Jim Tomlinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3609672 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jim Tomlinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jim |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomlinson |
| SIGNATURE | TOMLINSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 94 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 224 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 93 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Cooke, A Gentleman of Great Enterprise: William Sandeman (1722–1790): Perthshire Entrepreneur and Cotton Pioneer
Labour’s economic narrative in turbulent times: The limits of growth
No abstract available
An Industrial Policy for Hairdressing
Industrial policy is undergoing a notable revival in Britain, as well as elsewhere. But what are the aims of such a policy? The current government's core statement wholly subordinates its industrial strategy to the pursuit of economic growth. Even leaving aside the questions about the wisdom of making this the overarching goal of economic policy, there are issues about how far industrial policy should be focussed on other objectives. If one sees …
Corporativismo: Una Sociologización Adicional Del Marxismo
La apropiación de los autores marxistas del término "corporativismo" ha sido muy poco fructuosa desde el punto de vista teórico. Centrándose en el concepto de "dominación", se argumenta que no puede eliminarse de su contexto weberiano y usarse en otro contexto marxista para explicar la "explotación" y la "lucha de clases". Se propone una definición de "neocorporativismo" como un sistema de movilización social y control. También se analiza el jueg…
Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945–1979 , by Malcolm Petrie
Journal Article Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945–1979, by Malcolm Petrie Get access Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945–1979, by Malcolm Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022; pp. 212. £85). Jim Tomlinson Jim Tomlinson University of Glasgow, UK [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, cead195, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead195 Pub…
Financing Cotton: British Industrial Growth and Decline, 1780–2000, by Steven Toms
Journal Article Financing Cotton: British Industrial Growth and Decline, 1780–2000, by Steven Toms Get access Financing Cotton: British Industrial Growth and Decline, 1780–2000, by Steven Toms (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2020; pp. xiv + 318. £19.99). Jim Tomlinson Jim Tomlinson University of Glasgow, UK [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, cead126, …
De-industrialization: A case study of Dundee, 1951–2001, and its broad implications
Using a case study of one Scottish city, Dundee, this article addresses some of the tensions involved in the use of the concept of ‘de-industrialization’. Widely used to try to understand economic and social change in the post-war years, this term is complex and controversial. This article unravels some of this complexity, arguing that the term is potentially very helpful, but needs careful definition, nuanced application and recognition of its l…
People, Places and Business Cultures, Essays in Honour of Francesca Carnevali
People, Places and Business Cultures, Essays in Honour of Francesca Carnevali." Business History, 63(3), pp. 523–524
Being a ‘Clydesider’ in the age of deindustrialisation: Skilled male identity and economic restructuring in the West of Scotland since the 1960s
This article examines the relationship between long-running deindustrialisation and skilled male employment culture in the West of Scotland. The age of deindustrialisation is a valuable designation: the contraction of industrial production and employment in the United Kingdom was gradual rather than sudden, managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s and then recklessly in the 1980s. In Scotland there was an important transition in the 1960s from es…
Deindustrialization, the Linwood Car Plant and Scotland’s Political Divergence from England in the 1960s and 1970s
Scotland's political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote …
The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The Piketty Opportunity
The Art of the Possible. Politics and Governance in Modern British History, 1885–1997: Essays in Memory of Duncan Tanner
No abstract available
The Imperial and the Global
Now that the cold war is safely over the concept of capitalism is undergoing a re-emergence in the academy. University history courses deploying the term are now common in the USA, and recently the revival in its use has acquired recognition with the publication of the Cambridge History of Capitalism.1 How is this concept to be understood historically? Today, almost everyone would agree that any adequate account would have to recognize the global…
De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History
Much of the economic and other historiography of post-war Britain is shaped by the perceived failure of Britain to consistently match the growth rates of GDP experienced in other rich countries. These declinist narratives are commonly coupled to tendentious and ideologically driven analyses of economic, social and political developments. This article seeks to displace this declinist narrative by one focussing upon de-industrialization and its con…
Dundee and the Empire: 'Juteopolis' 1850-1939
Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850-1939
Dundee and the Empire
This new 'global' history of Dundee in the late 19th and early 20th centuries focuses on the question 'How did the people of Dundee respond to the challenge of being the most economically globalised city in the world in the years before the First World War?' It shows how the answer is complicated by the fact that Dundee's jute industry was competing with Calcutta's. It describes how 'Juteopolis' had to cope not only with low-wage foreign competit…
Dundee and the Empire: 'Juteopolis' 1850-1939
Juteopolis and Imperial Globalisation
This chapter examines the impact of globalisation and empire upon industrial Britain by focusing on the case of the Scottish city of Dundee as Juteopolis. Economic historians have suggested that falling transport costs combined with reductions in trade barriers triggered a rise in trade volumes in the nineteenth century. These processes have been most intensively studied for trade across the North Atlantic, where the expansion of the grain traded…
Politics of Decline: Understanding Postwar Britain
British government and popular understanding of inflation in the mid-1970s
InBritain in the 1970s inflation rose to historically unprecedented peace-time levels, and became the central issue of economic policy-making. We know a great deal about the elite policy debates on the significance of this inflation, and the arguments about how to reduce it, but we know far less about how inflation was understood by the population at large, and how those understandings were shaped. This article explores the evidence on popular un…
Provincial radicalism today
The managing of competition: Government and industry relationships in the jute industry 1957–63
This paper examines the development of the 1963 court case brought by the Board of Trade's Restrictive Trading Agreements Office against jute manufacturers, in order to examine the impact of the newly introduced competition policy for government–business relationships. Government's active enforcement of competition marked an important change in the direction of industrial policy in the UK and the jute industry was one of the cases to be examined
Jute No More: Transforming Dundee
This title traces the process of industrial decline in Dundee from the Victorian era onwards and the social and political reverberations of this decline. It is a story of urban transformation, and how this impacted on jobs, the physical environment, social life, culture and politics. The book shows how, as Juteopolis waned, a new Dundee came into being. It concludes by detailing how, in the later twentieth century, Dundee proclaimed itself Scotla…
City of Discovery?
De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History
Much of the economic and other historiography of post-war Britain is shaped by the perceived failure of Britain to consistently match the growth rates of GDP experienced in other rich countries. These declinist narratives are commonly coupled to tendentious and ideologically driven analyses of economic, social and political developments. This article seeks to displace this declinist narrative by one focussing upon de-industrialization and its con…
Credible Keynesianism? New Labour Macroeconomic Policy and the Political Economy of Coarse Tuning
This article questions prevailing interpretations of New Labour's political economy and challenges the assumption within the comparative and international political economy literatures of the exhaustion of the Keynesian political economic paradigm. New Labour's doctrinal statements are analysed to establish to what extent these doctrinal positions involve a repudiation of Keynesianism. Although New Labour has explicitly renounced the ‘fine tuning…
When rules started to rule: The IMF, neo-liberal economic ideas and economic policy change in Britain
This article reassesses the neo-liberal shift within British economic policy-making and the international political economy, focusing especially the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1960s. The IMF has always used the conditions attached to its lending to try and shape borrower's policy; here we explore the evolving content of that conditionality and the economic ideas underpinning it. Using recently released IMF records, as we…
Why was there never a 'Keynesian Revolution' in economic policy
This paper argues that the notion of a ‘Keynesian revolution’ in economic policy in twentieth-century Britain as commonly presented in the literature is misleading. The conception of such a revolution is dependent on implausible notions of how economic policy is made, above all on an exaggeration of the role of economic theory. It is contended that such a stress on the theory allegedly adhered to by policy makers is complicit with some common soc…
The Labour Party and the Capitalist Firm, C. 1950–1970
One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour'…
An Old Story, Freshly Told’? A Comment on Broadberry and Crafts' Approach to Britain's Early Post-War Economic Performance
(1998). ‘An Old Story, Freshly Told’? A Comment on Broadberry and Crafts' Approach to Britain's Early Post-War Economic Performance. Business History: Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 62-72
Mr Attlee's Supply-Side Socialism
i980s the Labour Party increasingly focused its policy proposals on supplyside issues, believing that the scope for demand management had been narrowed significantly by growing international economic integration.3 Much of the literature suggests that this is a quite new departure for Labour, and is therefore a major turning point in its history. This article attempts to assess how far this is actually the case by looking at an important, perhaps …
Planning: Debate and Policy in the 1940s
Journal Article Planning: Debate and Policy in the 1940s Get access JIM TOMLINSON JIM TOMLINSON Brunel University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 3, Issue 2, 1992, Pages 154–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/3.2.154 Published: 01 January 1992
Why wasn't there a 'Keynesian revolution' in economic policy every-where
1991). Why wasn't there a ‘Keynesian revolution’ in economic policy every-where? Economy and Society: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 103-117
Where do economic policy objectives come from? The case of full employment
This article has two major objectives. Firstly to argue that the British government's commitment to ‘full employment’ in 1944 is both a historic landmark in economic policy and one not adequately accounted for in existing literature. It is argued that this commitment can only be understood in relation to three major sets of ideas and the institutions they were embedded in —Keynesian economic theory, technocracy and total war. Secondly, and more g…
The 'economics of politics' and public expenditure: A Critique1
This paper attempts to criticise the explanations given by the 'economics of politics' for the growth of public expenditure in the UK, one of the major parts of the 'revival' of neo-classical economics in recent years. The focus is on the generality of arguments in this area and also on the particular arguments stressing the role of budget deficits in expanding the public sector. The paper is partly empirical in approach, but also draws some gene…
Re-inventing the 'moral economy' in post-war Britain: Re-inventing the ‘moral economy’ in post-war Britain
From the nineteen-forties Britain entered the age of intensive national economic management. This required the government to ‘manage the people’ alongside the deployment of new policy instruments, requiring in turn a representation of economic arguments aimed at persuading a mass electorate. The result was a ubiquitous representation of economic issues in moral terms – a re-invention of ideas about the ‘moral economy’ which many historians of the…
Hayek and the Market
The man and his work Hayek's social and political philosophy Hayek and the economy Hayek and the market Hayek, the Left and market socialism
Deindustrialization, the Linwood Car Plant and Scotland’s Political Divergence from England in the 1960s and 1970s
Scotland's political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote …
The managing of competition: Government and industry relationships in the jute industry 1957–63
This paper examines the development of the 1963 court case brought by the Board of Trade's Restrictive Trading Agreements Office against jute manufacturers, in order to examine the impact of the newly introduced competition policy for government–business relationships. Government's active enforcement of competition marked an important change in the direction of industrial policy in the UK and the jute industry was one of the cases to be examined
Managing the economy, managing the people: Britain c.1931-701
The rise and consolidation of national economic management is one of the key themes of British economic and political history in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This article seeks to complement the existing substantial literature focused upon elite economic policy-making processes with an analysis of how that economic management has been accompanied by persistent government attempts to develop and popularize new understandings of 'th…
Tawney and the third way
From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capitalism was combined with a concern for detailed institutional reform, challenging simple dichotomies b…
Restrictive Practices on the Shopfloor in Britain, 1945–60: Myth and Reality
It is widely assumed that shopfloor restrictive practices were both pervasive and very damaging in post-war British industry. Indeed, this point has been repeated by both politicians and academics, receiving perhaps its most sophisticated exposition in the work of Mancur Olson. However, a review of the contemporary evidence reveals that such an interpretation is almost wholly erroneous. Some commentators made much of restrictive practices in the …
History as Political Rhetoric
Complexity, Constraint and New Labour's Putative Neo-liberalism: A Reply to Colin Hay
Colin Hay's combative response is a welcome engagement with our ideas. Let us first set out where the battle lines are drawn. The most important points in Hay's shot across our bows relate to accommodating the notion of complexity; defining Keynesianism; invoking Labour's past; the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy; and the evidential basis for our argument. The first point involves admitting complexity when characterizing a politic…
The Failure of the Anglo-American Council on Producitivity
The Anglo-American Council on Productivity is the best-known body created as part of the Attlee Government's productivity drive. The (unavoidably impessionistic) evidence suggests that the impact of this body was rather limited. This article is concerned with the reasons for this failure. The effects of the AACP depended crucially on the role of the FBI, the main employer body represented on the Council. The FBI's attitude to the AACP was partly …
British government and popular understanding of inflation in the mid-1970s
InBritain in the 1970s inflation rose to historically unprecedented peace-time levels, and became the central issue of economic policy-making. We know a great deal about the elite policy debates on the significance of this inflation, and the arguments about how to reduce it, but we know far less about how inflation was understood by the population at large, and how those understandings were shaped. This article explores the evidence on popular un…
Sick but not Dying
Cable, V. (2009) The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means. London: Atlantic Books. Peston, R. (2008) Who Runs Britain ... and Who's to Blame for the Economic Mess We're In? London: Hodder and Stoughton. Krugman, P. (2008) The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. London: Allen Lane. Gamble, A. (2009) The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan
Inventing'decline: The falling behind of the British economy in the postwar years1
An Unfortunate Alliance: Keynesianism and the Conservatives 1945-1964
Research Article| December 01 1995 An Unfortunate Alliance: Keynesianism and the Conservatives 1945–1964 Jim Tomlinson Jim Tomlinson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1995) 27 (Supplement): 61–85. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-27-Supplement-61 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Jim Tomlinson; An Unfortunate Alliance: Keynesianis…
State policy and 'the poor'1
Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy
British Politics and Co-Operatives
The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump, 1929-32
Why was there never a 'Keynesian Revolution' in economic policy
This paper argues that the notion of a ‘Keynesian revolution’ in economic policy in twentieth-century Britain as commonly presented in the literature is misleading. The conception of such a revolution is dependent on implausible notions of how economic policy is made, above all on an exaggeration of the role of economic theory. It is contended that such a stress on the theory allegedly adhered to by policy makers is complicit with some common soc…
The 'economics of politics' and public expenditure: A Critique1
This paper attempts to criticise the explanations given by the 'economics of politics' for the growth of public expenditure in the UK, one of the major parts of the 'revival' of neo-classical economics in recent years. The focus is on the generality of arguments in this area and also on the particular arguments stressing the role of budget deficits in expanding the public sector. The paper is partly empirical in approach, but also draws some gene…
The ‘Keynesian revolution: A Response
Problems of British Economic Policy, 1870-1945
The Decline of British Economic Power Since 1870
Where do economic policy objectives come from? The case of full employment
This article has two major objectives. Firstly to argue that the British government's commitment to ‘full employment’ in 1944 is both a historic landmark in economic policy and one not adequately accounted for in existing literature. It is argued that this commitment can only be understood in relation to three major sets of ideas and the institutions they were embedded in —Keynesian economic theory, technocracy and total war. Secondly, and more g…
British Public Policy 1776-1939: An Economic, Social and Political Perspective
Full employment
Defending public expenditure
Depression and Protectionism: Britain between the Wars
Corporatismo: Una Sociologizacion Adicional Del Marxismo
La apropiacion de los autores marxistas del termino ?corporativismo? ha sido muy poco fructuosa desde el punto de vista teorico. Centrandose en el concepto de ?dominacion?, se argumenta que no puede eliminarse de su contexto weberiano y usarse en otro contexto marxista para explicar la ?explotacion? y la ?lucha de clases?. Se propone una definicion de ?neocorporativismo? como un sistema de movilizacion social y control. Tambien se analiza el jueg…
Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930s
British Macroeconomic Policy Since 1940
Part One: The new policy regime 1 Full Employment 2 The balance of payments and the exchange rate 3 Anti-inflation 4 Growth 5 The new regime Part Two: The new regime in decline 6 Full employment 7 The balance of payments and the exchange rate 8 Anti-inflation 9 Growth 10 Monetarism : desperate remedies 11 Summary and conclusion References Index
Democracy inside the black box? Neo-classical theories of the firm and industrial democracy1
Discussion of industrial democracy in Britain has been notably untheoretical, especially with respect to economic theory. There is economic literature on the issue, but it is very much dominated by neoclassical theories of the firm. This essay attempts to assess the arguments of that neo-classicism. Part of this involves some discussion of the basis of the hegemony of that type of economics within theories of the firm, which requires some discuss…
Employment Policy: The Crucial Years, 1939-1955
Employment Policy is a subject of great current importance. Between 1939 and 1955 policy on unemployment altered out of all recognition,however, and in the 1930s mass unemployment was never a concern of economic policy. After 1939, the Second World War brought not only the fact of full employment, but also a commitment to its peacetime continuation, and by 1955 full employment was an agreed goal of both Labour and Conservative governments. This b…
The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924-1936
Keynes, the Treasury and British Economic Policy
Introduction - The Return to Gold and After - Public Works as an Employment Policy - Towards a Managed Economy? - How to Pay for the War - The 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy - A 'Keynesian Revolution? - Appendix: Dramatis Personae - Notes - Select Bibliography - Index
Adjusting to Democracy: The Role of the Ministry of Labour in British Politics, 1916-1939
Although traditionally depicted as a minor department, the Ministry of Labour was in fact responsible for employment policy, industrial relations, and unemployment relief at a time that saw the General Strike and the growth of massive unemployment in Britain. This history of the Ministry of Labour illustrates the changing nature of government following the advent of universal suffrage in 1918 and provides a comprehensive account of Britain's inte…
The Geography of Interwar Britain: The State and Uneven Development
The Economic Section, 1939-61: A Study in Economic Advising
Public Policy and the Economy Since 1900
Economics (59 works) · Political science (58 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (35 works) · Law (34 works) · Politics (31 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Political economy (20 works) · History (19 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (17 works)