Joseph Mainzer (1801–1851) and the Popularisation of Choral Singing in Britain

Singing master Joseph Mainzer came to England in 1841 as a political refugee from Germany. Through his music schools, his textbook Singing for the Million, and his journal Mainzer's Musical Times (today The Musical Times) he contributed significantly to the popularisation of choral singing in Britain. This essay takes Mainzer's political background as a starting point to investigate the complex relationship between refuge and artistic production. It is argued that the latter was deeply informed by the former. Mainzer not only transferred choral traditions but also a politicised concept of popular culture which started to take hold in pre-revolutionary Vormärz-Germany. The case study is integrated into the larger framework of Anglo-German cultural relations and political refuge in mid-nineteenth century Britain.     

Palestinian perceptions of home and belonging in Britain: negotiating between rootedness and mobility

In this article based on ethnographic research among Palestinians in Britain, I argue that applying a ‘decentred’ conception of diaspora provides an understanding of the complexity of Palestinian identity-making in Britain. After a critical review of theorizations of the notion of diaspora and its relevance to this case study, I discuss ethnographic data to illustrate how processes of rooting and mobility are linked together in various contexts in which personal migration trajectories and positionalities play an important part. I demonstrate that, for Palestinians in Britain, diaspora relates to connections constructed both in relation to their homeland and other frames of reference: in relation to both roots and mobility.     

Refugees from Nazism and Cultural Transfer to Britain

This study accepts that while cultural transfer was obvious in the history of German Jewish settlement in Britain from Nazi Germany during the 1930s, it looks at what four individuals did and what helped them to lay the foundations of a successful career in Britain and make a noticeable contribution to their host society. The essay asks how bewildered refugees overcame social uprooting, isolation in a foreign country, linguistic deficiencies and lack of funds. It demonstrates the importance of relatives and fellow exiles, friends and colleagues, relief organisations and professional associations. The contribution uses the case studies of the journalist Sebastian Haffner, the Germanist Charlotte Jolles, the historian Francis L. Carsten and the industrialist Mac Goldsmith.     

British policy towards Indian princes in late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century Britain

This article examines the factors which induced Indian princes to visit Britain, the background and implementation of British initiatives on princely travel and the vocal response they produced. It also explores the impact of residence in Britain and the ambiguity of Indian princes’ status within British society. The last part of the article focuses more closely on official British attempts to restrict foreign travel to England. The study concludes by highlighting the contradictory nature of British attitudes towards Indian princes in Britain. Clearly, official attitudes towards South Asians in Britain were much more complex than is sometimes suggested.     

The English as they see others: England revealed in Provence

Peter Mayle's best-selling accounts of his life in Provence have appealed to a wide audience in Britain but have also attracted harsh criticism. It is argued here that these works, although ostensibly about Provence, are better analysed as myths for the English. The contrast with an account from the 1930s reflects wider social change, showing a move from a confidently colonial to a self-consciously ‘anthropological’ mode. Doubts about the authenticity of Mayle's accounts are related both to his use of free indirect discourse and other literary devices in order to convey ethnographic colour, and to ideological tensions in post-colonial Britain.     

Editorial: The Urgent Need for Global Action to Combat Climate Change

Abstract

Within the study of global politics and global political economy there has been an increase in literature within the last few years on the growth of resistance movements geared toward challenging the hegemony of US-inspired neoliberalism. This article questions much of the normative literature that is emerging, particularly from international political economy, on the nature of resistance and the anti-globalization movement. Using the case of Britain as an example, it argues that it is necessary to assess the various parts of the movement before any claim to counter-hegemony or counter-movement can be made. By looking at the various fragmented anti-globalization strategies and struggles that have been articulated within Britain, we also warn that any potential progressive or emancipatory ‘counter’ project is likely to suffer both from potential reactionary forces and from the lack of a clear transformative agenda.     

Mobile Spaces of Mesolithic Britain

ABSTRACT

This article examines how spaces were being made during the Mesolithic of Britain. Rather than focus upon material culture and landscape as separate analytical constructs, it demonstrates instead how they intersect and in so doing give rise to an understanding of space that is mobile and rendered through force. In investigating this the author asks whether objects not carried around by the occupants of Mesolithic Britain should be regarded as discarded (as has traditionally been the case), or should be seen as an ongoing and active component of how people make themselves at home. She goes on to suggest that people left things behind in the Mesolithic in order to create the possibility for future connections, making these objects anything but ‘homeless’.     

African Political Thinkers,Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile,c.1850–1970

This essay aims not only to detail the early history of African refugees in Britain but also to look at the political culture, ideas, writings, activities and organisations which African refugees and exiles from Africa and the diaspora developed while they were in Britain, and how this culture influenced wider political culture. It argues that further study of the histories of African migrants in Britain is required not just in order to provide an historical context to more recent concerns with transnational activities and diasporas but because to ignore the existence, struggles and political culture of those of African origin impoverishes and distorts our understanding of British political culture and Britain's historical past.     

RE-MAPPING THE PUBLIC

This paper traces the changing political/cultural formations of publicness in Britain, and how these intersect with emerging strategies for governing the social. It draws on three sets of discursive oppositions or elisions – those of public/community; community/bureaucracy; and public/social – to trace successive struggles over the fortunes of a public institution that, I argue, stands as an icon of the public sphere – the public library service. The account illuminates how notions of publics and publicness have been made and remade, expanded and residualized, by state professionals in Britain over the last 50 years as they struggled with the incursions of ‘new’ publics as well as seeking to mediate the impact of the Thatcher years and Blair governments. But rather than reading the decline of the public library service in Britain as just another example of neo-liberal governance, the paper argues for an approach that pays attention to the specificity of institutional histories and to the organizational and occupational forces that produce and mediate cultural change.     

Undercover policing and the spectre of ‘domestic extremism’: the covert surveillance of environmental activism in Britain

The spectre of environmental ‘domestic extremism’ has long been postulated by police leaders and security analysts in Britain. It is a narrative that has justified the commitment of enormous amounts of government resources towards police intelligence work directed at non-violent direct action campaigns. Most controversially, this has included the long-term infiltration of environmental (and other) activist groups by undercover police. This article provides a critical analysis of the justifications put forward in support of the covert surveillance of environmental activists in Britain. The paper proceeds by way of a single case study – a high profile, environmental direct action protest in the north of England – in order to reveal the levels of abuse, manipulation and deception at the basis of undercover protest policing. Through their court case, the activists involved with this action were able to obtain rare insights into the police authorisation documents for the undercover operation that had led to their arrests. An analysis of these documents provides us with a glimpse of the contradictory justifications given by senior police officers for infiltration – now under scrutiny by a public inquiry.     

The Making of National Health Insurance in Britain and Canada: Institutional Analysis and its Limits

Scholars examining the development of health insurance reform programs from an institutionalist perspective have drawn attention to the importance of state structures and administrative capacities in shaping social policy outcomes. Focusing on the introduction of the British National Health Insurance Act of 1911 and the Canadian Hospital Insurance Act of 1957, I suggest that institutionalist analysis can obscure the historical record in three ways. Analysts may ignore the multiple institutional mechanisms that were available to policy makers at the time; they may overlook the contentiousness of policy battles; and they may underestimate the extent to which similar institutions have functioned in very different ways. In the case of Britain, I argue that national health insurance was part of a package of social reforms designed to halt the slide of Britain from a position of preeminence in the world economy. The introduction of Canadian health insurance coincided with an increased role for local and federal states in fostering economic development within the nation. Institutional structures, cultural values, and political power were all resources used within both states to create a consensus behind the new national agenda.     

‘Upholding the Banner of Islam’: British Converts to Islam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute,c.1887–1908

Much has been written in recent years about the life of William Henry Abdullah Quilliam, late-Victorian propagator of Islam in Britain and founder of the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI). However, little attention has been given to Quilliam's fellow British Muslim converts, who constituted Britain's first indigenous Muslim community. This article briefly looks at the LMI as a missionary organisation. It then quantifies and examines the socio-demographics and post-conversion lives of the British Muslim community. It argues that individual commitment to both the LMI and Islam was affected by discrimination and misunderstanding of Muslims and their faith in society. However, by considering the fate of the Muslims following the LMI's demise, it is shown that a core of resolute converts held fast to their beliefs and played an important role in the consolidation of Islam in early twentieth-century Britain.     

The Work of the Russian Liberation Committee in London, 1919–1924

Abstract

The Russian Liberation Committee was one of the most active of the Russian émigré organizations operating in London in the period following the Russian Revolution. It acted as a clearing house for news on the Russian civil war, receiving telegrams from each of the fronts and distributing them to the British press. It also produced a variety of publications of its own, for distribution to the public, government officials and to soldiers in Russia. In this article, the Committee's work and publications are examined for the light they shed on anti-Bolshevik propaganda in Britain, and on the sources of information on the civil war available to the British press. While the Committee's efforts could not alter the pragmatic policy of the British government or the already anti-Bolshevik attitude of the British press, their presence made an important difference to the amount and kind of information that was available in Britain during the course of the Russian civil war.     

Bigamy: Neither Love nor Marriage,but a Threat to the Nation?

In a computer search of 18 national newspapers over a three-year period (1993–1945) 420 mentions of bigamy were identified. 110 items (or 26 per cent) referred to 26 current criminal cases involving bigamy. Seven cases attracted 70 per cent of the coverage. The comments of the presiding judge were widely reported in five of these cases together with titillating detail. Two other cases included comments by judges. Using Phoenix's (1996) distinction between threats to the nation-state from 'inside' and 'outside', the analysis indicates that two issues of wider socio-political importance – familism and immigration – were central to the judges' comments reported in the press and produced an important counterpoise to the titillating features of these cases. It is argued that the newspaper reporting of bigamy constructs bigamists as being a threat to Britain from 'inside' to the institution of marriage, while the threat from 'outside' is from minority ethnic men marrying female bigamists to gain residential status in Britain. It is the latter challenge which brings the most significant condemnation.     

Contemporary Anglo-Jewish community leadership: coping with multiculturalism

In this article, drawing on qualitative interviews and documentary analysis, we argue that the Jewish community in Britain has undergone a fundamental shift since 1990 from a 'strategy of security', a strategy of communal leadership based on emphasizing the secure British citizenship and belonging of the UK's Jews, to a 'strategy of insecurity', where the communal leadership instead stresses an excess of security among Anglo-Jewry. We demonstrate this based on two case studies: of the Jewish renewal movement in the 1990s and the 'new antisemitism' phenomenon of the 2000s. We conclude that this shift is tied to the shift from a monocultural Britain to an officially multicultural one, and that therefore there are lessons that can be taken from it for the study of British and other multiculturalisms.     

Britain and Globalization

Many perspectives on globalization see it as differentiated in its effects and reception, culturally driven, either pre-modern or postmodern, best captured by globalist or sceptical perspectives, and an equalizing phenomenon. This article discusses the British experience of globalization in the light of such approaches and argues that looking at this case gives an alternative view. Six themes on globalization are explored across four areas of the British experience of globalization. It is argued that in Britain globalization is, in contrast to the approaches outlined above, differentiated but also generalizing, economically driven, modern, best understood with a mix of globalist and sceptical perspectives and structured by power, inequality, and conflict. It is also argued that the British experience of globalization is a specific one and that Britain is a very globalized and globalizing country, economically, culturally, and politically.     

Child poverty and child outcomes

This article reviews the most up to date evidence on the prevalence of child poverty in Britain. It traces how child poverty has changed over the last 20 years, and how child poverty in Britain compares with that in other countries. Then there is a brief section describing the characteristics of poor children. It then reviews evidence of the impact of poverty on the well‐being of children drawing on the ESRC Children 5–16 programme project—Poverty: the Outcomes for Children (Bradshaw, 2001a). It concludes with a discussion of how the Labour Government is doing in its aspirations to abolish child poverty. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Translating values: Making sense of different value bases−Reflections from Denmark and the UK

A comprehensive body of comparitive material has been produced which looks at the similarities and differences betwen welfare regimes whether along continuums measuring degrees of commodification, service structure or social care models employed. However there has been a concentration on structural and institutional factors and a lack of recognition of the important consequences for the practice of welfare professionals within these welfare states of the values and ethics they bring to their work. This article seeks to explore the commonalities and differences between the value bases underpinning the work of welfare professionals in Denmark and Britain. Through an examination of the writings of Freire, Kierkegaard and Grundvitg in Denmark and the work of those espousing a framework for anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice in Britain. The article examines the similarities in values bases expressed around key issues such as human nature, power/oppression, liberation/empowerment and praxis. It concludes by suggesting that it is around the notions of equality and difference that the most obvious discontinuities occur. It concludes by calling for a recognition of the way in which an appreciation of our differences can lead to increased understanding and improved practice.     

Theorising gun control: the development of regulation and shooting sports in Britain

Utilising an account of the development of gun control legislation in Britain and the work of Norbert Elias, this paper argues that there are a number of processes that influence the development of such legislation, both in Britain and elsewhere. It argues that while processes such as the state's predisposition to consolidate its monopoly on the use of violence and advances in people's threshold of repugnance at violence influence the development of legislation, they can also lead to a blurring of the distinction between legally held sporting guns and illegal firearms in the hands of criminals. The paper concludes by considering other factors such as the efficacy of the prohibitionist lobby on the one hand and the gun lobby on the other, together with historical factors that may, in part, account for international variation in regimes of gun control.     

VIRTUAL COMMUNITY CARE? SOCIAL POLICY AND THE EMERGENCE OF COMPUTER MEDIATED SOCIAL SUPPORT

This article argues that the emergence and growth of internet use in Britain has important implications for the analysis of social policy. It attempts to outline a research agenda for social policy in relation to one particular aspect of internet use, that of on-line self-help and social support - what we term here virtual-community care . The article presents data on patterns of home based internet use in Britain and outlines some contemporary debates in social policy about the importance of self-help and social support. It also considers how the internet is being used for self-help and social support with a particular emphasis on the emerging situation in Britain. Three illustrations of on-line self-help and social support are presented: two from newsgroups, which are part of the 'uk.people.* hierarchy': one concerned with disability and one with parenting issues; and one web based forum concerned with issues surrounding mortgage repossession. Drawing upon this illustrative material the article discusses some emergent issues for contemporary social policy discourse: the rise of self-help groups; the privileging of lay knowledge and experience over the 'expert' knowledge of health and welfare professionals; the nature of professional-client relationships; the quality and legitimacy of advice, information and support; dis/empowerment; and social exclusion.