Chartism's moral politics and improvement culture were strategic interventions rather than dilutions of the movement's objectives and aspirations. Those Chartist leaders who turned to the politics of improvement did so to build the movement towards a position of Radical working-class hegemony. Indeed, by 1847 and before the rejuvenation of social-democratic Chartism the movement seemed to offer little direction beyond the immediate palliatives of prefigurative and improvement politics. Chartism's incorporation of the infidel, Owenite, and Radical traditions made it far more than simply a protest against 'Old Corruption'. Chartism is not part of a continuous Liberal tradition that has stretched into the twenty-first century and which limits its objectives to political reform and half-hearted attempts to relieve suffering. Chartists saw the Charter as the political starting point of widespread economic and moral reform, as a competitive and systemically corrupt society would be replaced with one founded upon wholly different principles.

This chapter considers the benefits of, and an approach to, undertaking research as part of the task of a trauma centre. Ongoing research into the changing needs of communities affected by emergency or conflict is fundamental to informing policy, advocating for service development, supporting the needs-directed commissioning of services and training, and to developing practice. Once the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation (NICTT) therapy team was established, a research working group was formed to guide the development of the research programme. As the work of the Omagh Community Trauma and Recovery Team was drawing to a close, the proposals for what became the NICTT were being developed, and from an early stage included research and development as one of the key programmes. Some practitioners and agencies had expressed anxieties about the use of such tools for those who sought help with trauma-related needs.

The six months between September 1960 and February 1961 fully transformed the Congo crisis from a regional Cold War conflict into a lightning rod for wider anti-colonial critiques. On 27 July 1961, while the diplomatic manoeuvres between America and Britain were ongoing at the UN over the reorganisation of the Secretariat, in the Congo, relations between Katanga and the Central Government had reached deadlock. In response to the implementation of the February Resolution, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had revised its position on the Congo, backing down from its earlier calls for the removal of the UN and replacing Dag Hammarskjöld with a troika power structure. Operation Morthor revealed that the extent of British opposition to the use of force to end the secession was a willingness to break with the US and the UN on the question. The relative success of Operation Rumpunch was overshadowed by Operation Morthor.

The legacy of Chartism's culture of moral improvement has been a major point of debate for several decades. While the existence of a labour aristocracy has been debunked it is also clear that working-class moral politics was a product of working-class Radicalism in the first half of the century rather than a post-Chartist imposition. For a brief period between 1848 and 1851 the Chartist movement possessed a culture evocative of earlier Radicalism, illustrated by the moralistic populism of G.W.M. Reynolds. Dietary reform and healthcare were major occupations of former Chartists in the 1850s, and the various sects of what commentators dubbed 'physical puritanism' after 1850 can be interpreted as non-political successors to Chartism. Chartist moral politics were therefore an important practical, ideological, and symbolic link between the 1840s and the era of the Reform League.

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz is best known for his hawkish service to the George W. Bush administration, when he pushed strongly for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But this was merely the most recent chapter in a long foreign policy career that began in 1969, and that included service to the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. This chapter characterises this period as one in which Wolfowitz's worldview departed the fringe and settled in the mainstream. While serving the Carter, Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Wolfowitz helped to catalyse policy shifts and formulated guidance documents that influenced later presidencies. Noam Chomsky and Paul Wolfowitz share many common traits; among other things, they both overstate America's actual or prospective ability to shape the world. The Second Iraq War emphasised the limits of American power rather than the potentialities.

Antoine Gizenga renewed the operation of the opposition Government in Stanleyville, with the help of Lumumba's former Minister for Education Pierre Mulele and aid from the Soviet Union and some members of the Casablanca Group, including Ghana, Guinea and Mali. The insurgency in Stanleyville destabilised the Central Government and combined with the unresolved question of Katanga, the Congo crisis remained on the international agenda. For both America and Britain, Thant's mounting determination to implement his Plan for National Reconciliation in the Congo, and the increasing likelihood of military action as part of the process, led to a renewed effort to coordinate policies towards the Congo and Africa generally. In the immediate aftermath of Operation UNOKAT, there was widespread criticism in Britain of the ways in which the UN handled the operation and particularly the question of responsibility for occupation of Jadotville and Kolwezi.

Building on the conclusions and individual agency highlighted in the last chapter, this chapter uses examples of the clashes between local government and inhabitants on the social housing estates of Manchester and Hull to show how the practices of everyday life could subvert and challenge the spatial practices of urban governance, shedding light on the lived experience and agency of the inhabitants of mid-twentieth-century social housing. Expectations about how certain spaces should function, what it was appropriate to do in them and the beneficial outcomes they were supposed to produce meant mapping certain expectations about how societies and individuals interacted onto places like parks, grass verges or community centres. Corporations’ and planners’ perceptions of how space should function is thus used here to demonstrate how spatial policies evidenced governmental anxieties over working-class association, concerns about suburban anomie and a growing disquiet about youth and delinquency.

This chapter analyses an account of world politics that gives ontological priority to 'race' and assigns the state a secondary or subordinate function. Andrew Carnegie was one of one of the leading racial utopians of the age. Carnegie insisted that the English-speaking peoples constituted a single race. Unlike many Anglo-Saxonists, Carnegie was largely free of poisonous racial bigotry. Race, democracy, peace and empire were fused together in a fantasy of liberal white supremacism. Yin to Carnegie's yang, it was a deeply pessimistic counterblast to the optimism pulsing through utopian visions of Anglo-Saxonism. Carnegie and the theologians of empire shared a teleological view of history that cast the Anglo-Saxons as agents of progress and regarded human perfectibility as achievable. A self-professed radical, Carnegie's most impassioned critique of British politics can be found in Triumphant Democracy, published in 1886.

This chapter offers a detailed description of how fishermen on the west coast of Scotland worked their fishing grounds and developed their productivity. The historical development of fishing techniques and fishing gear significantly affected what ground was considered 'workable'. James Gibson's and Tim Ingold's analyses of affordances offer a useful way of understanding the development of fishing grounds, and more broadly, how humans perceive, experience and transform the environments they find themselves in, in every moment of their lives. Anthropological studies of the role of human labour in human-environment relations have generally taken place outside industrial capitalist settings and are quite distinct from anthropological studies of waged labour and capitalism. Capitalism itself can be seen as a project to redefine what counts as productive activity, how productivity is assessed, and in particular, to re-shape people's 'own purpose' in their activities.

This chapter examines the origins of the post-war Plans as a means to interrogate a number of historical stereotypes about Britain after the Second World War. In 1945 Hull and Manchester, in common with many other British towns and cities, produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern architecture and ambitious cityscapes that sit, sometimes uneasily, alongside detailed tables, text and photographs. Initially examining continuities between the inter- and post-war plans, the chapter emphasises the importance of the Plans in local governments’ attempts to express long-held desires to control and shape the city. I argue that the Plans evidence an attempt to mould the future shape and idea of the modern city through imaginative use of urban fantasy. Images of modernism, I argue, were not presented as a realisable architectural aim, but as a way of mediating between the present and an indistinct, but fundamentally better future. I suggest flawed interpretations of the visual materials contained in the Plans are responsible for an over-emphasis on the influence of radical modernism in post-war Britain.