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History 151C: The Peculiar Modernity of Britain, 1848-2000

History 151C: The Peculiar Modernity of Britain, 1848-2000 (Fall 2011, UC Berkeley). Instructor: Professor James Vernon. For many years, Britain was seen as the crucible of the modern world. This small, cold, and wet island was thought to have been the first to develop representative democracy, an industrial economy, rapid transport, mass cities, mass communication and mass culture, and, of course, an empire upon which the sun famously never set. And yet, despite this precocious modernity, imperial Britain remained a deeply traditional society unable to rid itself of ancient institutions like the monarchy, the aristocracy and the established church. In surveying the history of Britain over the past century and a half this course will examine this paradox. The focus of the course is on how this combination of the old and the new produced a supposedly unique liberal version of modernity which combined free markets with the rule of law and a developing democratic system.

Lecture 13 - The Great War


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Lecture 01
Lecture 02 - Two Weddings, a Funeral and Some Riots
Lecture 03 - Britain in 1848: The Ancien Regime and Liberal Reform
Lecture 04 - Liberalism and the Meanings of Free Trade
Lecture 05 - The Triumph of Liberalism? Revolution Averted
Lecture 06 - The Revolution in Government
Lecture 07 - Learning to Do Democracy
Lecture 08 - The Uneven Work of Gender
Lecture 09 - Religion, Reason and the Pleasures of the Freeborn Englishman
Lecture 10 - An Urban, Industrial Nation
Lecture 11 - The Discovery of Poverty and the Social Question
Lecture 12 - Empire, National Efficiency and the Strange Death of Liberal England
Lecture 13 - The Great War
Lecture 14 - Rebuilding 'Middle England'
Lecture 15 - Depression and the New Sciences of Society
Lecture 16 - North and South
Lecture 17 - A Culture for Democracy?
Lecture 18 - The People's War?
Lecture 19 - Engineering the New Jerusalem
Lecture 20 - The Politics of Affluence and Consensus?
Lecture 21 - The End of Empire and Race Relations
Lecture 22 - Whatever Happened to the Working Class?
Lecture 23
Lecture 24 - The Permissive Principle: the 1960s
Lecture 25 - Punk and the End of Social Democracy
Lecture 26 - Thatcher, Blair and the Return of Liberalism