Image Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars Edited by Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas Brave New World Imperial and Democratic Nation- Building in Britain between the Wars Brave New World Imperial and Democratic Nation- Building in Britain between the Wars Edited by Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas LONDON INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Published by UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU First published in print in 2011. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY- NCND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free at http://www.humanities-digital-library.org ISBN 978 1 909646 45 2 (PDF edition) ISBN 978 1 905165 58 2 (hardback edition) Contents List of contributors vii Preface by Ross McKibbin ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 1. Political modernity and ‘government’ in the construction of inter-war democracy: local and national encounters Geraint Thomas 39 2. Whig lessons, Conservative answers: the literary adventures of Sir J. A. R. Marriott Gary Love 67 3. The ‘Will to Work’: industrial management and the question of conduct in inter-war Britain Daniel Ussishkin 91 4. Representing the people? The Daily Mirror, class and political culture in inter-war Britain Adrian Bingham 109 5. ‘A timid disbelief in the equality to which lip-service is constantly paid’: gender, politics and the press between the wars Laura Beers 129 6. Conservative values, Anglicans and the gender order in inter-war Britain Lucy Delap 149 7. Cultivating internationalism: Save the Children Fund, public opinion and the meaning of child relief, 1919–24 Ellen Boucher 169 v Brave New World 8. ‘Mending a broken world’: the universities and the nation, 1918–36 Tamson Pietsch 189 9. Inter-war agnotology: empire, democracy and the production of ignorance Priya Satia 209 10. Black intellectuals in the imperial metropolis and the debate over race and empire in Sanders of the River Marc Matera 227 11. Co-operatives and the technocrats, or ‘the Fabian agony’ revisited Aaron Windel 249 Index 269 vi List of contributors Laura Beers is assistant professor of British history at American University and a Leverhulme visiting fellow at the University of Exeter during the academic year 2011–12. She is the author of Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). Adrian Bingham is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004) and Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918–78 (Oxford, 2009). Ellen Boucher is assistant professor of European history at Amherst College. She is completing a book on the history of British child emigration to Australia and Southern Rhodesia during the twentieth century, and is also researching the connections between imperialism, decolonization and the growth of international aid directed at African children. Lucy Delap is a fellow of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and a member of the History Faculty, University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters, of the Early 20th Century (Cambridge, 2007) and Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in 20th Century Britain (Oxford, 2011). Gary Love is associate professor of British social and cultural studies in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. He has contributed articles to Contemporary British History and the Journal of Contemporary History. He is currently writing a book on the intellectual history of the British Conservative party. Marc Matera is assistant professor of modern British, British empire, and world history at Northern Arizona University. He is the co-author with Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent of The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Basingstoke, 2012). Tamson Pietsch is lecturer in imperial history at Brunel University in London. Her first book, Universities and Empire: Academic Networks and vii Brave New World the British World, 1850–1939, will appear with Manchester University Press in 2012. Priya Satia is associate professor of modern British history at Stanford University and the author of Spies in Arabia: the Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford, 2008). She is currently writing a book on the history of the gun trade in the British empire. Geraint Thomas is college lecturer in modern history at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He is currently completing a book on the Conservatives and cultures of national government between the wars. Daniel Ussishkin is assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he teaches British and European history. He is currently completing a book-length manuscript on the history of morale in modern Britain. Aaron Windel is visiting lecturer in history at the University of Massachusetts where he teaches courses on European culture and politics, the British empire, and media history. viii Preface The essays in Brave New World, seven of which are by non-British authors, reflect and contribute to the important changes in the writing of British history that have characterized the last twenty years or so. These have been changes both in emphasis and content. Not only have historians chosen to write about different things, they now write about the old things in different ways. The central themes of Brave New World – empire, gender, race, religion and ‘modernity’ – are themselves not new, but they would probably not have appeared in this form in a similar collection published twenty years ago. Absent, for example, in Brave New World is any treatment of social class as such. Social class is certainly here, and could scarcely not be, but it does not appear directly as a motor of social change or as a polarizing political agent. This represents the reluctance of contemporary historians to use class as an ‘objective’ political and social phenomenon, something which can be measured and which unites large numbers of people within a more-or-less clearly defined class interest, or to use it as a fundamental political category. If anything, gender is thought more fundamental than class. Discussions of class, as of politics more generally, have been drawn into a more widely defined political culture where linguistic and rhetorical conventions, ways of thinking and speaking, and fluid political allegiances become more important kinds of historical analysis. In Brave New World, for instance, politics is not party politics in the formal sense, but is the culture of the press, of the empire and the more amorphous culture of modernity. Furthermore, we can easily see why contemporary historians should give a sophisticated media – press, radio and cinema in the inter- war years – a special place in the construction of a political culture. We only need look around us. The essays are, broadly speaking, organized around three subjects: the political role of the media, the significance of empire and the extent to which the inter-war years can be thought to be ‘modern’, to fit our idea of modernity. The media, especially the press, is central to the essays by Laura Beers, Ellen Boucher, Adrian Bingham and Geraint Thomas. In her essay, Beers argues strongly that the way the press treated the first generation of women MPs, its emphasis upon their clothes, their style of life, their private life (though their efforts here were, by modern standards, pretty unsuccessful) and the sex-appeal of MPs as a whole, even those who had none, anticipated what was to happen to political culture in its broadest ix Brave New World sense after the Second World War. In this development Beers gives the press a prime role. Bingham, in his study of the most successful paper of the period, the Daily Mirror of the late 1930s and 40s, suggests that despite the deliberate expulsion of formal political reporting from its pages, which clearly reflected the wishes of its increasingly huge readership, it was able to construct an influential sort of non-party political radicalism, especially during the Second World War. Boucher, in her essay on the establishment and growth of the Save the Children Fund, demonstrates the dangers as well as the benefits of any relationship with the modern press. The founders of the fund brilliantly exploited the press as a means of publicity and support but then found that they had to change the nature of its appeal and activities significantly in order to retain that support. Assistance could no longer be given to communities – who might, like the Bolsheviks, be politically suspect – but to individual children with whom people were urged to identify, often at the expense of the wider community. Thomas equally notes that whereas political activists in inter-war Britain were reliant on an increasingly national mass media, and knew it, they also resented the way the new media appeared to disrupt a more traditional (and cherished) politics of place and locality. The empire is the second of Brave New World ’s organizing subjects. But the essays here are not an institutional history of the empire, nor are they about that familiar question – was the empire popular or not? Rather they are concerned with the relationship between the metropole (mostly London) and the empire, and the ways in which the empire was strengthened or weakened by such a relationship. Tamson Pietsch is concerned with the attempt to create an imperial (white) system of universities through the Universities’ Bureau of the British Empire, which would give the empire a new kind of political and intellectual coherence – a system based upon an expansive definition of the British nation.