In a chapter of Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present covering the Thatcher years, Pat Thane notes the prime minister's lament that the teaching of history in schools placed “emphasis on interpretation and enquiry as against content and knowledge,” when history should be “an account of what happened in the past” (376). Yet as Thane reminds us, “historical understanding . . . is always provisional and open to challenge” (1). As Thane makes clear, the history of the United Kingdom since 1900 is by no means “a simple story of progress or decline,” but is a “complex picture of continuity and change,” of “conflicting patterns” through which can be seen the “trajectories of fundamental inequalities” and their effects on the people who perceived and experienced them (4–7). Thane probes how successfully Britain adjusted to new realities, and how divisions and inequalities could be understood, lessened, and exacerbated.

Divided Kingdom is an accessible, engrossing textbook. Thane deftly covers enormous ground, offering the reader both an authoritative survey of modern British history and important insights into its social dimensions especially. Divided Kingdom is chronologically structured over thirteen chapters into recognizable subperiods, albeit ones that defy simple labels or grand narrative arcs. For example, Thane makes clear that the 1950s cannot be reduced to the last gasp of a “dull cultural conservatism” soon to be swept away by the “permissiveness” of the 1960s (220). Nor was a postwar “golden age” brought to an abrupt end by the “turbulent discontent” of the 1970s, while “consensus” between the main political parties is often “hard to detect” (301). There are subtler and more interesting stories to be told. For example, 1930s, the “slump decade,” during which old industrial centers were hard hit and long-term unemployment rose, also witnessed the growth of the holiday industry and new leisure activities—which were, nevertheless, “class, race, and gender divided” (110). Thane also alerts us to the context of moments that have come to encapsulate these historical episodes: for example, Macmillan's 1957 “never had it so good” speech was not triumphal but a mediation on whether it was too good to last, while birth control was only integrated into the National Health Service in 1974.

The “divided” of the book's title is an ever-present theme that can be read on multiple levels, the most prevalent and persuasive of which is inequality, itself a multilayered phenomenon. Thane detects in the 1900s the increased prominence in public discourse of “issues which resonated through the century,” including the causes and remedies of poverty, tensions around immigration, challenges to gender inequality, and an increasingly organized labor movement (38). The cautious responses and compromises made by politicians to an expanded electorate and to the economic shocks of the interwar years ensured that still deep inequalities did not generate the conflicts seen elsewhere. Amid the dislocations of the “People's War” there grew hopes of transformation and the development of blueprints for change. Substantial social and economic reform was attempted but not completed postwar, and although the welfare state survived the 1950s more or less intact, the situation was far from being a “settlement.” The period between the Second World War and the 1970s was nonetheless one of “sustained decline in overall inequality” (473). Income inequality fell to its lowest point in the early 1970s, the welfare state reached its zenith, and there had emerged an “exceptional range of collectively organized groups . . . campaigning against perceived disadvantage.” Yet from the 1980s, inequality was, to those in power, “natural and desirable,” an issue for which neither the state nor “society” bore responsibility (344–46). Although by the late 1990s the idea of society was again a thing, and poverty declined, income and wealth inequality continued to rise. Thane also traces “cultural shifts” toward, and the limits of, “greater openness and tolerance” (7), and stresses the survival of class divisions and consciousness of them.

Divided Kingdom will find a welcome audience among undergraduates, for whom it will be an invaluable companion. Each chapter contains a number of sections, organized around easily digestible themes and moments, providing points of reference traceable back and forth through the book. This arrangement is also an interpretational tool, as Thane seeks to integrate a range of histories and broaden perspectives, with consistent emphasis placed on gender, race, culture, and class, as well as on political, economic, and international developments. This structure speaks to Thane's argument that such histories “intersect” and have “all mattered” (1). That they can be neither “compartmentalized” nor blurred into one hints at what is often the messiness and uneasiness of Britain's twentieth century. As a textbook, Divided Kingdom offers breadth over sustained depth. Thane acknowledges, for instance, that while attention is paid to similarities and differences across and within the nations of the United Kingdom, these are not always explored in sufficient detail (468). Perhaps more surprisingly, religion is largely off-stage, appearing occasionally in wider discussions rather than as a recurrent chapter section or theme on the place of faith in British society and culture. Readers, students especially, will however benefit from lucid explanations of major campaigns and legislative and economic policies. Divided Kingdom also contains a wealth of statistical information, showing, for example, that as late as 1984, the median earnings of full-time women workers were only two-thirds those of men, while in 1999, unemployment among black, Asian, and minority ethnic groups was double that of white people (295, 443).

Divided Kingdom is in many respects a story of challenges: from challenges posed by international conflict and the loss of empire to those represented by nationalisms and the European Union referendum result; from challenges to exclusion from the franchise to those mounted against gender, sexual, and racial discrimination; from the challenges to classic liberalism at the start of the twentieth century to those facing the welfare state and collective social responsibility in its final two decades and into the new millennium—to name but a few. In each can be seen deep divisions and inequalities. The book promises to reveal what has and has not changed in Britain since 1900. Readers will find major, if in many cases incomplete, shifts, in which Britain has progressed or regressed, as well as parallels, some welcome and others disconcerting; they may also encounter some surprises along the way.