Browse
The British fascist imagination during the interwar period was racked by a morbid dread of impending national dissolution. A veritable kaleidoscope of nightmarish new forms and practices appeared on the fascists' mental horizon as a result of the sexual revolution. Many fascists believed that this revolutionary wave had burst the dam of conventional decency and moral restraint, unleashing a tide of sexually promiscuous behaviour and decadent sexual perversity on modern Britain. Fascism and literary modernism were also contemptuous of 'mass culture' and the alleged 'Americanisation' of British culture. In addition, the supremacy of elites in culture and other areas of society was deemed unavoidable. Fascists accused rationalism of presiding over a fundamental divorce between intellect and emotion. By elevating mind and reason to a privileged position of authority within the human condition, rationalism was charged with denying man's subjective nature.
A degree of intellectual confusion would mark the earliest attempts to comprehend fascism. The contemporary Marxist view of fascism as a secondary phenomenon shared many of the historicist and teleological assumptions. The notion of fascism as a temporary lapse into insanity, a moral and cultural deviation that drove a wedge into European history and diverted it from its path to reason and enlightenment, failed to appreciate the distinct lines of continuity between fascism and the European society and culture that spawned it. In order to comprehend more accurately the essence of British fascism, it must be viewed as an organic element of the fin-de-siecle intellectual and cultural revolt. The 'anti-' model of fascism serves as a useful analytical device to probe the reactionary, negative and imprecisely formulated pronouncements of 1920s manifestations of fascist ideology in Britain, particularly Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascists.
This chapter considers the membership strength of Britain's interwar fascist parties, and other areas of related interest such as the social-class and occupational profiles of fascist 'joiners'. Reliable material on the membership in the official fascist sources, in particular, is extremely scarce. Fascist newspaper sources are less useful, however, if we are attempting to arrive at an estimation of a fascist party's membership strength. Membership figures put out by the fascist press are notoriously unreliable. The significance of the National Fascisti and the IFL lay in areas other than the number of members they attracted, though. Both parties had pitifully small memberships. Social-class and occupational analyses of fascist memberships undoubtedly help us to arrive at a greater awareness of the nature of fascism, not least because they impel us to focus on the structural or objective determinants of recruitment.
Of the minor fascist parties during the 1920s the National Fascisti (NF) was the most significant. It was formed by a group of disaffected British Fascisti activists who split from the parent body in late 1924. The NF would look to the recent experiences of Mussolini, and particularly the squadristiy for inspiration and guidance. There are a small number of impressionistic assessments of the NF's membership strength given in the contemporary and postwar accounts. The 1930s threw up another fascist party, the Unity Band, which managed to outlive most of its contemporaries among the minor parties. Like many leading British fascists between the wars, Seton Hutchison was a disillusioned First World War veteran. Prior to his attempts to establish himself as Britain's Fiihrer, Seton Hutchison was a member of the BUF, but was expelled for 'improper conduct', an experience that left him very embittered towards Mosley.
The doctrines of the British fascist parties were forged from a complex amalgamation of ideas of varying degrees of sophistication and crudity that emanated from a range of sources. The origins of British fascism should not only be sought in ideas and intellectual currents, however. Other forces and tendencies in society, of a social, economic, technological, political and cultural nature, contributed to its emergence, nourished its growth and shaped its subsequent development. Advocates of social-imperialism and national efficiency who ascribed to Social-Darwinist principles would also prove important to the development of British fascist ideas. Besides being a positivist and a progenitor of national socialism, C. Arthur Pearson was a eugenicist, who in 1911 became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at the University of London. At the more general level, British fascism bequeathed from Social-Darwinism the notion of evolutionary development and ascent to more advanced modes of biological existence.
As with other contemporary cultural forms in Britain, such as literature and music, the visual arts were caught in the throes of change during the interwar years, which was both profound and deeply unsettling to established mores and conventions. British fascism, though, unlike Italian fascism which incorporated aspects of modernism into its cultural and artistic programme, including Futurism and Cubistart, almost wholly repudiated intellectual modernism in the visual arts. Artistic modernism was accused of failing to respect the rules of harmony in art. Again, it is tempting to detect a sub-text of fascist ideology here and interpret this as a yearning for an ordered and harmonious social structure purged of the alleged discord created by class conflict. To Britain's fascists, artistic modernism, with its creative use of distortion, disintegrative images and general disdain for the traditional discipline of the art form, made a virtue of deformity.
This chapter focuses on data management and data sharing. Strong emphasis is given to the tool Git as a highly recommended way to keep data under version control. As a way of sharing data, the near-ubiquity of Git means that a basic understanding of it as a tool is essential for historians wishing to use work shared by others on public Git repositories. The use of Git and Git repositories is covered in some depth.
This chapter outlines the history of digital history and digital humanities more broadly. This historical narrative is intertwined with coverage of the technological changes which have made certain types of digital history feasible or even popular, and noting the economic drivers to certain types of material being preferentially digitised. The effect of the digital on the way historians approach reading, writing, collaboration, discovery (search) and citation is also discussed.
This book offers a practical introduction to digital history with a focus on working with text. It will benefit anyone who is considering carrying out research in history that has a digital or data element and will also be of interest to researchers in related fields within digital humanities, such as literary or classical studies. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction on how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. After placing digital history in its historiographical context and discussing the importance of understanding the history of the subject, this guide covers the life-cycle of a digital project from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as plain text and XML with confidence. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools.
This chapter provides a survey of the landscape of contemporary digital history, with coverage of the way individual research projects have built upon each other. An understanding of what is available and how it can be used is vital to choosing a viable research project, and this chapter covers technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR), handwritten archives, crowdsourcing, big data and web archives. The chapter concludes with discussion of publication broadly conceived, so not simply of the final outputs of a project.