Rock Against Racism's (RAR's) politics and its relationships with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other organisations and individuals have been interpreted via crude assumptions regarding the left and movements of popular protest. Insufficient attention has been paid to the specific historical context in which RAR operated and the political and cultural traditions that informed its activities. The author addresses these issues in his study and he proposes a number of conclusions on this basis. RAR was an important partner in the anti-racist and anti-fascist mobilisations of the 1970s. Many of RAR's leading activists may have been Marxists, but those who were in the SWP represented not only a Trotskyist perspective, but a dissident, state capitalist, variant at that. Far from expressing a monolithic Marxist approach to culture, RAR broke ranks with most of the left by choosing to orient itself on the products of the capitalist music industry.

This chapter takes a look at the confrontations between the warrior-hero and the femme fatale. It proposes that maybe the most culturally prominent instance of a combined metaphysical and military narrative—the biblical encounter between the Jewish heroine Judith and the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes—hovers intertextually in the background in two ‘warrior plays’ by Shakespeare and Marlowe.

On 14 January 1966, the Spectator magazine ran an article written by Angus Maude, the Conservative front-bench spokesman on the colonies. Maude's emphasis on principle in politics represented a significant shift in his thinking. In a 1953 contribution to the Political Quarterly he had noted that social change was creating an enlarged middle class. Maude believes that the free market exhibits the same 'technocratic' trends which have begun to infect even the Conservative Party. For Maude, big government and elephantine industrial concerns are part of a technocratic conspiracy against the public. When Margaret Thatcher won the 1975 leadership election Maude's reward was a key role in the party's policy-making machine, replacing Ian Gilmour as Chairman of the Conservative Research Department (CRD). Thatcher was more receptive to the arguments of small business, and her policy of selling council houses to their tenants was one which Maude had advocated in the 1960s.

Der Stellvertreter, a play of Rolf Hochhuth, was a moral historical treatise which indicted the deceased Pope Pius XII for failing to respond adequately to the tragedy of European Jews. One can certainly see it as a contribution to historiography. This chapter asserts the importance of bystander History, arguing that its moral immanence gives the discipline of History social and political purpose. It reveals the degree to which the cleavages in bystander historiography are defined by different approaches to the past. The chapter then discusses the possible worth of these approaches for Holocaust studies and the discipline of History in general. The antagonists in the 'Pius Wars' operate different interpretations of the Holocaust and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Arthur Morse's sensationalised 1968 study of Allied reactions to the Holocaust was in part inspired by his understanding of the 'silence' of Pius XII.

History does not stop, and certainly the political destiny of Gibraltar, internally and externally, was, in May 1969, still to be determined. Accordingly, subsequent political developments are reviewed as an introduction to this final chapter. The new constitution was certainly an important step, confirming and extending Gibraltar's democratic character. This chapter examines how the past – and remembrance of the past, which is not the same thing – and conditions in the present have created among the civilian population a sense of themselves as a distinctive community, different from Spain and Britain. Usually, such considerations are debated in relation to the national identity of a nation-state, which in the case of a place and a people not internationally recognised as a nation generates other interesting issues. After considering politics, Britishness and national identity, the chapter looks at Gibraltar's economy and consumption, ethnicity and culture, and the link between history and identity.

This chapter is concerned with the analysis of discourses that have emerged in resistance to the Democratic Security Policy (DSP), and argues that the resistance discourses of armed groups reproduce the violent logic of in/security from the margins. It then discusses how those discourses have reworked the very matrix of power relations of the DSP to counter-propose different understandings of peace and in/security. The concept of reading resistance discourses in a contingent way might already be the first entry point for constructing a theoretical frame to investigate discourses contesting the DSP. The DSP discloses the power over life in multiple biopolitical practices. Analysing the nonviolence programme of the Congruent Peace Plan of the Province of Antioquia revealed that qualified state nonviolence does not serve as an alternative to the DSP, but merely as a way of filling in its gaps.

This chapter focuses on the repatriation of the Scots from the West Indies. It reviews the ways in which the returnees spent their Caribbean fortunes and suggests that returnees from the Caribbean and their wealth had a profound influence on late eighteenth-century Scottish society. It discusses how the group which originated in Scotland, was developed in the West Indies, and finally settled in and around Bristol and became an integral part of the civic community there. In addition to returning Scots, there were also young West Indians who were sent to Scotland to be educated and they are mostly the children of Scottish migrants to the Caribbean.

This chapter considers the context of Elizabethan settlement in Ireland by examining the forms of early English colonization: the physical structure of settlements, the activities taking place within them, and the functions these sites fulfilled. The first period (1540–75) witnessed Protector Somerset's aggressive moves in Ireland and Scotland, Mary's unwise entanglement in Hapsburg policy and the subsequent loss of Calais, and Elizabeth's approval of several overly ambitious private colonies. The second phase (1575–1606) witnessed the rebellion and confiscatory defeat of the Earl of Desmond, unsuccessful royally approved attempts to establish a foothold on the North American coast, and the destruction of both the Munster Plantation and the Irish forces of resistance. The final period (1606–40) saw the resettlement of pacified Munster; the flight of the ‘Wild Geese’ earls; the distribution of their lands to London guild companies and the planting there of settlers from Scotland and north England.