James Vernon - Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

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James Vernon 2017

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First published 2017

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To my teachers and students

This book has my name on the cover but it is really the product of my conversation with generations of scholars as well as my teachers, students and colleagues. I hope all of them will see their influence at work. Caroline Ritter, Katie Harper, Trevor Jackson and Sam Wetherell actually wrote some of the book. They checked facts, tidied my prose, found images and produced those textboxes with their initials at the end. Brandon Williams marshalled the images and permissions. Elizabeth Friend-Smith somehow convinced me to write the book and Rosemary Crawford helped me finish it. It all begins and ends with Ros. Our family, near and far, kept me in the present. I never could have imagined writing this book without those who taught me at school and university. Since then my students have been the inspiration and my teachers. Thank you all.

There are countless histories of modern Britain but little agreement about what it is, when it was, where it happened, who was part of it, or how it should be told. These histories share similar titles but cover different periods of time, extend across different geographical areas and tell very different stories. This is as it should be. History is about debate and interpretation. What some have recently dubbed the History Wars are a set of arguments about how the national past should be understood and taught. As countries become demographically and culturally more diverse, politicians frequently offer increasingly prescriptive versions of their national pasts. In 2015 the British prime minister David Cameron claimed that British values of democracy, equality, tolerance and the rule of law were rooted in a national history that stretched back 800 years. Those seeking to become British citizens are tested on a similar version of this national history and it is often proposed that this is the history British school children should be taught through the National Curriculum.

Those who advocate such histories complain that in recent decades an emphasis on economic, social and cultural history has undermined the seamless and self-congratulatory chronological narrative of the past anchored in political history. Once economic, social and cultural historians insisted that the experience of ordinary Britons women and men of all classes, as well as people of all colours and creeds had to be included in the national history, the question was to what degree they would change it. Similarly, as historians began to recognize the different roles of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England in Britains history, as well as their entanglement with continental Europe, the British Empire, and the rest of the world, it became increasingly difficult to imagine the national past as an island story that stopped on the shores of the British Isles.