Adam Chill

Modern British History Reading List (Peter Weiler)

General Works—Eighteenth Century

John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New
York: Alfred A Knopf, 1989)

Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Allen Lane: London 1982)

Richard Price, British Society, 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change

(Cambridge UP, 1999)

‘Class’ in the Eighteenth Century

Peter King, “The Patrician-Plebian Model Re-examined,” Social History 21, no. 2 (May
1996)

Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common

Dror Wahrman, “Review of Public Life and Propertied Englishmen,” Social History 17,
no. 3 (October 1993)

The Making of the Working Class

Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1995)

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Alastair Reid, Social Classes and Social Relations in Britain, 1850-1914 (London:
Macmillan Education Company, 1992)

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

The Making of the Middle Class

Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750-
1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

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Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in
Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge UP: 1995)

Industrial Revolution

David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880-
1980,” Past and Present, No. 103 (May, 1984): pp. 131-172

Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the present day,
2nd Edition, 1999 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968)

David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial

Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969)

Class and Political Language

James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in

England, 1790-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and nation in

English radical politics, 1848-1874 (Cambridge UP, 1993)

Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century
England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Rohan McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England

Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class

Gender

Billie Melman, “Class and Gender: The ‘Girls Weeklies,’” Women and the Popular
Imagination in the Twenties, 107-120

Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose, Gender and Class in Modern Europe (NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996)

Keith McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness: The Working Man,’” in Defining the Victorian
Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge UP, 2000)

Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992)
 3

Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Feminism and Women

Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial
Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal (Spring 1978):
9-65.

Billie Melman, Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992)

Claire Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870

Jane Rendall, “The Citizenship of Women and the Reform Act of 1867,” in Defining the
Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge
UP, 2000).

Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman

Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society

Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London and New
York: Verso, 1992)

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

Crime and Sexuality

Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer movement
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)

Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in
Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)

Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-

Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths & Modern Sexualities
(London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)
 4

Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England,
1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Race and Nation

Howard Fulweiler, “The Strange Case of Governor Eyre: Race and the ‘Victorian Frame
of Mind.” Clio 2000 29(2): 119-142.

Catherine Hall, “‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains…to Africa’s Golden Sand’:

Ethnicity, Race, and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England.” Gender and History 5,
no. 2 (Summer 1993): 212-230.

________, “The nation within and without,” Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race,
Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge UP, 2000)

Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Colonial Re-characterization and the Discourse Surrounding the
Eyre Controversy.” Southern Communication Journal 66, no. 1 (Fall 2000)

H.L. Malchow, “Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century

Britain,” Past and Present May 1993: 90-130

James Smith Patterson, “The Liberals, Race, and Political Reform in the British West
Indies,” Journal of Negro History 1994 79(2): 131-146.

‘Britishness’

Antoinette Burton, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” Journal of
Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (September 1997)

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837.

_____, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31

(October 1992)

Stuart Hall, “Culture, Community, Nation,” Cultural Studies 7 (October 1993)

Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations.

Miles Taylor, “Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain,” The
Historical Journal 33, no. 4 (1990): 971-972.

E.P. Thompson, “The Making of a Ruling Class,” Dissent (Summer 1993)

 5

Decline

Perry Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis”

Michael Dintenfass, The Decline of Industrial Britain, 1870-1980 (London and New
York: Routledge, 1992)

E.P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in The Poverty of Theory

Capitalism and Empire

P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000, 2nd Edition 2000
(Longman, 1993)

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill,
1944)

Diplomacy

John Gallagher, “The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire,” The Decline,
Revival, and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays, ed. Anil
Seal (Cambridge UP, 1982)

Wm. Roger Louis, “The Dissolution of the British Empire,” in The Oxford history of the
British Empire, vol. v, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998-1999)

Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 3rd Edition
(London and New York: Longman, 1976)

David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the 20th
Century, 2nd Edition 2000 (London: Longman 1991)

Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The
Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (New York: St. Martins Press, 1961)

Empire and Domestic Culture

David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001)

________, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and
the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820-1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
 6

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination,
1830-1867 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002)

John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public

Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)

Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998)

George Orwell, Burmese Days

Timothy Parsons, The British Imperial Century, 1815-1914

Ann P. Saab, “English and Irish Reactions to the Massacres in Lebanon and Syria, 1860.”
Muslim World 74, no. 1 (January 1984): 12-25

Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England,
1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

________, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of
Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present, no. 121 (Nov. 1988): 74-109

Intellectual History

J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966)

Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, eds., History, Religion, and
Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000)

Charles Darwin, Autobiography

Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British

Liberal Thought (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)

J.S. Mill, Autobiography

Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)

Education

Paul Deslandes, “‘The Foreign Element’: Newcomers and the Rhetoric of Race, Nation,
and Empire in ‘Oxbridge’ undergraduate culture, 1850-1920.” Journal of British Studies
37, no. 1 (January 1998): 54-90.
 7

Brian Simon and Ian Bradley, eds., The Victorian Public School: Studies in the
Development of an Educational Institution (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975)

Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780-1870 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1960)

Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870-1920 (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1965)

Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order, 1940-1990 (New York: St. Martins Press,
1991)

Gillian Sutherland, “Education,” The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950:

Volume 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990)

The Growth of the ‘State’

José Harris, “Society and the State in Twentieth-Century Britain,” in The Cambridge
Social History of Britain 1750-1950: Volume 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, ed.
F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Pat Thane, “Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750-1914,” in The
Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: Volume 3 Social Agencies and
Institutions, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Religion

James Obelkevich, “Religion,” The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950:

Volume 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990)

General Works—Twentieth Century

Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990

Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870-1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993)

Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945, 4th Edition 2003 (London: Pelican Books,
1983)

World War I

Pat Barker, Regeneration

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Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 2nd Edition, 2000 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975)

Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,”
Signs 8 (3): 422-450

Nicoletta Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and
International Law during the First World War,” AHR 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 737-769.

Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1979)

Interwar radicalism

Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s
(New York: Viking Press, 1977)

Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish
Civil War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, and Co., 1966)

World War II

Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London:
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1975)

Stephen Brooke, “Revisionists and Fundamentalists: The Labour Party and Economic
Policy during the Second World War,” The Historical Journal 32, no. 1 (March 1989):
157-175.

Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain—1939-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books,
1969)

20th Century Labour and Politics

Eric Hobsbawm, “The ‘New Unionism’ in Perspective” Eric Hobsbawm, Workers:

Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)

Eric Hobsbawm, “The Making of the Working Class 1870-1914” in Eric Hobsbawm,
Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)

Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock

(Oxford UP, 1987)

Henry Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party, 10th Edition, New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993 (London: The Macmillan Press, 1961)
 9

Peter Weiler, Ernest Bevin (Manchester and New York:

Manchester University Press, 1993)

The New Left and other critiques

Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the
Origin of Cultural Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997)

George Orwell, Animal Farm

_________., 1984

John Osborne, Look Back in Anger