Geoffrey Field

Social Patriotism and the British Working Class: Appearance and Disappearance of a Tradition

The study of patriotism and national identity, once left to the likes of Sir Arthur Bryant, has been rediscovered by the mainstream of British historians. One source of this change is the growing influence of anthropology and literary theory on the discipline, encouraging closer attention to ritual, myth, and language. Another is a renewed focus on the modern state and the mechanisms by which it “intervenes” in civil society.

Perspectives on the Working-Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945

In the late 1940s the British people seemed preoccupied with family and children to an unprecedented degree. A similar revival of family life occurred in other European countries, testimony to the common legacy of the war years, during which private life had been broken apart by death, forced separations, constant anxiety, and unaccustomed privation. But the specific form of postwar familial ideology in Britain reflects the complex circumstances, cultural traditions, and mood of the nation. Everywhere the faces of smiling, responsible parents and healthy, carefree children gazed out from advertising billboards and National Health posters, symbolic of the nations “social capital” and a better future. Widespread concern about low birthrates helped to strengthen domestic and mothering images of women; magazines and radio espoused the ideas of a growing phalanx of child-care professionals; and government social policy redefined the reciprocal obligations of parents and the state, reflecting a new “social democratic” conception of family as the basic unit of society and the chief incubator of citizenship and community values.

Labor and the Military: Introduction

The military and the working class have intersected in myriad ways, especially in the era of mass conscription. Millions of workers served in, fought in, and died in the armed services. They brought their political and cultural values into armies and their military experiences back into labor movements and working-class communities. Militaries have been large employers of civilians, on bases in home countries and abroad, directly and indirectly, in the vast armament industries. In some countries, like China and Iran, they directly control large parts of the economy, including major industrial establishments. Military employment practices have reflected and shaped civilian-sector labor relations, race relations, and gender roles. Armies have been used to break strikes and have launched coups designed to defeat left-wing and labor movements or, occasionally (as in Portugal and, more recently, Venezuela), to defeat conservative forces. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, war and militarism remain prominent features of both advanced industrial societies and less developed ones.