1. The central theoretical focus of this study which seeks to offer a sociological account of the nature of the labour movement and socialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century is strictly speaking the genesis and evolution of working class political beliefs. It is intended that this should be considered in relation to the broader structural and ideological environment of the period, as well as within the experiential milieu of the working class community on the local level. 2. In Chapter 1, a number of prefactory remarks are advanced and the main theoretical issues under consideration are discussed. Chapter 2 comprises a chronology of socialism and working class movements during the period 1850-1906. It is hoped that this chronological outline will provide a basis for the subsequent analysis. 3. The two chapters which comprise Part I of this study attempt to elaborate a theoretical perspective, by reference to which the trajectory and nature of British socialism and working class social belief in the latter half of the nineteenth century may be better understood. Chapter 3 considers the major Marxist and sociological approaches to this question, stressing in particular the themes of social structure, ideology and class consciousness. A variety of problems inherent in these theories will be identified in Chapter 4 which, building upon a critical analysis of the approaches to the socialist movement, concludes by proposing a theoretical framework adequate to the complex historical and sociological issues apparent in this area. 4. The three chapters which comprise Part II aim to provide a general account of the broader structural and ideological context of the period. In Chapter 5, the development of the economy and social structure is discussed, stressing, in particular, changes in this sphere during the closing decades of the last century. Chapter 6 complements this with an account of the major ideological forms and their developments during these years. Finally, the themes of these two chapters are drawn together by Chapter 7, in which the broad trajectory of socialism and the labour movement at the societal level is documented in relation to the foregoing analysis. 5. The macro-structural and ideological formation of later nineteenth century Britain as documented in Part II provides the overall context for the third part of this study: an examination of the workings of certain micro-sociological processes. Here, the focus will be upon socialism and working class life, work and religion in Lancashire between about 1890-1906. In accordance with the theoretical perspective outlined above, this part of the study will highlight the innovative role of working people themselves in the development of social consciousness. Chapter 8 sets the background to political change in the north west between 1868-1906 and documents the course of labour organisation and politics during this period. Chapter 9 comprises a detailed examination of the activities, agitations and conceptions of socialism prevalent at the branch level in Lancashire in short, an account of socialist branch culture. Chapters 10-12 aim to situate these socialist beliefs and organisational forms within the working class community of later nineteenth century Lancashire. Attention is here devoted to, firstly, industrial structure, wages and work processes; secondly, home and community patterns; and finally, nonconformity and popular religious belief. 6. Finally, Part IV comprises one chapter in which a number of concluding remarks are advanced.

This thesis examines how the expansion of a steam-powered Royal Navy from the second half of the nineteenth century had wider ramifications across the British Empire. In particular, it considers how steam propulsion made vessels utterly dependent on a particular resource – coal – and its distribution around the world. In doing so, it shows that the ‘coal question’, almost totally ignored in previous histories, was central to questions of imperial and trade defence, required the creation of infrastructures that spanned the globe, and connected British sailors with a plethora of different imperial, maritime, and foreign peoples. Although a limited number of studies have highlighted the importance of coal to imperial defence, this thesis considers the wider context of the period 1870−1914 in order to understand the significant place of coal in these discussions. In doing so, it shows coal’s place within wider changes to political ideologies, imperial defence schemes, popular imperialism and navalism, knowledge collection, and the growth of the state apparatus. A robust coaling infrastructure was required to ensure quality naval coal was available globally on a huge geographical scale. This involved a large number of bodies, but this has never been examined by scholars for this period. Although naval coaling relied heavily on the coal export industry, the Admiralty had a key role in ensuring that the infrastructure, particularly after 1880, could cope with increases in ship size and number and competition from its rivals. The thesis also shows how these processes worked on the ground, from testing and purchasing coal to the methods and labour used to load in on warships. The thesis also shows that the necessity of coaling in foreign stations fostered new interactions between naval personnel and the wider world. Although naval visits to these places are prime examples of British encounters beyond its own shores at the zenith of empire, these are largely absent from existing studies. Thus, it explores how the interactions with local populations, other maritime visitors, and the stations themselves shaped the experience of sailors abroad, and created a maritime community spanning large oceanic spaces.

This dissertation examines the activities of the Bowood Set, a group of merchants, intellectuals and radicals centred on Lord Shelburne, and their struggle with the late-eighteenth-century port of London. Having read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, they were awakened to his idea of markets and, more pointedly, the existence of the mercantilist institutions that were inhibiting them. Their response was to use technologies like the Docks, pensions, policeman and insurance companies to physically reorder the Thames and break the monopoly of London’s trading companies on political and economic power. The Bowood Set were not always successful. However, their belief that technology and infrastructure could shift political and economic culture simultaneously opens up a series of questions about the type of ‘things’ underpinning both mercantilism and liberalism. Drawing on actor network theorists like Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the notion that the economy and state are simply networks held together by artefacts is here used to suggest that political economy is a material culture and, moreover, one that shifted in the late-eighteenth century from something resembling mercantilism towards something that increasingly recognisable as liberalism. Examining the Shelburnite Sir William Musgrave’s attempt to fight corruption in the Customs in London and the role of the West India Merchants lobby in coordinating London’s Quays shows clearly that the bureaucratic structures they mobilised were effective in altering the information that fiscal and commercial decisions were based on. Networks which were previously held together by close-knit cultural ties of friendship, patronage or customary agreements became increasingly contractual and monetised around the port. However, this was not always the case. Two investigations of London’s micro-economies suggests that Smith’s faceless markets were retarded by the cultures of consumption across London, and warehousing in the City, which were both sectors that accustomed communities to certain commercial practices that were not easily dislodged. What Michel Callon calls ‘calculative agency’, or the capacity to make economic decisions, was unevenly distributed across London because of material, political or social considerations, and the market was not understood by contemporaries as detached from them. As a result, the political economy advocated by Adam Smith progressed slowly across different social groups, geographies and networks. Examining how his discourse progressed in tandem with bureaucratic and material ‘things’ shows markets to have been multifaceted and socially embedded but not incapable of being redirected. Conversely, it shows that technologies designed to break open mercantilist monopolies, like the Docks, could become entangled in the social and political institutions they were designed to overpower. Examining the Dock campaign through the lense of material and bureaucratic culture in the City, this dissertation concludes that Vaughan and his associates surely did have some impact on shifting mercantilist commercial practices, though their’s was far from an outright victory.

This research investigates the development of early medieval identities in the South West, and how various factors caused continuity and change in the insular material culture, the settlements, and ultimately in social identity. These cycles of change, brought about by influences both within and outside the region, appear to reoccur throughout the study period, and are evidenced through a regional (macro-scale) and micro-regional (site-specific) scale assessment of the evidence. An overriding sense of long-term continuity is perceived in the ability of these insular identities to retain former traditions and develop their material culture, despite the apparent political domination by far-reaching and overarching social groups in the Anglo-Saxon and Norrnan periods. These traditions include the ceramics, where an examination of developments in form and fabric have created a chronological framework that is more sympathetic to the archaeology of the region than the accepted broad periods of Early, Middle and Late Saxon, and which perhaps reflects a more accurate picture of social changes through time. Furthermore, the retention of both prehistoric and Late Roman practices, in particular the former, is seen throughout all aspects of the archaeological evidence and is examined here through the themes of settlement hierarchies, exchange mechanisms and identity, and their spatial differentiation, and with geographical determinism a deciding factor in the form and nature of communities. It is significant that prehistoric, Byzantine and Late Antique practices prevailed in the fifth to eighth centuries where Roman traditions did not, together with an introduction of Continental cultural indicators. and whilst insular traditions show similarities with those of other Atlantic regions. including Ireland. Scotland and Wales. The thesis also explores the development of Late Roman societies in an assessment of the impact of geographical determinism on identity, and the potential development of Atlantic and maritime identities within society as a whole.

This PhD thesis is based on a qualitative interview study of white South Africans who have migrated to the UK in the post-apartheid era, focusing on their sense of belonging and ‘racial’/ethnic boundary-processes in society. With the increasing South African emigration in the post-apartheid era, the UK has been South Africans’ primary destination. Nevertheless, this migrant group has received relatively little scholarly attention. It could seem as though South Africans have been considered less interesting for research purposes, as their typical status as white and relatively privileged migrants appears to have made them better perceived by the British state apparatus and public than many ‘non-white’ and other disadvantaged migrants (Crawford 2011). By investigating migrants’ sense of belonging, this thesis complements the traditional preoccupations with the formal rights and duties of citizenship (e.g. Marshall 1998 [1963]). Moreover, the analytical insights of ‘intersectionality’ can rectify the one-dimensional conceptualisations (e.g. Kymlicka 1995) which run the risk of labelling all members of an ethnic minority or migrant group as equally disadvantaged without considering how social categories like gender and class might position them differently in particular ‘social hierarchies’. ‘Intersectionality’ – as typically applied to reveal intersecting categorisations/oppressions affecting multiply disadvantaged groups such as black women – can therefore be employed also when demonstrating how members of relatively privileged groups may be situated differently according to ethnicity, class, gender, and so on. Noticeably, varying forms of inclusion and exclusion can be negotiated simultaneously depending on the social categories being underscored (Yuval-Davis 2011a). The psychosocial concerns affecting even relatively privileged migrant groups – as migrants in a new context – are evidenced by the ways in which white South Africans negotiate away boundaries of exclusion by drawing on the more privileged aspects of their group status in order to distinguish themselves from disadvantaged groups in British and South African society.

This dissertation explores British perceptions of and discourses on the ‘Ottomans’ in the mid-nineteenth century, which have been largely overlooked in the existing literature. It approaches the question through three case studies analysing the construction of the perceptions through a discourse-analytic framework. This thesis is divided into two main parts, with the first part providing essential background information for the three case studies which make up the second part. Chapter 1 (Introduction) sets out the research question and the methodology. Chapter 2 looks at the development of Anglo-Ottoman relations from the beginning until the nineteenth century, identifying important stages in these relations which in turn impacted upon British perceptions. These early British perceptions are traced in Chapter 3, indentifying a range of perceptions none of which achieve a dominant position in the British public discourse on the Ottoman Empire and the Ottomans. Part 2 constitutes the core of the dissertation. Chapter 4 focuses on Britain and the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s and 1870s, analysing the wider setting which forms the background to the case studies. Chapter 5 examines the Lebanon Crisis of 1860 tracing the formation of two discourses on the Ottomans in Britain: the sick-man discourse and the integrity discourse, which competed for dominance in the public debate. Chapter 6 examines the Cretan Crisis of 1866, which showed the continued use of these two discourses, with the sick-man discourse finding more support but not yet dominating the debate. This changes during the Bulgarian Atrocities Campaign of 1876, which is explored in Chapter 7. During this crisis, the sick-man discourse undergoes both a radicalisation and popularisation following the graphic coverage in the British press of the atrocities committed in the Balkans which is picked up by politicians who feel the need to respond to pressure from the streets. The Conclusion sums up the main findings of the dissertation and discusses how far the nineteenth-century constructions of the Ottomans as the ‘other’ in Britain remain relevant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when the Muslims take the place of the Ottomans as the ‘other’.

Scotland's response to the end of the British Empire was different from reactions in the rest of the UK. This thesis examines the specific ways in which Scottish civil society and politics engaged with British decolonisation during the 1950s and early 1960s. The thesis draws heavily on the understudied archival records of Scottish civil society and pan-UK political groups to demonstrate that a conspicuous critique of decolonisation emerged north of the border. It shows (in Chapters I and II) that the most powerful and distinctive strand of anticolonialism in Scotland coalesced Scottish civil society organisations, primarily the Church of Scotland (CoS). Transnational connections, especially in Central Africa, shaped an anticolonialism largely driven by an Edinburgh based middle-class establishment which found its primary focus on opposing the imposition of the Central African Federation on Nyasaland and the Rhodesias. As Chapter III shows, this anticolonialism also found expression in the previously understudied Scottish Council for African Questions, a pressure group formed in opposition to the Central African Federation, with close ties to the CoS (along with university academics and other notables). Political parties and trade unions also campaigned on anticolonial causes and their responses are charted in Chapters IV to VII. With the exception of Scottish nationalist organisations, such groups operated more in a pan-British context and had many connections to equivalent organisations in England. Pan-UK political and other organisations tended not to be vehicles of Scottish distinctiveness, but could at times be prominent local vehicles of anticolonialism. However, by the end of the decade, Scottish politics was taking its lead from Scottish civil society in opposition to the Central African Federation. By reconstructing critiques of empire in Scotland, the thesis sheds further light on Scotland's complex relationship with the British Empire, demonstrating how Scotland's transnational connections and civil society generated a distinctive response to the end of empire.

This thesis examines the political role played by the private members' clubs of the St. James's district of London, between the first two Reform Acts. The thesis looks at the institutional history of such establishments and their evolution insofar as it affected their political work. It then analyses the statistical trends in club membership among Members of Parliament, the overwhelming majority of whom belonged to political clubs. The crucial role of clubs in whipping is detailed, including analysis of key divisions. The distinctive political use of space by clubs is then set out, including an overview of the range of meetings and facilities offered to parliamentarians. Finally, the thesis seeks to address the broader impact of clubs on national electoral politics in this period.

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This thesis explores the deaths, funerals and other associated rituals given at the deaths of British monarchs and royals in the late Stuart period (1660-1714) with a focus on those occurring between the death of King Charles II in 1685 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714. This topic has lacked in-depth archival study and the existing historiography has often focused on larger cultural forces. This thesis presents a series of case studies structured around one or two deaths in particular, examining the ritual response as planned by the Royal Household and Privy Councillors within the wider and immediate political context which shaped their decisions. The first chapter reconstructs the process of a royal death at this time by drawing off a large amount of primary material and examples from across the period being studied. Subsequent chapters explore the political motivations and reasons behind the ‘private’ funeral for Charles II in 1685, the opposite decision for a larger heraldic or ‘public’ funeral for Mary II in 1695 and the decision to hold neither a funeral nor a ritual response beyond the familial obligation of mourning for James II in 1701. Another chapter explores the act of court mourning and how its relationship to gendered ideas about monarchy and grief underpinned the political responses to Queen Anne’s two years of mourning after her husband’s death in 1708. The final chapter explores two deaths and their relationship to the Glorious Revolution’s pursuit for a secure and defined Protestant Succession which ultimately overshadowed the rituals performed at their deaths. Together these demonstrate how politics, ritual and culture were interlinked and how immediate circumstances made rituals malleable and thus changes to them occurred, if somewhat inconsistently, over time.