Brave New World

The year 1919 reconfigured nations and nationalisms across Europe. In the aftermath of the First World War, nations were created, borders redrawn, populations displaced and exchanged. This volume contends that, whilst Britain, from the outside at least, appeared unchanged by the War, the social and political upheavals which followed in its wake similarly redefined nationhood. Drawing upon Hobsbawm's concept of nation building, the volume explores the changed relationship between ‘the people’ and the state, and between the nation and the world. Opening with an insightful and rigorous historiographical review, editors Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas describe the evolution of the field of inter-war studies. As they note, over the past ten years, studies of this era have mushroomed and many have used the optic of ‘modernity’ to conceptualize the processes of globalization, imperialism, democratization, urbanization, and the rise of civil society, which came to the fore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly concerned by these processes, this volume might easily have been billed as a study of inter-war modernity; it is, at times, difficult to see what the idea of nation building adds to the analysis. Focusing upon dynamics of democratization engendered by universal suffrage, the expansion of mass media, and interrogating the evolving nature of imperial governance, many contributors grapple more with questions of periodization—the extent to which the inter-war years represented a shift away from or continuity with the Edwardian period—than with how these processes served to refashion the nation at large

Ancient history · Democracy · Democratization · Economic history · Globalization · Historiography · Modernity · Periodization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Suffrage · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law