The Great Depression of the 1930s devastated the national economies of West Indies, which also had to already dealing with low wages, unemployment, malnutrition, illiteracy and deplorable housing. Barbados was one of the poorest areas in the West Indies with the lowest life expectancy and highest rate of child mortality. It was a white oligarchy that was wholly dependent on sugar and due to the steady fall in its prices, arable land was also turned to sugar production and rural workers with access to small plots of land were forced to grow sugar as a cash crop. The arrest and subsequent deportation of Clement Payne, a socialist from Trinidad, in 1937 finally led to the outbreak of riots in Barbados, which was followed by Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua and British Guiana. These region-wide disturbances highlighted the need for social reform and forced the British government to appoint a Royal Commission, under the chairmanship of Lord Moyne, to investigate the causes of the riots and dissent and make recommendations.

This chapter is devoted to considering how compulsory electoral participation affects electoral campaigns and related attitudes. It seeks to determine the impact of this institution on campaign-related behaviour and dispositions relevant to campaigns. Compulsory electoral participation can be expected to alter the incentive structure voters face when considering elections. It will thus invariably alter the way in which those seeking to win their votes appeal to the electorate, and, in turn, the way voters react to electoral campaigns. From the perspective of electoral contestants, the main difference between an election held under voluntary voting and one held under compulsory turnout is that in the former it is necessary to place emphasis on mobilisation to get one's supporters to the polls, whereas in the latter this is taken care of by the legal framework.

The post-war Conservative Party has been equivocal in its attitude towards intellectuals. Those who courted controversy within the Party could be criticised for excessive intellectualism even if they lacked the formal credentials of a Sir Keith Joseph or a Quintin Hogg. The Conservatives may have been trounced in 1945, but they were certainly not short of ideas; and generally speaking the leadership was in sympathy with the Party's thinkers. Margaret Thatcher's victory in leadership election was a tribute to her own campaigning skills rather than her ideas; and if her opponents had produced a more convincing explanation for the Party's problems the outcome could easily have been different. Among the few Conservative politicians who have tried to rationalise and develop Thatcher's legacy, David Willetts has provided the most interesting contributions.

This chapter argues that the reason why groups are gaining more renewed interest is their ‘democratizing’ qualities. Does their incorporation into governance structures help democratize those structures? This book examines interest group organizations against the backdrop of this ongoing debate. Groups are important vehicles for injecting ‘voice’ into the public sphere and keeping the ‘conversation’ going. Much of the disagreement over whether groups are agents of democracy can be traced back to differing starting points. This chapter identifies several separate threads in the literature which have converged to focus scholarly attention upon groups.

Rutherford Hayes eventually emerged victorious from the inconclusive election of 1876, but commenced his presidency fatally compromised to Southern planters. In terms of the ‘Compromise of 1877’, Southern Democrats relinquished the presidency in exchange for a promise from Hayes to bring Radical Reconstruction to an end and withdraw Northern troops from across the South. Withdrawing the Northern army from the South was the first of three fateful betrayals that abandoned emancipated blacks to white-hot Southern rage. Two other federal institutions – Congress and the Supreme Court – would also betray blacks.

This chapter provides short overviews of the longitudinal documentary works that will be the subject of more extensive analysis. The long doc work includes Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. The Seven Up series had its origins in May 1964 when Granada Television transmitted a one-off 'special' in their World in Action series. Just like Apted's Seven Up series, Winfried and Junge's The Children of Golzow can also lay some claim to being a historically significant chronicle of the times. The series traces the lives of a group of citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who were born in the 1950s and grew up in the small town of Golzow.

This chapter examines the work of Scots in the West Indies plantations. It explains that Scots were only employed by planters, but many were landowners themselves, and they acted as magnets for employment applications. The practice of employing relatives or associates from the same part of Scotland as overseers or managers was widespread throughout the later part of the century. These connections extended to include British and transatlantic circles, facilitating their activities in several colonies and on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter suggests that these networks, then, did not exist merely as a series of bilateral links for the transfer of goods, capital and people between Scotland and a colony; they established a lattice of connections that enmeshed Scotland, the Caribbean and Britain in a transatlantic complex.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of how South Africa and the United States of America, two countries with notorious histories of racial violence, attempted to formally deal with their violent pasts at roughly the same time. It then notes that, to date, no major comparative work has considered interpersonal violence as a distinctive component of the broad field of ‘racial repression’. By focusing on unofficial violence in the early stages of segregation in both countries, this study hopes to stimulate questions about a neglected phenomenon that tells us much about the development of distinctive forms and ‘styles’ of white supremacy.

This chapter examines the role of archaeology in the study of the Elizabethan colonization of southern Ireland. Initial foreign settlement by early modern European states, or by their authorized commercial organizations, are usefully characterized as the ‘proto-colonial phase’ of the epoch of modern colonial imperialism. For European overseas activities, the proto-colonial period may be generalized as c. 1450–1650. The ‘planting’ of English colonists in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is recognized as an important step in English colonialism and a turning point in Irish history, but twentieth-century politics and policies discouraged its study.

That fascism should be understood primarily in economic terms was a belief retained by the left from its initial awareness of the movement in Italy in 1919 up to and beyond the outbreak of war in 1939. By using the simple expedient of enquiring into who actually ruled and who actually benefited, the left have bequeathed to us a model that we can use today to break through the still-resonant and apparently still-seductive assertions that fascism made in its own defence. The question of whether the British left's methods of opposing fascism can stand comparison with the tactics used abroad is addressed. The left parties in each country attempted to fight fascism in ways that accorded with their own political ethos and which they judged to be suitable at the time, each framing their opposition in the light of the threat as they perceived it. The extensive study of anti-fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain has tended to overshadow the struggle in Britain. Yet it can be argued that the British left utilised tactics that complemented the strategies of the various parties, which were appropriate to the nature of the fascist threat, and were decisive in limiting the growth of such groups as the British Fascisti and the British Union of Fascists.