Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

Britain's Changing Climate.Human Impact on Hydrology and Rivers in Britain.Changing Landforms.Soils and Ecosystems.Managing Environments.

Commercial pressures and mechanization have rendered almost unrecognizable the natural and man-made landscapes of Britain as they existed before World War I. How this happened and how we can best conserve what is left is charted using the perspective of aerial photography in this book.

The UK’s Changing Democracy presents a uniquely democratic perspective on all aspects of UK politics, at the centre in Westminster and Whitehall, and in all the devolved nations. The 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU marked a turning point in the UK’s political system. In the previous two decades, the country had undergone a series of democratic reforms, during which it seemed to evolve into a more typical European liberal democracy. The establishment of a Supreme Court, adoption of the Human Rights Act, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, proportional electoral systems, executive mayors and the growth in multi-party competition all marked profound changes to the British political tradition. Brexit may now bring some of these developments to a juddering halt. The UK’s previous ‘exceptionalism’ from European patterns looks certain to continue indefinitely. ‘Taking back control’ of regulations, trade, immigration and much more is the biggest change in UK governance for half a century. It has already produced enduring crises for the party system, Parliament and the core executive, with uniquely contested governance over critical issues, and a rapidly changing political landscape. Other recent trends are no less fast-moving, such as the revival of two-party dominance in England, the re-creation of some mass membership parties and the disruptive challenges of social media. In this context, an in-depth assessment of the quality of the UK’s democracy is essential. Each of the 2018 Democratic Audit’s 37 short chapters starts with clear criteria for what democracy requires in that part of the nation’s political life and outlines key recent developments before a SWOT analysis (of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) crystallises the current situation. A small number of core issues are then explored in more depth. Set against the global rise of debased semi-democracies, the book’s approach returns our focus firmly to the big issues around the quality and sustainability of the UK’s liberal democracy.

Britain has an immense range of environmental law and the reputation for largely ignoring it. John McCormick describes the fascinating story of the political growth of that law, and the pressures, the compromises, the parliamentary and civil service opportunism that allowed the edifice to grow over the greater part of a century. He tells the story of the absolute change in political climate over the last ten years and deciphers the nature of Thatcher's ''conversion'' to greenery. He explains why everyone who cared about the environment became embattled and, above all, how the old methods of sensible compromise were banished, probably for ever, not least because of the government's obsession with secrecy. What, then, are the new political means of compelling change on a reluctant parliament? Everything is at stake from welfare to water, from forests to fishing. Where are we now? What are the likely pressures, both internal and from Europe and the rest of the world, to make Britain pass more environmentally sound laws and, perhaps more importantly, to observe them? McCormick provides a gripping picture of the central issues, of the system and of the battleground. Originally published in 1991