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Coming just five years after the ravages of the Second World War, the Korean war was a deeply unsettling moment in post-war British history. This book is a study of Britain's diplomatic, military and security policy during the Korean War as seen from the perspective of the British Government. It explores the social and cultural impact of the Korean War (1950-53) on Britain. From allegations about American use of 'germ' warfare to anxiety over Communist use of 'brainwashing' and treachery at home, the Korean War precipitated a series of short-lived panics in 1950s Britain. The book charts the war's changing position in British popular imagination and asks how it became known as the 'Forgotten War'. The study presented argues that the British did have influence over American decision-making during the Korean War. Whereas the existing United Nations resolutions would permit 'swirling' across the 38th parallel operations of a politico-military nature would require further United Nations consideration. The British did not have a veto over American strategy in Korea - but under the Truman administration they came pretty close to one with respect to the widening of the war into China. The Attlee-Truman talks, in December 1950, secured for the British the watershed agreement of the right to be consulted on the use of the atomic bomb. The book also talks about General Douglas MacArthur, the 1951 Chinese capture of Seoul by communists, and the concept of a British 'Manchurian Candidate'-type figure indoctrinated by the Chinese in Korea.
This book is about a lost moment in British, and especially Scots, history. It explores in detail the events of 1708. The book uses this as a platform to analyse the dynamics of the Jacobite movement, the English/British government's response to the Jacobites' activities and the way the Jacobites interacted with the French government. Grand historical theses need, however, to be well grounded in the nitty-gritty of human affairs. The book offers a detailed narrative of the execution of the Enterprise of Scotland. It introduces the reader to the operation's climactic moment and at the same time corrects misapprehensions about it that have crept in to the historiography that touches on the operation proper. The book also offers a new interpretation of the role of Queen Mary of Modena as de facto regent and thus director of the movement in the early eighteenth century. It highlights the unusually prominent role played by particular Scots noblewomen, such as Anne Drummond, countess of Erroll, and Elizabeth Howard, duchess of Gordon, in the conspiracy leading to the '08. In a context set by a desperate, epic global war and the angry, febrile politics of early eighteenth-century Scotland, the book contends that Britain was on the cusp of a military and constitutional upheaval.
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
Vaccinating Britain investigates the relationship between the British public and vaccination policy since 1945. It is the first book to examine British vaccination policy across the post-war period and covers a range of vaccines, providing valuable context and insight for those interested in historical or present-day public health policy debates. Drawing on government documents, newspapers, internet archives and medical texts it shows how the modern vaccination system became established and how the public played a key role in its formation. British parents came to accept vaccination as a safe, effective and cost-efficient preventative measure. But occasional crises showed that faith in the system was tied to contemporary concerns about the medical profession, the power of the state and attitudes to individual vaccines. Thus, at times the British public demanded more comprehensive vaccination coverage from the welfare state; at others they eschewed specific vaccines that they thought were dangerous or unnecessary. Moreover, they did not always act uniformly, with “the public” capable of expressing contradictory demands that were often at odds with official policy. This case study of Britain’s vaccination system provides insight into the relationship between the British public and the welfare state, as well as contributing to the historiography of public health and medicine.
For the last three and a half years, this country has felt trapped, like a lion in a cage. We have all shared the same frustration – like some super-green supercar blocked in the traffic. We can see the way ahead. We know where we want to go – and we know why we are stuck. Boris Johnson, Introduction to 2019 Conservative Party Manifesto, Get Brexit Done: Unleash Britain's Potential
In the aftermath of the Great War, Britons read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, soldiers had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic or spiritual forces. Many of these individuals believed their experiences were based on scientific facts. Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, renowned British scientists, politicians and authors endorsed spiritualism, the belief in the survival of the human personality after death and the possibility of communication between the living and dead. Others took seriously the possibility of telepathy, a term first coined by the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s. During the outbreak of the Great War, a greater segment of the British population turned to these movements to understand the slaughter of their children, brothers, husbands and friends in the furnace of industrial warfare. This book explores their ghostly encounters to offer a new emotional history of the Great War, one that contrasts sharply with the legacy of the war, and modernity itself, as a disenchanting experience.
3 Africa–Britain: a short history Introduction This chapter makes a review of British-African interactions through history. It does not make a claim to anything but the most general review, and this is because the purpose here is simply to provide the general coordinates for the more detailed considerations of the historical changes in Africa’s representation in Britain in subsequent chapters. The focus is on the nature of the political relations between Africa and Britain and the main ways in which Africa has been ‘domesticated’ into the British polity. The
Citizenisation processes are designed to redress the ‘citizenship deficit’ of migrants. However, an overlooked feature of theoretical and policy understandings of citizenisation is how they not only operate as a social intervention, as argued in the previous chapter. It is also how they shape definitions of the nation-state itself. This chapter turns to the history of British citizenship and to how the perceived ‘citizenship deficit’ of Britain has long since been the subject of political and scholarly discourse. Cast in this way, histories
’s commemorative time and energy went towards commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade within the British Empire. The centrepiece of commemorative events was the ceremony at Westminster Abbey in August, which was most notable for the incursion by Toyin Agbetu who made his protest so close to the person of the Queen. There are several explanations for the elision of the tercentenary of the Union between England and Scotland by the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery. The first was that for an external audience the abolition of slavery was a
5 British questions Geoffrey Bell It is no longer the Irish question, it is the British question. (Kevin McNamara, Parliamentary Labour Party Spokesperson on Northern Ireland, 1991)1 In the spring of 1991, I interviewed several leading British politicians on their understanding of the historical and contemporary nature of the British–Irish conflict. All had recent experience of Northern Ireland. One was an MP who, as a soldier, had served in Northern Ireland; the rest had been or were either UK government ministers in Northern Ireland or party spokespeople on