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  • Structures and Transformations in Modern British History ed. by David Feldman, Jon Lawrence
  • Sonya O. Rose (bio)
Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence; pp. xii + 331. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, £50.00, $93.00.

This extraordinary collection of essays honors Gareth Stedman Jones. Collectively the essays are intellectually stimulating, engage in critical arguments with current and past historical practices, and illustrate the diversity of historical methods and conceptual approaches that constitute British history today. They are a fitting tribute to a historian whose work has contributed to and encouraged a probing and critical approach to historical analysis.

The editors’ introduction offers a rich and insightful assessment of British historiography from the late 1960s. It explores the uneven and contested presence of the concept of class and emphasizes the diversity of social history. It illuminates the changing nature of debates over a concern with structures and processes and with theoretically driven approaches that aim toward something like total history. And it stresses Stedman Jones’s concern with politics—or rather the connections between economic changes and sociopolitical transformations—from his earlier work on political responses to poverty and working-class politics to his more recent engagement with the history of ideas. Most significantly, it highlights the methodological pluralism of both Stedman Jones’s scholarship and the essays contained here.

These essays traverse a period from the mid- to late-eighteenth century to the closing decades of the twentieth. But even essays focused on periods outside of the purview of Victorianists make for important reading because of their conceptual and interpretive challenges and impulses to reach back. David Feldman’s essay, “Why the English Like Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History,” centers on Sikh bus drivers and other Sikh men’s successful struggles to wear turbans in the 1960s and 1970s to make an argument about a history of pluralism in Britain. Feldman argues that cultural pluralism predated what we know as multiculturalism and is a counterstory to the one generally told about English responses to immigration in the post-war period. One might read Feldman’s essay as another retelling of the story of British tolerance, but he also offers an insight into the conservative tone underlying the policies of accommodation to difference. He suggests that pluralist policies were a “structural feature of governance . . . used to shore up the established disposition of power—English, Anglican and imperial—within the Union and in the empire” (300).

The methodological diversity of social history that the editors claim characterizes Stedman Jones’s stance is amply illustrated in the volume. E. A. Wrigley’s essay makes use of newly available quantitative data to demonstrate that the political economists who famously predicted that rises in population growth would be accompanied by economic misery were wrong for much of the period between 1751 and 1851. Increasingly productive agricultural methods and a lessened need for rural workers coupled with growth in mining and industrial production elsewhere led to increased migration from rural to urban areas. Margot Finn’s essay analyzes family letters that linked a prominent imperial kin network across the Empire from India to the metropole and in which marital strategies were negotiated. In a family saga that might be the basis of cinematic treatment, the letters explore the marital histories of the sire’s legitimate and illegitimate sons and how they negotiated issues of family belonging. Finn reveals that resolving familial tensions, [End Page 381] especially those wrought by bastardy, was a central preoccupation in letters that disclose a complex world in which ethnicity, class, and race were fluid markers of belonging. Finn concludes by noting that the letters suggest that popular ideas about race in the early nineteenth century may have been less “rigid and deterministic” than those encouraged later in the century by scientific, anthropological, and historical writings (117).

Several essays deal substantively with the relationship between radical politics and social transformations over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alun Howkins explores a rich topic for social history, the enclosure of common land. He focuses not on the period from 1700 to 1850, which has dominated debates, but on the “last...

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