Author: Kathleen Burk
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300161502
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
In March 1976 the value of the British pound began to slide. The slide turned into a rout and triggered an economic and political trauma. By September confidence in the pound had collapsed. In April 1975 the Wall Street Journal had run the headline 'Goodbye, Great Britain, ' advising investors to get out of sterling. Now the British Labour government under its new Prime Minister James Callaghan was forced to seek help from the International Monetary Fund, a familiar option for Third World countries but highly unusual for a developed western economy. This expert new study uncovers the roots of the most searing economic crisis of postwar Britain. The weakness and instability of the British economy in the mid-1970s, the consequence in part of the 1973 rise in oil prices, raised international alarm. The US government in particular feared economic crisis would drive Britain into a left-wing siege economy, endangering NATO and the EEC. Anticipating the danger, the US Treasury set out to force Britain to make major domestic policy changes. The sterling crisis provided the opportunity. The IMF provided the weapon. Arriving in London in November 1976, the IMF mission announced that the price for the loan included deep cuts in public expenditure. The consequent political crisis was fought out in private and in public, amongst members of the British Cabinet, the Labour Party, the Treasury and the Bank of England. It involved the US President, Treasury and State Department, the Federal Reserve, the German Chancellor and the Bundesbank. Burk and Cairncross uncover the efforts of the Labour government to escape IMF conditions. They also examine the political agenda, the loss of economic control, the rise of monetarist ideas and the change in the climate of opinion. Juxtaposing gripping narrative with expert analysis, the book provides surprising answers to critical questions and reveals how the breakdown of the postwar consensus on macro-economic management paved the way for the triumph of Thatcherism.
Author: Hunter Powell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526184028
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This book seeks to bring coherence to two of the most studied periods in British history, Caroline non-conformity (pre-1640) and the British revolution (post-1642). It does so by focusing on the pivotal years of 1638–44 where debates around non-conformity within the Church of England morphed into a revolution between Parliament and its king. Parliament, saddled with the responsibility of re-defining England’s church, called its Westminster assembly of divines to debate and define the content and boundaries of that new church. Typically this period has been studied as either an ecclesiastical power struggle between Presbyterians and independents, or as the harbinger of modern religious toleration. This book challenges those assumptions and provides an entirely new framework for understanding one of the most important moments in British history.
Author: Alwyn W. Turner
Publisher: Aurum Press
ISBN: 9781781310717
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
'A masterful work of social history and cultural commentary, told with much wit. It almost makes you feel as if you were there' ROGER LEWIS, Mail on Sunday The 1970s. They were the best of times and the worst of times. Wealth inequality was at a record low, yet industrial strife was at a record high. These were the glory years of Doctor Who and glam rock, but the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict. Beset by strikes, inflation, power cuts and the rise of the far right, the cosy Britain of the post-war consensus was unravelling – in spectacularly lurid style. Fusing high politics and low culture, Crisis? What Crisis? presents a world in which Enoch Powell, Ted Heath and Tony Benn jostle for space with David Bowie, Hilda Ogden and Margo Leadbetter, and reveals why a country exhausted by decline eventually turned to Margaret Thatcher for salvation.
Author: Tom Nairn
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789606837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 571
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Book Description
In this classic text, first published in 1977, Tom Nairn memorably depicts the 'slow foundering' of the United Kingdom on the rocks of imperial decline, constitutional anachronism and the gathering force of civic nationalism. Rich in comparisons between the nationalisms of the British Isles and those of the wider world, thoughtful in its treatment of the interaction between nationality and social class, The Break-Up of Britain concludes with a bravura essay on the Janus-faced nature of national identity. Postscripts from the Thatcher and Blair years trace the political strategies whose upshot accelerated the demise of a British state they were intended to serve. As a second Scottish independence referendum beckons, a new Introduction by Anthony Barnett underlines the book's enduring relevance.
Author: Curt Cardwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139498231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War re-examines the origins and implementation of NSC 68, the massive rearmament program that the United States embarked upon beginning in the summer of 1950. Curt Cardwell reinterprets the origins of NSC 68 to demonstrate that the aim of the program was less about containing communism than ensuring the survival of the nascent postwar global economy, upon which rested postwar US prosperity. The book challenges most studies on NSC 68 as a document of geostrategy and argues instead that it is more correctly understood as a document rooted in concerns for the US domestic political economy.
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847252435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
A new account of the changing relationship between Britain and America in the 18th Century that helped to define both nations.
Author: Sylvia Walby
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150950320X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.
Author: Alan James
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349245283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Based on interviews and on documentary collections in Britain, Sweden and the US, this book describes and analyses Britain's often-tortured response to the crisis which occurred in Congo immediately following its independence. Principally, it throws much fresh light on British policy. But it also examines the impact of the crisis on Britain's status as a great power; reveals important new material about the UN's conduct of its peacekeeping operation in the Congo; and draws lessons about the conduct of contemporary peacekeeping.
Author: David Powell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
The author provides a stimulating interpretation of the Edwardian period, offering valuable insights into the difficulties of governing a society in a time of rapid modernisation and suggesting a new perspective on the question of whether Britain was on the verge of revolution in the summer of 1914.
Author: Christopher Foster
Publisher: Hart Publishing
ISBN: 1841135496
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
This book traces the development of government over 25 years and argues that it's defects are not attributable to one political party.
