This study addresses the three major aspects of Britain's discriminatory approach to women's employment laws which were domestic service, broad unemployment and the links between voluntary bodies and the British state.

This volume explores primarily late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to solve the problem of unemployment in the context of the new understandings of ‘unemployment’. The sources show the continuing power of discovering men’s commitment to work by finding ways to make them work. This volume focuses on emigration to put unemployed men to work in the British colonies, the various projects to employ urban men without work on the land, and the increasing ‘Intervention of the State’ in efforts like emigration and labour colonies. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this volume will be of great interest to students of British History.

Focusing on the politicized mechanisms of welfare distribution in post-World War Two Britain, this study demonstrates how gender and race determined the quality and quantity of benefits received by Britons seeking state aid. Scholars of public policy, law, and political history will be interested by Noble’s findings and theoretical implications.

The First World War appears as a fault line in Britain’s twentieth-century history. Between August 1914 and November 1918 the titanic struggle against Imperial Germany and her allies consumed more people, more money and more resources than any other conflict that Britain had hitherto experienced. For the first time, it opened up a Home Front that stretched into all parts of the British polity, society and culture, touching the lives of every citizen regardless of age, gender and class: vegetables were even grown in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Britain and World War One throws attention on these civilians who fought the war on the Home Front. Harnessing recent scholarship, and drawing on original documents, oral testimony and historical texts, this book casts a fresh look over different aspects of British society during the four long years of war. It revisits the early war enthusiasm and the making of Kitchener’s new armies; the emotive debates over conscription; the relationships between politics, government and popular opinion; women working in wartime industries; the popular experience of war and the question of social change. This book also explores areas of wartime Britain overlooked by recent histories, including the impact of the war on rural society; the mobilization of industry and the importance of technology; responses to air raids and food and housing shortages; and the challenges to traditional social and sexual mores and wartime culture. Britain and World War One is essential reading for all students and interested lay readers of the First World War.

This book examines how, from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, British policymakers, welfare providers, and working-class men struggled to accommodate men's dependence on the state within understandings of masculine citizenship.

This volume is the first major account for nearly fifty years to critically re-assess Labour's first period in office in terms of domestic, foreign and imperial policy. It draws on a wide range of private papers and official sources and reconstructs the history of this forgotten government in the broader social and political context of the 1920s.

In twentieth-century Britain, consumerism increasingly defined and redefined individual and social identities. New types of consumers emerged: the idealized working-class consumer, the African consumer and the teenager challenged the prominent position of the middle and upper-class female shopper. Linking politics and pleasure, Consuming Behaviours explores how individual consumers and groups reacted to changes in marketing, government control, popular leisure and the availability of consumer goods.From football to male fashion, tea to savings banks, leading scholars consider a wide range of products, ideas and services and how these were marketed to the British public through periods of imperial decline, economic instability, war, austerity and prosperity. The development of mass consumer society in Britain is examined in relation to the growing cultural hegemony and economic power of the United States, offering comparisons between British consumption patterns and those of other nations.Bridging the divide between historical and cultural studies approaches, Consuming Behaviours discusses what makes British consumer culture distinctive, while acknowledging how these consumer identities are inextricably a product of both Britain’s domestic history and its relationship with its Empire, with Europe and with the United States.