Structures and Transformations in Modern British History is one of a series of Festschriften for modern British historians to have appeared in the last year, including The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley, 2011), edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon and in honor of Patrick Joyce, and Classes, Cultures, and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2011), edited by Clare V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott, and William Whyte. David Feldman and Jon Lawrence were doctoral students of Gareth Stedman Jones, as were four of the other contributors. Among those contributors not supervised by Stedman Jones are several colleagues from Cambridge and the History Workshop movement.

The essays in the volume essentially fall under three broad categories. First, there are the “gotcha” chapters, or those that “reopen old questions about the relationship between long-term socio-economic change and changes in culture and practice” (20). These range from Margot Finn’s chapter on the relationship among family networks, race, and power in the Victorian empire to Emma Griffin’s chapter on the rationale and implications of the “urban renaissance” over the long eighteenth century. Several, including Finn’s chapter, Anne Summers’s chapter on nineteenth-century internationalism, and Feldman’s chapter on turbans, are concerned with reassessing now-dominant narratives about imperial and postimperial culture. While these essays are not all concerned with analyzing political language, per se, they are clearly influenced by the “new political history” approach that Stedman Jones pioneered in his classic study, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983). As with Stedman Jones’s essays in Languages of Class, and most particularly his justly acclaimed “Rethinking Chartism,” the chapters in this category all seek to upend our traditional understanding of historical change through close reading of hitherto overlooked sources. In “Rethinking Chartism,” the overlooked source was the actual language used by radical politicians in outlining the arguments for political reform in early Victorian Britain. In Feldman’s chapter, it is the legal history of the British Sikh community’s largely successful campaigns to defend their right to wear turbans at the workplace or on the back of a motorcycle. As Feldman writes, “The clashes were fought out in the 1960s and 1970s. … These were the years when Britain, we are told, was imagined as a white, homogenous nation. Yet time and again the Sikhs won concessions. Their success suggests the need for a different narrative; one that takes into account a history of pluralism” (285).

Feldman’s assertion of the need for histories of racial attitudes in the 1960s and 1970s to take pluralism into account is characteristic of the type of historiographical claims made in most of these chapters. Rather than saying that previous historians have got it wrong, they argue that earlier histories told an incomplete story. Here, too, the influence of Stedman Jones’s cautious empiricism is again in evidence. “Rethinking Chartism” is frequently credited by followers of the “linguistic turn” in political history with illustrating the autonomy of the political from the socioeconomic sphere. Yet, Stedman Jones did not argue that material forces were irrelevant to the Chartists’ reading of politics, only that a purely economic explanation was incomplete. Notably, “Rethinking Chartism” ends by concluding that Peel sped Chartism’s decline through his “avowed aim to remove the material sources of popular discontent and to avoid identifying the state with any particular faction or economic interest of the propertied class” (Languages of Class, 176).

The second category of essays reflects Stedman Jones’s later incarnation as a scholar of political thought. Among the younger contributors to the volume is Tristam Hunt. Hunt came to Cambridge to work with Stedman Jones after he had begun the transition from a scholar of working-class society to a scholar of Marxist thought, and Hunt’s doctoral thesis combined social and intellectual history in examining the growth of the Victorian city. His chapter in this volume, “Engels and the City: The Philosophy and Practice of Urban Hypocrisy,” reflects the influence of Stedman Jones’s later intellectual preoccupations, as well as Hunt’s own broader interest in the life of Frederich Engels. Other chapters more closely in dialogue with Stedman Jones the intellectual historian include Daniel Pick’s “Psychoanalysis, History and National Culture” and Alastair Reid’s “The Dialectics of Liberation: The Old Left, the New Left and The Counter-culture.”

Outside of the “gotcha” chapters and the intellectual histories, there are also several chapters that pay homage to Stedman Jones’s long-standing interest in the relationship between the state and society and between political parties and their constituencies, including contributions by Joanna Innes on the eighteenth-century state, Alun Howkins on the final chapter in the history of enclosure, Jonathan Perry on nineteenth-century politics, and Jon Lawrence on twentieth-century politics. Finally, the volume contains a chapter on population growth by E. A. Wrigley that harkens back to an older, more economics-inflected style of social history and reflects Stedman Jones’s wide-ranging methodological interests as director of the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge. The opening chapter, by Feldman and Lawrence, nicely traces the trajectory of Stedman Jones’s career and helps to draw together the chapters in the volume. As befits a Festschrift, Structures and Transformations is, genuinely, a series of essays for a particularly influential scholar. Reading the various chapters, one is left with a well-rounded impression of how widely Stedman Jones has influenced the field of modern British history over the past four decades.