Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public life in later Georgian and Victorian England. Anti-slavery, temperance, charity organisation, cruelty prevention, 'social purity' advocates, and more--all promoted their causes through mobilisation of citizen volunteer support. This book sets out to explore the world of these volunteer networks, their foci of concern, their patterns of recruitment, their methods of operation, and the responses they aroused. It provides the first ever systematic survey of moral reform movements over this period and is both compelling and accessible.

Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public life in later Georgian and Victorian England. Anti-slavery, temperance, charity organisation, cruelty prevention, 'social purity' advocates, and more, all promoted their causes through mobilisation of citizen volunteer support. This 2004 book sets out to explore the world of these volunteer networks, their foci of concern, their patterns of recruitment, their methods of operation and the responses they aroused. In its exploration of this culture of self-consciously altruistic associational effort, the book provides a systematic survey of moral reform movements as a distinct tradition of citizen action over this period, as well as casting light on the formation of a middle-class culture torn, in this stage of economic and political nation-building, between acceptance of a market-organised society and unease about the cultural consequences of doing so. This is a revelatory book that is both compelling and accessible.

Contemporary liberal thinkers commonly suppose that there is something in principle unjust about the legal prohibition of putatively victimless immoralities. Against the prevailing liberal view, Robert P. George defends the proposition that `moral laws' can play a legitimate, if subsidiary, role in preserving the `moral ecology' of the cultural environment in which people make the morally significant choices by which they form their characters and influence, for good or ill, the moral lives of others. George shows that a defence of morals legislation is fully compatible with a `pluralistic perfectionist' political theory of civil liberties and public morality.

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book Robert Tombs’s momentous The English and Their History is both a startlingly fresh and a uniquely inclusive account of the people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. The English first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history. The English have come a long way from those first precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today’s England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity. Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly embarking on a new chapter. The English and Their History, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division and also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.

Between 1756 and 1840, philanthropy in the British world grew from the domain of small, associational committees to a vast enterprise of philanthropic and humanitarian societies with global reach. British Philanthropy in the Globalizing World tells the story of this movement, from its inception in small networks of mercantile and religious entrepreneurs to its signal projects and achievements in the abolition of slavery, in evangelical missionary societies, Bible societies, and in the early indigenous rights movement. It traces the lives and networks of hundreds of philanthropists across four generations, showing how their social, religious, economic, intellectual, and cultural worlds intersected to foster philanthropic innovation through organisational models, transnational networks, and the creation of a unique formative culture. It shows how groups such as the Clapham Sect -- including William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Hannah More, James Stephen, and others -- emerged in an intergenerational context, and how they sought to effect social and cultural change across multiple spheres. For every headline achievement, there were many failed experiments, inner wrestlings, and long-running intellectual collaborations that left a wide and deep imprint on the cultural and political landscape of the English-speaking world. Drawing on the separate historiographies of metropolitan philanthropy, associational culture, anti-slavery, moral reform, Evangelicalism, colonial missions, and economic thought, the study unites into one analytical frame both the imaginative and organizational realities of philanthropy, offering a dual focus on individual philanthropists -- their inner lives, daily practices, and participation in collaborative communities -- and on mapping the networks that bound philanthropic societies and projects together in metropolitan London and at the far reaches of the British world. In doing so, it offers a very human portrait of these entrepreneurs and evangelicals, as they pursued a philanthropic global vision.

Martin Daunton provides a clear and balanced view of the continuities and changes that occurred in the economic history of Britain from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the Festival of Britain in 1951.In 1851, Britain was the dominant economic power in an increasingly global economy. The First World War marked a turning point, as globalization went into reverse and Britain shifted to 'insular capitalism'.Rather than emphasising the decline of the British economy, this book stresses modernity and the growth of new patterns of consumption in areas such as the service sector and the leisure industry.