and successful society well into the latter half of the sixteenth century.

The economic history of England has long been dominated by the Industrial Revolution, examining its degree of uniqueness, and its longer-term implications for both the domestic economy and that of the nations whose advance to the modern industrial state took place rather later. In this study , scholars have tended to concentrate on the period after 1750, often dismissing the previous century rather naively in terms of 'preconditions' for industrial growth. Relatively few have looked at the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in depth, except in the fields of public finance and overseas trade. For most purposes, the century before the Industrial Revolution is still, in Professor Fisher's words, a 'Dark Age'. One sector of the economy, the retail trade and retailing institutions, has been generally deprived of scholarly attention. Apart from the development of the great chain stores in the nineteenth century, the bulk of our knowledge of the sector of the economy stems from research conducted prior to 1920. While age is hardly synonymous with a lack of quality, the time had clearly come for some revision. As scholars such as Professor Eversley have come to stress the significance of changing patterns of consumption in the home market to the Industrial Revolution, this sector of the economy has increasingly demanded more research.

Since the conflicts in the Gulf and Bosnia in the 1990s, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, a large sociological and political literature on British Muslims has appeared. It is often a contention of these works that Muslims in Britain did not identify, and were not seen in terms of, their religion prior to the time of the Rushdie affair. This thesis contends that, contrary to these arguments, religion has been a significant referent for the claims-making of Muslim communities in England since essentially the time that those communities settled (the early 1960s). This is demonstrated through the consideration of Muslim claims-making and elite practice and policy in a number of thematic areas, including education, employment, social services, and party politics. Building on these insights, it is suggested that such misconceptions about English Muslim social and political mobilisations are attributable to the absence of an historical perspective upon British multiculturalism. This thesis, particularly in two concluding chapters, attempts to correct this absence, offering a broader consideration of British multiculturalism in the studied period. It suggests that – rather than a relatively coherent ideology or policy approach – British multiculturalism has been an institution, produced in an ad hoc manner through the largely uncoordinated actions of a large number of actors, often lacking shared aims, at both local and national level. Although subject to changes over time, this institution has observed a number of consistent ‘rules’ in the form of concepts shared by actors involved in it (such as the ‘ethnic group, ‘community leadership’ and ‘special needs’). Finally, it is suggested that multiculturalism in Britain has endured primarily due to a process of ‘path dependence’ through which many actors have ‘learned’ how to operate within the rules of the institution, and may owe their existence of prestige to it.

England in the late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart period saw a surge of pastoral writings intended to provide lay-readers with information and advice about sacraments. Using sixty-four such texts from the period 1590-1630, this thesis analyses the conceptions of sacraments offered by cleric-authors to their audience. As a group these works had two structural features in common. First they were concerned to outline the ‘qualities’ of a ‘worthy’ receiver of the Lord’s Supper, foremost amongst which were knowledge, faith, newness of life and repentance. Second they tended to divide the concept of worthiness into three temporal chunks comprising the times before, during, and after the Supper. Using these rubrics as guidelines the thesis compares and contrasts the content of the corpus. In opposition to stereotypes of puritans neglecting sacraments, it is found that sacraments were presented by Reformed English clerics as highly efficacious entities, which truly communicated something to the believer. The importance of faith to the Reformed conception of sacraments is affirmed, with the caveat that the dominance of this concept did not prohibit clerics from extolling the sensuous or ceremonial aspects of sacraments. It is further contended that sacraments continued to be seen as spurs to moral amelioration, occasions for charity, and a demonstration of community – and that receiving sacraments did not become a wholly individualised enterprise. Building on this analysis the thesis offers three broader conclusions. Firstly it is shown that sacraments played a key part in the quest to gain assurance of salvation. Secondly it can be seen that in England there was a way of extolling sacraments and their use which is not usually thought about – a species of ‘sacramental piety’ which used mainstream Reformed ideas about sacrament to urge believers to comfort and increased Godliness. Thirdly it is contended that key Reformed theological distinctions were often submerged by the contingencies of pastoral writing.

This thesis offers a new conceptual framework for the study of women’s philanthropy between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War. Contesting the dominant historiographical narrative which essentialises the association of women with philanthropy, it argues that interwar female philanthropy operated through an inherently creative and flexible methodology. By interrogating gender as a category of analysis alongside other definitional variables of generation, religion, informal and formal modes of influence, and professionalisation, it reveals female philanthropy as an intellectual, as much as a practical endeavour, through which women philanthropists sought to achieve and encourage self-development and societal improvement. Moving beyond a social history framework that concentrates on philanthropic activity in terms of its relationship to social policy, six thematic chapters argue for the critical significance of concepts of language, performance and space in the meanings and presentations of interwar female philanthropy. A central remit of the thesis is to relate the social and cultural processes that underpinned women’s philanthropy between the wars to the subjective experiences of the individual women who engaged them. The thesis examines the personal archives, published oeuvres and publicity materials (alongside presentations of philanthropy in public discourse) of four philanthropic women who achieved celebrity in the interwar period: Evangeline Booth, Lettice Fisher, Emily Kinnaird and Muriel Paget. It interrogates the contemporary meanings attached to female philanthropy in a period of transformations in mass transport, mass communication and mass democracy, and in women’s position within society. An analysis of this process sheds new light on the historiography of work, civil society and citizenship. Problematising the centrality placed on the national as a sphere of citizenship (embodied in the state), the thesis reveals the critical interconnections between the local and global domains in female philanthropists’ visions. It also illuminates the hitherto underexplored connections between philanthropy, celebrity, the mass media and mass culture. Far from outmoded, female philanthropy lay at the heart of interwar cultural transformations. Female philanthropists contributed dynamically to debates about civil agency and sought to remap the contours of a good society.

In January 1979, Stuart Hall claimed to have identified a new ‘radical Right’ ideology he termed ‘Thatcherism’, which was attempting to ‘command the space’ occupied by the social democracy of the then Labour government and the ‘moderate wing’ of the Conservative Party. In short, the Thatcher Conservative Opposition was detaching itself from ‘traditional’ Conservatism. This thesis examines the validity of the claim at the time it was made, through a detailed scrutiny of the positions taken up between 1974 and 1979 by those identified as being on the ‘radical Right’ of the Party and those designated as ‘moderates’. In particular, it analyses the programme proposed by Sir Keith Joseph, the leading advocate of New Conservatism, within the context of the policy-making processes adopted by the Party in those years and the outcome of those processes. It concentrates on efforts to formulate policies in the key economic and industrial relations fields and examines how what emerged was shaped by the opposing views of those involved and by outside events. It considers how Margaret Thatcher, in order to keep the Party intact, contrived to avoid entering into potentially unsustainable policy commitments and, at the same time, impressed herself sufficiently on the electorate that when the opportunity arose, it was prepared to vote her and her Party into office. It became possible, once the first Thatcher government started its work, to regard much of what it did as ideological and radical. However, so inchoate was the programme developed in opposition that one can only conclude that there was no body of doctrine at the time of the 1979 election which warranted the name of ‘Thatcherism’ and that victory was achieved by acting in accordance with ‘traditional’ Conservatism – by doing what was necessary in the circumstances to attain power.

A number of academic studies assert that ex-servicemen were subject to intimidation, some killed as a punishment for war service, and that they formed a marginalised group in Irish society. Evidence based on records of the victims and perpetrators demonstrates otherwise; intimidation was mostly for reasons other than war service, for instance, membership of a particular class such as landowners or the judiciary, or for specific actions, including informing, supplying to or joining the Crown Forces. The violence towards ex-servicemen was geographically focussed, varying in intensity in correlation to the level of violence experienced by other sectors of the population; support for republicanism varied significantly by location. The great majority of ex-servicemen were not intimidated; many served in the IRA. With the formation of the Free State there is little evidence that either the State or community marginalised ex-servicemen. They were treated equally before the legislature and the courts. Some half of the Free State army, formed to defeat extreme republicans, were ex-servicemen. Remembrance took place with considerable community support and acceptance from the State. According to credible contemporary reports they were not discriminated against and held high positions in the civil service, army and police. They were not a homogeneous group. Neither war service nor loyalism defined them; many were supporters of Fianna Fáil. Britain fulfilled its imperial obligation to the ex-servicemen with housing and pension benefits considerably more favourable than those for their counterparts in Britain. The view that ex-servicemen were persecuted became persuasive. They became perceived through the prism of commemoration, and with the establishment of a republican historiography assigned to a national amnesia. Loyalist lobbying groups highlighted perceived discrimination to a willing press. It was a convenient collusion but at odds with the evidence. In reality the group truly marginalised after the Civil War was the anti-Treaty republicans.

This dissertation examines the roles played by Catholicism on the German Home Front during the Second World War. It analyses to what extent German Catholics supported their nation’s war effort, and how they sought to reconcile their religious convictions with Nazism and its conduct of the conflict. The thesis examines the oscillations of morale within the Catholic ‘milieu’ during the war years, and analyses its responses to German defeats from 1943 onwards. In addition to these overtly political themes, this dissertation analyses the social history of religion during this period. In order to focus its analysis on a manageable scale, this thesis focuses on the experiences and activities of Catholics from the Rhineland and Westphalia. Its concluding chapter uses its findings concerning Catholicism during the war years to revise current understandings of the formation of a conservative ‘restoration’ in West Germany after May 1945. Many existing works concerning German Catholicism during this period provide a monolithic portrayal of the confession’s internal coherence, and domination of its adherents’ political beliefs. This thesis, by contrast, argues that profound divides existed amongst German Catholics during the Second World War. Younger clergymen were frequently more sympathetic to völkisch nationalism than their older colleagues, and desired a more pro-Nazi stance from the German episcopate. The Catholic laity, moreover, was similarly often frustrated by the conservatism of episcopal Neo-Scholastic theology, and wanted sermons and pastoral letters that would endorse the German war effort in more unambiguous terms. The war years witnessed a complex negotiation of religious, political and national loyalties amongst Catholic communities, ensuring the thesis provides a nuanced picture of the confession’s place in German society during this period.