The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, volume 1: Regions and Communities

The intensive study of particular localities and communities characterizes much recent work in social history. Volume One draws on this approach to present a series of chapters on the social history of various regions of the British Isles. Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that the advance has occurred through such an outpouring of research and writing that it is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of recent monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three complementary perspectives: those of regional communities, of the working and living environment, and of social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change A regional approach to social history obviously works primarily within geographical boundaries, and it is the long accumulation of the effects of topography and its influence on patterns of settlement and administrative and economic structures which is at the root of those regional identities that can be observed through the many superimposed layers of national and international forces, religious and class divisions, and inward and outward migration. V. 1. Regions And Communities -- V. 2. People And Their Environment -- V. 3. Social Agencies And Institutions. Edited By F.m.l. Thompson. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes. Now in paperback, a three volume thematic interpretation of the development of modern British society from 1750.