The People's Peace: British History 1945-1989 Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The People's Peace: British History 1945-1989 Book

* By a leading historian of the period * Draws on sources recently released under the Thirty Year Rule The People's Peace is the first comprehensive study by a professional historian of British history from 1945 to the present day. It examines the transformation of post-war Britain from the planning enthusiasm of 1945 to the ethic of Thatcherism. Its themes include the troubles of the British economy; public criticism of the legitimacy of the state and its instruments of authority; the co-existence of growing personal prosperity with widespread social inequality; and the debates aroused by the process of decolonization, and by Britain's relationship to the Commonwealth, the transatlantic world, and Europe. Changes in cultural life, from the puritanical 'austerity' of the 1940s, through the 'permissiveness' of the 1960s, to the tensions of recent years, are also charted. Kenneth Morgan examines the paradoxes of life in the modern United Kingdom: the growing affluence and internal peace of mainland Britain, with its underside of disillusion and discontent. Using a wide variety of sources, including the records of political parties and documents recently released under the Thirty Years Rule, Kenneth Morgan brings the story right up to date and draws comparisons with the post-war history of other nations. This penetrating assessment by a leading historian of twentieth-century Britain will prove invaluable to anyone interested in the development of modern Britain.Read More

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  • Blackwell

    The People's Peace is the first comprehensive study by a professional historian of British history from 1945 to the present day. It examines the transformation of post-war Britain from the planning enthusiasm of 1945 to the end of the era of...

  • Product Description

    Kenneth Morgan has won wide acclaim as one of the finest historians of twentieth century Britain. His works have been hailed as "history at its very best" by New Society--the finest combination of rigorous scholarship and lucid, enjoyable writing. Now comes The People's Peace, the most comprehensive and authoritative look at post-war Britain ever written.

    In The People's Peace, Morgan paints a richly detailed portrait of British social and political history from the end of the Second World War up through the rule of Margaret Thatcher. It was a time when the British, having pulled together to win what was called "the people's war," looked forward to a people's peace--a peace of plenty and equality, provided by the Labour government's dramatic new welfare programs. But Morgan shows how the nation staggered under the debt of the war, struggling to rebuild its economy for a rapidly changing world. He examines Britain's fitful retreat from its imperial legacy, depicting the surprising popularity of the withdrawal from India and other colonies, and the shock of the Suez Crisis--when the U.S. made Britain's reduced role in the world painfully clear. Morgan also provides an insightful look at the changing popular culture, from the Teddy Boys to the massive adulation of the Beatles, as well as rising consumerism, permissiveness, and the ugly racism that met the tide of African, Asian, and Caribbean immigrants.

    From the debates over the welfare state, to the Profumo scandal, to the disillusionment with Wilson's chaotic Labour regime (leading to rumors of a military coup), to the crisis of strikes and economic decline that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, Morgan provides a lucid narrative of Britain's post-war politics. Even after Thatcher's apparent revival of the U.K.'s vitality, he writes, it still remains a land of tremendous inequality, split between a decaying industrial north and a growing high-tech south, the Celtic fringe and English heartland, the well-paid and the unemployed--locked into decades-old patterns. "In forty-four years," he writes, "the British had yet to recover from victory in the Second World War, even though the Germans and Japanese had so manifestly recovered from defeat."

  • 0198227647
  • 9780198227649
  • Kenneth O. Morgan
  • 4 October 1990
  • OUP Oxford
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 558
  • First Edition
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