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Themes
Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on our key topics: Class and Work, Agencies and Institutions, Crime and Punishment, States of Mind, Health and Welfare, Family and Demography, Recreation and Consumption, Rural and Urban Life, Race and Empire and Gender and Sexuality. These short introductions offer a concise overview of ten key areas within British society and have been written by our academic editors, Professor Martin Hewitt and Susie Steinbach.. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind
Exploring agencies and institutions in Britain in 1750-1914 involves engaging with bewildering variety, marked gender differences, and extraordinary change. It is helpful to bear in mind a few key distinctions, although the reality was often much messier. Most significant is the division between governmental and non-governmental bodies, a division often described as between the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. Also important are the distinctions between national and local, and between the different types of non-governmental institutions.
At the apex of the institutional pyramid was the British state: the monarchy, Parliament, civil service and the law. The monarch remained influential and significant, not least as symbolising the unity of the country. Remember that England & Wales and Scotland were only formally united into one country in 1707, and Ireland was absorbed into the British parliamentary system only between 1801 and 1922. Separate legislation governed Scotland and Ireland, and Scotland retained its own legal system. The state was also an imperial institution, and a religious institution, through the status of the (‘Anglican’) Church of England.
As Nadja Durbach’s video-essay describes, the British state was transformed in significant ways across the period. Not only did its scope and purpose expand, but it became much more ordered and bureaucratic: admission by examination replaced patronage in many areas of the civil service; new standards of record-keeping were introduced; action came to be based more securely on expertise. Even political parties shifted from loose coalitions into disciplined organisations. For much of the period the state was an entirely masculine entity, and though women’s involvement did occur after 1870, women’s rights to vote and serve in office were extremely limited before 1918.
In many respects even greater transformations took place beyond the state, in the institutions of civil society. For much of the period voluntary bodies were responsible for activities which in the twentieth century came to be associated with state provision, most notably health services, but also nearly all welfare, most educational provision, culture institutions like libraries, galleries and museums, as well as the more familiar campaigning organisations, associations for mutual support, and communal sport and leisure. In the eighteenth century, trusts (often funded by legacies or endowments) or incorporated societies were the most common organisational model. From the early nineteenth century, an enormous range of membership societies or ‘subscriber democracies’ were formed, sustaining the extraordinary vibrancy but also the unpredictability of nineteenth century activity in many areas. Although gender exclusions operated throughout the period, especially in male ‘clubs’, from the early century women did prise open access and create alternative women’s associations.
For most of the period nearly all these organisations were local or regional, based on parish, town, or perhaps county. Indeed, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, national organisations were actively inhibited for fear they might enable the people to unite against the government. One legacy of this was that even as national organisations emerged thereafter, they were often based on largely autonomous local branches. This was the case for trade unions and political parties. ‘National’ organisations might have had a leadership drawn from across the country but were in effect metropolitan organisations with little or no wider presence. In the same way, business organisations were traditionally highly local, often owned by individuals or families. Although the development of the railways had created a new sort of large national company in the 1840s, one sign of the modernity of the early twentieth century economy was the emergence of large conglomerations in various industrial sectors.
Recommended reading for this subject area includes: James Walvin, English Urban Life. 1776-1851 (1984), David Doughan and Peter Gordon, Women, Clubs and Associations in Britain (2006), the journal articles ‘Gender, the family and women’s agency in the building of ‘welfare states’: The British Case’ by Jane Lewis, ‘Faith, philanthropy and the aged poor in nineteenth-century England and Wales’ by Carmen M. Mangion, and the primary source collections Edwin Chadwick: Nineteenth Century Social Reform, and The Philosophy of the State and the Practice of Welfare.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind