The argument for a pre-war Liberal decline, propounded by historians such as George Dangerfield, Ross McKibbin and Pelling, is contradicted by the evidence from this study. For most of the war, the Labour Party was more severely split over policy than the Liberals and it was not actively trying to recruit Liberal defectors. The Labour Party played a relatively passive role in the Liberals' decline, although perhaps its role could be characterised as malevolently passive. It was the recipient of many Liberal defectors, but it was, in fact, more split than the Liberal Party at the crucial times, especially during the Great War and the 1931 crisis. The outward defections were not a result of the failure of Liberalism, but of a breakdown of the Liberal Party organism. The role of the Liberal leadership, and especially that of the whips, contributed to the disintegration of the party.

After the Second World War, Manchester council's housing reformers were determined to force the pace of change. Councillor Ottiwell Lodge, Chairman of the Town Planning and Buildings Committee, claimed in the 1945 Redevelopment Plan that the biggest problem of all would be moving 120,000 people to a new town or to existing towns outside the city. Developing new towns and extensive overspill estates were absolutely vital. In the early developments at Wythenshawe and Belle Vue, tenants had made a number of complaints that had parallels with the later estates. Tenants in the overspill estates expressed very similar complaints, suggesting that the council failed to act on earlier experiences. The story of overspill is important in what it tells us about the Labour council, its relations and attitude to neighbouring local authorities and how it regarded/disregarded its own tenants. Manchester's battles with neighbouring councils had serious implications for future housing policy.

In this chapter, Levine specifies entanglements as double binds of ideology. The setting or ground of pragmatism appears through the movements of ideology as solidarity, struggle, colonial and divisional cage, and base for transcending conventional generational differences.

This chapter focuses on a particular kind of evidence, illustrations, and addresses what kind of information they contribute to or encode in books. Illustrations in early modern books serve a wide variety of functions. As in scientific texts, they are essential explanatory devices; but even in these cases pictures are rarely merely explanatory. The repetition of illustrations strikes us as inept, an index to the inadequacies of early printing, though in terms of design it might actually be considered a virtue. That it was at least considered an available visual convention is clear from one of the most extraordinary pieces of early English book illustration, John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie, 1556, with astonishing woodcuts by an unknown artist. Illustrium Imagines has here ceased to be a coin collection, a record of images drawn from the material remains of the past, and has become an iconology, fanciful when necessary.

This chapter draws attention to the importance of African mariners in maintaining anti-slavery efforts in West Africa and examines how European sailors treated and categorised the African body in the age of abolition. Comparison of the health of African and European sailors serving on the West Africa Station will provide insight into the degree to which naval medicine was racialised in the early nineteenth century. The Royal Navy's reliance upon African labour was partly a consequence of the disease environment. There was a noticeable difference in the morbidity rates of European and African personnel serving in the West Africa Station. The analysis of morbidity presents an opportunity to examine, in addition to fever, a few ailments at a closer level in order to acquire further insight into the health experiences of African and European sailors.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in this book. The book provides a new look at the history of Manchester, one of Britain's leading centres of canal trade. It also provides two important measures of the extent of canal trade and allows comparative analyses between canals and other modes of transport. The first measure is the volume of trade in tons and, the second is the canal company income from traffic in monetary values. The quantitative data presented in the book confirms the popular impression that the Bridgewater Canal was central to the operation of Manchester's canal system before the Ship Canal opened. The book emphasises that canals formed just one component of Manchester's transport system from 1750 to 1850. Roads, coastal shipping and canals each formed important and partly inter-dependent components of Manchester's transport system.