Charles More - Britain in the Twentieth Century

First published 2007 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-78483-3 (pbk)

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Set by 35 in 10.5/12.5pt Ehrhardt MT

Cons = Conservative; Lab = Labour; Lib = Liberal; IN = Irish Nationalist; SNP = Scottish National Party; PC = Plaid Cymru.

This is a book about the public life of the British people. It is about which political parties they choose to govern them and about the decisions the governments they elected have taken. It is about Britains relations with the outside world. It is about major decisions that people have taken for themselves but which have affected the nations collective life such as the number of children in a family, or how individuals spend their money. And it is about the things that have impinged on peoples lives but have been partly beyond the control of either individuals or governments war and economic shocks, for example. It examines the ideas people have had about certain things that have affected public life, such as class and national identity, but it is not primarily about peoples private lives and thoughts. So it is a political, social and economic, but not a cultural, history.

The use of some terms may be unfamiliar to non-British readers. The 1900s means the period 19001909 (or, loosely, 1900 to the First World War). Interwar means the period between the two world wars, and post-war, after the Second World War. Liberal and Conservative with initial capitals mean the political parties of those names. The views they have been associated with are discussed in the relevant chapters. Uncapitalised, conservative can mean politically right of centre (the location of the centre, of course, changing over the century and broadly moving to the left until the 1980s), or simply reluctant to change, and the context should make clear which. As the Liberal Party faded, liberal came to mean mildly left of centre; for the last 50 years or so it has been particularly associated with liberal social attitudes. Neither word, in Britain, denotes an extreme position and hence one can have, for instance, liberal Conservatism without that being a contradiction. Finally, America and the USA, and between 1922 and 1991 Russia and the Soviet Union, have been used interchangeably.

A book like this is dependent on the work of many other historians. There is a list of useful books covering the whole period at the end of . At the end of other chapters Further reading indicates the most important sources. In the case of books of essays by different writers, I have listed individual essays where they are a particularly important source, and otherwise I have listed the book.

I owe a debt of thanks to two anonymous referees for their valuable comments, and to my wife, Hilary, for her support.