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In this book, I explore the history of the British-Spanish Society, which played a key role in the cultural relations between Spain and the UK during the 20^th Century. I argue that this association is an early example of those cultural institutions involved in foreign policy. Although its aims were usually political and economic, its strategies were based on the advocacy of cultural understanding between Britons and Spaniards. In fact, the British-Spanish Society’ biggest achievement was its important contribution to the development of the Spanish language education in the UK in the 20^th Century. In the beginning, the association was basically a British soft power tool, but it also served the Spanish diplomatic strategy after the World War II. This book offers the first overview of its history, paying special attention to both its role in British-Spanish relations, and its contribution to Spanish language education in the UK.

In nineteenth-century Britain few cities could rival Liverpool for recorded drunkenness. Civic pride at Liverpool’s imperial influence was undercut by anxieties about social problems that could all be connected to alcohol, from sectarian unrest and prostitution in the city’s streets to child neglect and excess mortality in its slums. These dangers, heightened in Liverpool by the apparent connections between the drink trade and the city’s civic elite, marked urban living and made alcohol a pressing political issue. As a temperance movement emerged to tackle the dangers of drink, campaigners challenged policy makers to re-imagine the acceptable reach of government. While national leaders often failed to agree on what was practically and philosophically palatable, social reformers in Liverpool focused on the system that licensed the sale of drink in the city’s pubs and beerhouses. By reforming licensing, they would later boast, Liverpool had tackled its reputation as the drunkenness capital of England. The Licensed City reveals just how battles over booze have made the modern city. As such, it confronts whether licensing is equipped to regulate today’s problem drinking.

Save the Womanhood examines twentieth-century anxieties about promiscuity and prostitution, and the efforts of social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. Offering an historical analysis of concerns about women’s interactions with urban space beyond London, the book notes that the pioneering work of women philanthropists and women police patrollers in Liverpool often ran counter to the ambitions and liberties of other women who travelled through the city in search of work and adventure. National debates about the efficacy of solicitation laws, fears about ‘white slavery’ and concerns about changing sexual practices and new consumer cultures gave women street patrollers in Liverpool greater opportunity to justify their own forms of ‘respectable’ public womanhood. For much of the twentieth century, these women patrollers networked with other agencies to enact a powerful form of moral surveillance on the streets. Yet the book also notes that the post-war decline of social purity organizations did not mean that their ideas about the need to monitor female morality went away. The book argues that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. As such, this is a history that also speaks to contemporary debates about the criminalization of sex workers by showing how laws against solicitation have been historically intertwined with moral judgement of women’s sexual practices.

Socialism and the Diasporic ‘Other’ simultaneously examines how left-wing politics functioned within the diasporic communities and how Irish and Jewish populations were viewed by the wider socialist and trade union movements. It discusses the similarities and differences in how politics and communal dynamics were apparent in the Irish and Jewish East Ends, and the relationships formed between Irish and Jewish women, men and children in numerous contexts. It also compares the structures and agendas of the Jewish and Catholic metropolitan hierarchies, and how communal leaderships attempted to maintain control over working class migrant communities. The book emphasises the lack of consistency in progressive attitudes towards ethnic and religious minorities in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and the use of ethnic difference as a way of demarcating political space in an often chaotic and fractured London left. It argues that there were two key major differences in the ways in which communal politics functioned in Jewish and Irish Catholic East London, the first based around the nature of hierarchical authority, and the second on how class relations manifested themselves in the communities. It roots the divergent paths that Jewish and Irish communal East End politics took before the First World War in these differences.

Michael Lavalette’s A Thing of the Past? uses historical and sociological research to provide multiple interpretations of the changing nature and form of child labour in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book itself is split into three parts, The Theoretical Context of Child Labour Research; Child Labour in British History; and Contemporary Issues, and features chapters that emphasise the effect of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism on the marginalisation of children within the labour process, and analyses the significance of child ‘employment’ in society today. While the book focuses predominantly on child labour in British history and in Britain currently, the book also looks closely at the past and present forms of child labour in the US in order to offer a useful study of the exploitation of children within an advanced economy.