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Brave new world: imperial and democratic nation-building in Britain between the wars

Brave New World is the latest in a sequence of reflections on the historiography of Britain between the two world wars and the directions future research might go in. Several of the other appraisals were prompted by the publication in 2010 of Ross McKibbin’s Parties and People: England, 1914–1951, the long-awaited complement to 1998’s Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951, a social and cultural history with a strong political-history undertow.(1) There was a roundtable on Parties and People in the journal Twentieth Century British History, and the book served as a springboard for Helen McCarthy’s historiographical review on inter-war Britain in the Historical Journal in 2012.(2) McKibbin contributes a preface to Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas’s wide-ranging collection of thickly researched and articulately argued essays on the period (in the process he summarizes the contents of the book far better than I can). The title of the 2009 conference from which the volume hatched, ‘Unconventional Wisdoms: New Research in the History of Inter-War Britain’, both alluded to McKibbin’s 1990 essay on the foundations of Conservative hegemony in these years and signalled the arrival of a cohort of new researchers.(3) All appear to have been within ten years of their PhDs at the time of the conference; some were still finishing their dissertations.