Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

In the twentieth century, the British Crown appointed around a hundred thousand people - military and civilian - in Britain and the British Empire to honours and titles. For outsiders, and sometimes recipients too, these jumbles of letters are tantalizingly confusing: OM, MBE, GCVO, CH, KB, or CBE. Throughout the century, this system expanded to include different kinds of people, while also shrinking in its imperial scope with the declining empire. Through these dual processes, this profoundly hierarchical system underwent a seemingly counter-intuitive change: it democratized. Why and how did the British government change this system? And how did its various publics respond to it? This study addresses these questions directly by looking at the history of the honours system in the wider context of the major historical changes in Britain and the British Empire in the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the evolution of this hierarchical, deferential system amidst democratization and decolonization. It focuses on the system's largest-and most important-components: the Order of the British Empire, the Knight Bachelor, and the lower ranks of other Orders. By creatively analysing the politics and administration of the system alongside popular responses to it in diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Tobias Harper shows the many different meanings that honours took on for the establishment, dissidents, and recipients. He also shows the ways in which the system succeeded and failed to order and bring together divided societies.

First Published in 2004. In Victorian Labour History: Experience, Identity and the Politics of Representation, John Host addresses liberal, Marxist and postmodernist historiography on Victorian working people to question the special status of historical knowledge. The central focus of this study is a debate about mid-Victorian social stability, a condition conventionally equated with popular acceptance of the social order. Host does not join the debate but takes it as his object of analysis, deconstructing the notion of stability and the analyses that purport to explain it. In particular, he takes issue with historical evidence, noting the different possibilities for meaning that it allows and the speculative character of the narratives to which it is adduced. Host examines an extensive range of archival material to illustrate the ambiguity of the historical field, the rhetorical strategies through which the illusion of its unity is created, and the ultimately fictive quality of historical narrative. He then explores the political contingency of the works he addresses and the political consequences of representing them as true.