In Charity, self-interest and welfare in the English past, Martin Daunton assembled a collection of authors committed to demonstrating the everchanging nature of welfare provision over the centuries. Martin clearly set out the differing forms of welfare provision – commercial, public, charitable, and household – with the balance between the four never being fixed. Indeed, in Jo Innes’ contribution, the precise nature of the mix between these different forms of welfare was never a source of agreement. While commentators might concur that all four served a purpose, the respective weight given to each one has always been in contention. In this chapter I focus on the relative weight given to charitable relief, and probe the nature of the mixed economy of welfare when that model of relief was taken abroad – by British charities, voluntary associations, and non-governmental organisations focused on humanitarian relief and long-term aid and development. In the latter half of the twentieth century they maintained a strong presence in the former territories of the British empire, though tragedy respects no borders, and organisations such as Oxfam, Christian Aid, and Save the Children came to operate in virtually every country the world over.

In Martin's introduction, he was keen to move away from older debates about charity and philanthropy that focused on their roles as agents of social control. Instead, the volume recognised the positive role charity could play in, for instance, the formation of new middle-class identities and in the opportunities afforded to women in the public sphere otherwise denied to them. In writing of the late nineteenth century Martin observed that, like today, charity constituted an incredibly diverse sector. It was, however, also the ‘golden age’ of philanthropy, as Frank Prochaska has argued. Prochaska has estimated that the middle classes spent a larger amount of their income on charity than on any item in their budget except food. Donations did not just come from the affluent. New research is showing the extent to which the British public as a whole responded to poverty and suffering at home and abroad. But precisely because charity was just one pillar of the mixed economy of welfare, the history of charity is intricately bound up with the history of capitalism, a point Martin has returned to in his other works on the history of political economy.

Introduction

In 2007, Francesca Carnevali and Julie-Marie Strange published 20th Century Britain: Economic, Cultural and Social Change. A textbook for undergraduate history students, the volume was the second edition of a work first put together by Paul Johnson in 1994. It is possible that were Francesca still with us, she would now be turning her attention to creating a third edition. In this chapter I want to speculate on what such an updated textbook might now look like, taking into consideration not only new directions in the field of modern British history, but also what we as teachers feel our students want to, and should, know. For reference, the table of contents of both editions appear at the end of this chapter.

In what follows I do not intend in any way to provide a definitive account of twentieth-century British historiography since 2007. The task would be enormous and the footnotes themselves would run to tens of thousands of words. Indeed, the sheer scale and specialist nature of much of what has been published is, in any case, worthy of consideration in itself. But I offer the following observations to continue a more general conversation about the current state of twentieth-century British history. This is a conversation which lies at the heart of what the University of Birmingham's Centre for Modern British Studies is trying to achieve, and this chapter emerges as much from my Birmingham colleagues’ reflections on the subject as my own. It is also one which would have been enriched by Francesca's presence, expertise and characteristically forceful interventions. Moreover, textbooks are there to be updated regularly and they have an opportunity to reflect our – and our students’ – concerns in the present. There are many criteria that can be used to organise a textbook and decisions to make as to whether chapters should be arranged by period, theme or subject. But I want to add too an additional criteria that the chapters should consider ongoing issues in public debate. The traditions of economic and social history from which the two editions of the textbook emerged were very much keen to engage with the world in the present as much as the past.

Modern, value-for-money, comparative-testing consumerism did not begin with the establishment of the Consumers' Association in 1956. In 1945, the National Council of Women (NCW) set up an Advisory Committee on Consumer Goods and approached the British Standards Institution (BSI) with a view to extending the work on standards to domestic commodities. The following year, six representatives of the Advisory Committee met at the BSI for the first time ‘to offer to the BSI the views of women as consumers on specifications which were in the course of preparation, concerned with household goods and similar subjects’. It was a type of consumerism unrecognisable from the socialist politics of necessity espoused by many labour organisations before the Second World War. The NCW was an umbrella organisation for largely middle-class and socially and politically conservative women's organisations such as the Women's Institute (WI), the Townswomen's Guild, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs and the Women's Voluntary Service. The Advisory Committee's terms of reference were restricted to providing the ‘consumer’ view on matters determined or already set in motion by the BSI. Its creation in 1946 appears to have been a purely conciliatory measure. At its first meeting, the BSI Director did not even bother to welcome them, preferring instead to send a memorandum dictating the items to be discussed (that is, the already drawn-up standards for building materials and the sizing of women's garments).

Luxury and necessity, vice and virtue, use and abuse, productive and unproductive – these traditional dichotomies all continued to inform debates about consumption throughout the twentieth century, particularly those of the British Left. While necessity implied a set of rights to a basic standard of living around which citizenship and socialism could be built, luxury remained more problematic. It could either represent, in the classical sense, the vampirism of the aristocracy and futile status seeking of the bourgeoisie, else it connoted the dehumanising standardisation and compensatory pleasures of the mass market ‘culture industry’. If the former moulded political prejudices, the latter, for many left-wing intellectuals at least, only weakened the class struggle through distraction and false consciousness. Yet throughout the 1940s the politics of consumption underwent a number of important changes, where such polarised divisions lost their social validity. Firstly, wartime controls saw unprecedented state intervention in supply, distribution and consumption, stretching the sphere of government activity well beyond the usual boundaries of bread and milk. Secondly, if this really was a ‘people's war’, then the consuming desires of these people had to be considered. Even before the spread of affluence in the 1950s, politicians had to address the issue of wants not needs, and of the rights of consumers to the cheap luxuries, conveniences, customs and simple pleasures of the mass market which they had enjoyed for at least half a century.