This book explores the representation of London’s nightlife in popular films and newspapers of the interwar period. Through a series of case-studies, it analyses how British popular media in the 1920s and 1930s displayed the capital after dark. It argues that newspapers and films were part of a common culture, which capitalized on the transgressive possibilities of the night. At the same time both media ensured that those in authority, such as the police, were always shown to ultimately be in control of the night. The first chapter of the book provides an overview of the British film and newspaper industries in the interwar period. Subsequent chapters each explore a specific aspect of London’s nightlife. In turn, these chapters consider how films and newspapers of the interwar period depicted women navigating the street at night; the Metropolitan Police’s involvement in nightlife; and the capital’s newly built and expanded suburbs and public transport network. Finally, the book considers how newspapers and films depicted themselves and one another.

This book is the first substantial study of the presence and relationship with the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in modern British art from 1914 to 1945, addressing how and why practitioners in both religious and secular spheres turned to the subjects. The volume examines British art and visual culture’s relationship with the then-contemporary anxieties and hopes regarding the orientation of society and culture, arguing that there is an acute relationship to the particular forms of cultural discourse of eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium. Chapters identify the continued relevance of religion and religious themes in British art during the period, and demonstrate that eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium were thriving and surprisingly mainstream concepts in the period that remained vital in early to mid-twentieth-century society and culture. This book is a research monograph aimed at an audience of scholars and graduate students already familiar with the core focus of modern British art and cultural histories, especially those working on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in Theology, Sociology, or other disciplinary settings. It will also be of interest to scholars and students working on war and visual culture, or histories of imperialism. It will benefit scholars of early twentieth-century British art, demonstrating the intersection of art and religion in the modern era, and critically qualifies the standard secular canon and narrative of modern British art, and the general neglect of religion in existing art-historical literature.

An interpretative history of global urbanity in the 1920s and 1930s, from the vantage point of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, that follows the life of business tycoon Victor Sassoon. In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family’s trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family’s fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, The Worlds of Victor Sassoon paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wreaked by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital.

Home front heroism investigates how civilians were recognised and celebrated as heroic during the Second World War. Through a focus on London, this book explores how heroism was manufactured as civilians adopted roles in production, protection and defence, through the use of uniforms and medals, and through the way that civilians were injured and killed. This book makes a novel contribution to the study of heroism by exploring the spatial, material, corporeal and ritualistic dimensions of heroic representations. By tracing the different ways that home front heroism was cultivated on a national, local and personal level, this study promotes new ways of thinking about the meaning and value of heroism during periods of conflict. It will appeal to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of Second World War as well as the sociology and psychology of heroism.

This book investigates a Jewish orientation to film culture in interwar Britain. It explores how pleasure, politics and communal solidarity intermingled in the cinemas of Jewish neighbourhoods, and how film was seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal concerns might be carried to a wider public. Addressing an array of related topics, this volume examines the lived expressive cultures of cinemas in Jewish areas and the ethnically specific films consumed within these sites; the reception of film stars as representations of a Jewish social body; and how an antisemitic canard that understood the cinema as a Jewish monopoly complicated its use as a base for anti-fascist activity. In shedding light on an unexplored aspect of British film reception and exhibition, Toffell provides a unique insight into the making of the modern city by migrant communities. The title will be of use to anyone interested in Britain’s interwar leisure landscape, the Jewish presence in modernity, and a cinema studies sensitised to the everyday experience of audiences.

This book deals with the growth of cinema-going in Scotland in an extended scholarly manner, integrating the study of cinema into wider debates in social and economic history.

"Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy ..."--Jacket.