Moving from a specialist interest in recent years, the study of the history of education has flourished and expanded. Focusing on literacy, this study reviews the history of education in the nineteenth century and the academic debates surrounding it.

Since the 1870s the British economy has steadily declined from its position as the 'workshop of the world' to that of a low-ranking European power. Michael Sanderson examines the question of how far defects in education and training have contributed to this economic decline. By looking at issues such as literacy, the quality of scientific and technical training, the supposed anti-industrial bias of public schools and the older universities, the neglect of vocational and technical training and the neglect of the non-academic teenager, Michael Sanderson demonstrates that education was far from the sole cause of economic decline, but that its deficiencies have certainly played a part. This book offers an accessible and concise analysis of a topic of current importance, interest and debate and will be of interest to students and teachers of the history of education and its impact on British economic development in the twentieth century.

Concise, up-to-date survey of the sporting 'revolution', and its cultural and economic consequences.

This is an innovative study of middle-class behaviour and property relations in English towns in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Through the lens of wills, family papers, property deeds, account books and letters, the author offers a reading of the ways in which middle-class families survived and surmounted the economic difficulties of early industrial society. He argues that these were essentially 'networked' families created and affirmed by a 'gift' network of material goods, finance, services and support, with property very much at the centre of middle-class survival strategies. His approach combines microhistorical studies of individual families with a broader analysis of the national and even international networks within which these families operated. The result is a significant contribution to the history, and to debates about the place of structural and cultural analysis in historical understanding.

It is a story that is strong in notable events -slave emancipation, the arrival of the 1820 British settlers, a series of frontier wars, the Great Trek of Boer emigrants - as well as in striking personalities, among them Dr John Philip, Andries Stockenstrom, John Fairbairn, Moshoeshoe and Sir Harry Smith. In Keegan's pages these familiar historical landmarks and characters emerge in entirely novel ways, the subject of fresh interpretations and original insights.

Over the past two hundred years German education policy and practice has attracted interest in England. Policy makers have used the 'German example' both to encourage change and development and to warn against certain courses of action. This monograph provides the first major analysis of the rich material from government reports (including work by Matthew Arnold), the press, travel accounts, memoirs, scholarly publications and the archives to uncover the nature of the English fascination with education in Germany, from 1800 to the end of the twentieth century. David Phillips traces this story and uses recent work in theories of educational policy 'borrowing' to analyze the reception of the German experience and its impact on the development of English education policy.

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of current research on the social conditions, experiences and reactions of working people during the period 1750 - 1850.