This introductory chapter begins by considering the work of the major non-Marxist labour historians of the post-1945 generation: work which is still widely respected and used as a source of empirical detail but, long overshadowed by the more critical and more conceptually explicit approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, has come to be regarded as lacking in any real intellectual interest. This is followed by a brief discussion of shipyard workers and social relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. An overview of the three parts of the book is also presented.

Séamus Mallon famously described ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was based on effectively the same formula as the Sunningdale Agreement – power sharing and an Irish dimension – and was more comprehensive than Sunningdale in the assurances that it offered to unionists. It provided a commitment to further reform to achieve full social and economic equality in Northern Ireland, and also promised to fulfil the demands that had first led John Hume into political action in the civil rights era. The Hume–Adams dialogue was unavoidably ambiguous on the relationship between unionist consent and Irish self-determination. Through the GFA, northern nationalists can feel that they have attained equality, and that they have exercised their right to self-determination and sovereignty. It can be argued that the GFA broadly vindicates the thinking of Hume, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and revisionist Irish nationalism.

There was an ideological affinity between the Catholic Church and the fascist regimes in Europe, including Adolf Hitler's Germany. Despite Alfred Rosenberg's known opposition to the Christian churches, he had no authority to shape the Reich's church policy nor did he participate in the regime's political anticlerical measures. The insistence on Christ's Jewish origin and the historical link between Judaism and Christianity were part of the Katechismuswahrheiten and Nathanaelfrage. The Catholic defence literature was primarily meant as self-defence against an encroaching anticlerical National Socialist ideology as well as an attempt to bind Catholics to the community's traditional values and tear them away from ‘neopaganism’ and its antisemitism that undermined Christianity. The imbalance between accounts of communism and fascism was not confined to fringe organisations. ‘Latin’ fascism appeared to be the means to solve pressing social problems while still safeguarding Christian values.

British diplomacy was an occupational sub-culture of genteel public service rather than anything resembling a professional bureaucracy. Ritual should not, however, be seen in simple terms as either a site of contest or mechanism of subordination. The gendered division of labour that became apparent in British diplomacy after 1780 has parallels in Europe. This chapter mentions the need to examine the extent to which the changing ideas about gender at home raised standards of public service for men and women. Diplomats' accounts of war and travel mark Britain's second arrival as a great power in 1815. This pride, married to an increasing set of investments in the empire, would play an important role in Britain's increasing sense of separation from Europe over the course of the nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses women's public lives that demonstrate the influence of a professional social ideal on the feminine public sphere. Female temperance reformers were integrated into middle-class public life both through their reforming interests and their internalisation of a professional ideal. For female temperance reformers, this meant work among ‘travelling showpeople’ as well as the fair-going public. Along with this, the spectre of ‘the female inebriate’ alternately fascinated and repulsed the men and women of the middle classes, and an important aspect of British women's complementary role within the temperance movement to work particularly with women and girls was manifest in the creation and maintenance of female inebriate homes. This chapter concludes that female temperance reform should be viewed as a fundamental realm of women's active participation in middle-class identity construction rather than simply as a religiously inspired movement bogged down in a conservative understanding of women's social role.

This chapter provides The Annals of St-Bertin in full, translated and annotated by Janet L. Nelson.

This chapter surveys Methodist missions throughout the century and the opportunities they provided for professional female evangelism. It adopts a broad definition of missionary work, including home missions, missions to emigrant communities, mainly in British colonies and foreign missions. All provided opportunities for women to preach, although these varied by time and place. Home missions to areas outside any Methodist organizational structure declined in importance in the mid-century, but became a major focus in the last two decades of the century when Methodists started to pay greater attention to working among the poor in cities. All home missions continued to provide opportunities for female evangelists, some of whom were hired as paid workers by their Connexions. Missions to emigrant communities were particularly important for the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians, who lost substantial numbers of home members to emigration. In the last quarter-century overseas missionary societies began to recruit women, largely to work with indigenous women and children in Africa and Asia.

The documents in this section illustrate the social welfare responsibilities of late medieval monasteries. These social services took three main forms: hospitality, education and charity.

This chapter covers the heyday of female evangelism in the Primitive Methodist and Bible Christian Connexions. It both builds on and challenges Deborah Valenze's pioneering and important Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England. Valenze argued that what she defined as a ‘cottage religion’ arose out of the social and economic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century, and that religious worship in domestic spaces emboldened some women to embark on careers as itinerant (travelling) preachers. The examination of the lives and working conditions of female itinerants in the 1820s and 1830s supports Valenze's claim that the decline of women's itinerancy by the mid-century is partially explained by the effects of industrialization, urbanization and migration. But this is also attributed to internal change in the two sects, resulting in the development of a more formal ministry that excluded women. The chapter also challenges Valenze's contention that female evangelism died out in the second half of the century. Female itinerancy lapsed, but women evangelists adapted to changing conditions.

It was the growth of Sinn Féin that provided the initial rationale for the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985 and the precursory New Ireland Forum (NIF) of 1983–84, the latter of which finds its parentage in the thinking of both John Hume and Garret FitzGerald. Despite FitzGerald's intentions, the NIF was an essentially nationalist exercise that Hume saw as a way to prompt a change in British policy on Northern Ireland. It brought together a number of strategic and ideological threads that Hume and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) had been working on for some years. The AIA represented a compromise between the respective positions of FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher. The United States played a significant role in nudging the British government towards the AIA. The AIA led to something quite different from talks between the SDLP and unionists.