Courses starts: 22 Jan 2026
Week 1: Life in the shadow of wars? We find instead a process of active transformation reaching deep into society and caused by internal political pressures, and the search for a new equilibrium with an altered world. Out of this a new Britain emerged, not one simply reacting to its past and in fear of its future.
Week 2: Putting the world back together again. A process of memorialising the First World War had as its primary purpose seeking to move on, with a return where possible to pre-war sources of prosperity. There was also a recognition that despite the global reach of its still vast empire and economic strength, Britain was no longer making the political weather as it had done before the First World War, and faced new types of difficulties.
Week 3: The rise of Labour. The transformation of British politics, caused by the rapid rise of the Labour Party under a considerably extended franchise, with the eclipse of Victorian and Edwardian Liberalism and the remaking of Conservatism under Stanley Baldwin, the dominant figure in British politics between the wars.
Week 4: Culture and society in the 1920s. The decline of the aristocracy, the closure of country houses, and the eclipse of high-brow culture. The rise instead of the middling sort, in the novels of H.G. Wells and J.B. Priestley.
Week 5: The world closes in: economic catastrophe and political extremes. Enormous strains on the world economy emanating from the United States, although Britain finds itself in a different position than, for example, Italy, France and Germany, as economic pressures drove politics towards the extremes.
Week 6: Britain's National Government. A coalition to deal with the economic crisis under the Labour Party’s former leader, James Ramsay Macdonald, which created a new innovative politics of the centre, pushed political extremism to the margins, under full adult democracy for the first time.
Week 7: Economic reconstruction and social reform. Contrary to received opinion, under the leadership of Neville Chamberlain Britain underwent a major economic restructuring in the 1930s, and massive social reform from which a more equal society began to emerge
Week 8: Mass consumption and mass culture. Political and economic reforms were matched by the new forms of mass consumption and mass culture, popular press, cinema and radio, the movement of populations, wider education, new applications of science and increased prosperity for many.
Week 9: Imperial reconstruction and appeasement. The ‘command and control’ empire directed from London with the British Raj at its centre was quietly abandoned in favour of a ‘commonwealth’ model over the 1930s, presided over by a ‘People’s King’. Rearmament from the mid-1930s underlying the policy of ‘appeasement’ was a vast undertaking which gives the ‘appeasement’ of the European dictators in the 1930s a different aspect.
Week 10: Summary and conclusions. Starting and ending in war, the 'Janus' inter-war years were a time of huge changes, looking back with nostalgia to the past but also forging a new basis for Britain to face the future, immediately the world war, but beyond that an altered status on the world stage and a more progressive society at home.
