The paper covers the history of the British Isles throughout the twentieth century. This was a period of almost unprecedented political, social and economic change. At its beginning Great Britain was the centre of a world-empire, the hub of the world’s financial system, and Ireland was still politically united to Britain. At the end of the century, the Empire was gone, to be replaced by a Commonwealth, in many respects vestigial, but still of some authority. Ireland, with the exception of the northern six counties, had become an independent republic. In 1900 the Labour Representation Committee (to become the Labour Party in 1906) was formed as a small parliamentary pressure group with a doubtful future. In 2000 it was the governing party with a huge parliamentary majority. At the beginning of the century Britain was almost wholly white; at its end it had large ‘Black and Asian’ populations whose influence on British life was profound. In the 1990s there was another demographic wave as large numbers of people came from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. By 2000 Britain was no longer central to the world’s financial system, though London was still one of its most important foci, and in military terms Britain had become a middle-ranking power. Economically, particularly in its manufacturing sector, Britain found it difficult to compete and an apparent political and economic decline was, especially after the Second World War, one of the principal themes of British politics and public life. And yet, despite its preoccupation with failure, few other societies had such a successful twentieth century. Its people experienced a rise in living standards and social opportunities which would once have been thought inconceivable; it emerged victorious from two world wars with its political institutions intact and increasingly democratic; its civil life was remarkably peaceful; it was one of the most culturally open societies in the world and its cultural productivity, at élite and popular levels, was surpassed only by the United States.

The paper is open-ended, since it has no terminal date, and it allows us to examine contemporary Britain historically. The core of the paper is political, but political in the broadest sense. It is concerned not just with parliamentary politics but with the relationships between political parties and society, the way political institutions have been shaped and the manner in which the political system coped with major challenges – for example, the two world wars, the emergence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the re-emergence of the ‘Irish question’, or the pervasive notion of economic ‘decline’ (something which people consciously tried to reverse) from the 1950s on. Although the period can usefully be divided into two by the Second World War – which in many ways was a ‘turning point’ – the paper and the lectures try to give the period a unity; to allow people, if they wish, to answer wider questions, while recognizing that some people will prefer to consider other questions in more detail. And the paper embraces the whole of the British Isles – Ireland as well as England, Scotland and Wales. It is, however, by no means confined to its political core: it includes those subjects which are closely allied to politics but which we usually think of as ‘social’: gender, popular culture, the extent to which Britain was, or was not, a society based upon social classes, immigration and its consequences and, not least, the degree to which British life and culture was Americanized.