School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemColonial soundscapes: a cultural history of sound recording in Australia, 1880–1930( 2019)‘Colonial Soundscapes’ is the first systematic cultural history of the early phonograph and gramophone in Australian settler society. Drawing on recent work in sound studies and the history of sound, the ‘talking machine’ is conceived as part of the soundscape of colonial modernity in colonial and Federal Australia. I argue that national environmental/place attachment and modern listening practices developed together, with anthropological thought, popular culture, commercial life, intellectual elite discourse and everyday life providing the key sites for transformation. This thesis reads the materials of the early sound recording industry in light of recent conceptual emphases on the importance of sound in cultural life. Archival research into the history of sound recording was conducted at the EMI Archives Trust and Thomas Alva Edison Papers, Rutgers University, among others. I also draw heavily on the papers of several foundational anthropological recordists, chiefly Baldwin Spencer, Alfred Cort Haddon and E. Harold Davies. Extensive research into the trade and popular phonographic press also provides a corpus of material through which it is possible to recover the meaning of recorded sound in everyday Australian life in its first generations. I conceive of the early phonograph and gramophone in terms of an ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ of sound in a settler society. These concepts are proposed as a mechanism for accounting for the raft of cultural responses provoked by early sound recording. An ‘economy’ of sound encompasses the economic, archival and scientific modes of apprehending the changed relationship between sound and source. The economic and business structures that underpinned the rise of a national recording industry in Australia fall under this rubric, as do attempts by salvage anthropologists to taxonomically fix and locate the speech and musics of Indigenous peoples, believed to be endangered by the onset of colonial modernity. Drawing on the concept of the soundscape, as modified by significant scholarship in the history of sound in recent years, an ‘ecology’ of sound focuses on the poetic, vernacular and emplaced repsonses to recorded sound that pervaded early Australian cultures of listening.
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ItemMirroring England?: Milton Keynes, decline and the English landscape( 2017)This thesis traces representations of the new town Milton Keynes in British media, politics and popular culture from 1967-1992. From the time of its designation, Milton Keynes has been represented symbolically in terms of the ideologies which were understood to have created it, both in terms of political ideologies and particular theories of urban planning practice. While early responses to the town reflect concerns with its potential to over-determine the landscape, representations of Milton Keynes quickly adapted to the economic and political changes of the mid-1970s to reflect anxieties about the role of postwar socialism in having generated a form of national decline, and to have inscribed this decline on the landscape itself through the postwar housing and reconstruction policies which had led to Milton Keynes’ designation. By 1978, the town was consistently understood as symbolising a technocratic positivism opposed to ideals of national heritage, and therefore as undesirable and foreign, whether as a threat or as a “joke”. Even as it adapted to the political and ideological climate of post-1979 Britain through reimagining its public image and administration, in media and political representations Milton Keynes continued to function as a symbol of a failed Keynesian postwar reconstructionist state, and of the ideal of newness itself. As such it has also acted as an ongoing reminder of a political alternative to neoliberalism and its legitimating cultural narratives; it has therefore continued to challenge what and where can be considered a normal, typical or ideal representation of English and British landscape, and how particular landscape forms are understood as containers of both people and of national heritage. Historicising Milton Keynes' reception and meanings helps render explicit the “common sense” which underpins judgements about ideal landscapes, the role and value of heritage in narratives of Englishness and Britishness, and how these symbolic identities are made and remade.
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ItemThe tragedy of the common law: the ancient constitution in the Age of Reform, 1830–1909( 2017)The method of legitimating political claims by appeal to constitutional precedent—first developed by English common lawyers in the early seventeenth century—was in nineteenth-century Britain an important political language among democratic reformers and popular radicals. Legalistic in its method and historical in its referents, ‘ancient constitutionalist’ discourse supported narratives of constitutional history as a tragedy of decline from a lost golden age. In these dramas of dispossession and lost virtue, the prospect of structural political change was articulated as the redemptive ‘restitution’ or ‘restoration’ of that supposedly lost. Following the reform crisis of 1830–32, such narratives were given up in Westminster politics, becoming almost exclusively the preserve of popular politics. Commencing with the reform crisis, and focusing on debates over reform of the franchise, the central ‘constitutional’ question of the nineteenth century, I trace the termination of ancient constitutionalism among the governing classes, and its continued employment by popular radicals, by the Chartist movement, and later by women’s suffrage campaigners. Primarily the ideology of the voteless, ancient constitutionalism was used by these movements as a means of justifying their claims for inclusion within constitutional structures. It was both a device of political rhetoric, and an impetus for serious historical investigation that generated novel accounts of constitutional history. The thesis offers a new narrative of the relationships between historical knowledge, political discourse and the common law in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that ancient constitutionalist reasoning, far from becoming extinct in the early nineteenth century or merging seamlessly into the nascent professional historiography, as has sometimes been described, remained a crucial source of political legitimacy up to the ‘socialist revival’ of the 1880s, and in some forms persisted into the early twentieth century.
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ItemKnowledge, unity, responsibility: the left book club movement, 1936-1945( 2016)In the late 1930s, as political darkness drew on Europe, tens of thousands of Britons chose books as their route to stopping fascism and war. The publisher Victor Gollancz founded the Left Book Club (LBC), an anti-fascist, subscription-based book club, in 1936. Historians have cited the LBC as a proxy for a Popular Front in Britain, and argued it won converts for socialism in advance of the Labour Party’s 1945 General Election victory. This thesis expands the purview of studies of the LBC to include the LBC movement, convened among its 57,000 members and centring on its 1200 local discussion circles across Britain. Using a diverse and expansive archive, and methods associated with cultural history and the study of social movements, this thesis provides new insights into the LBC’s contributions to electoral politics and a wider political culture in the 1930s and 1940s. This thesis examines how members worked through the central contradiction of the LBC and the wider, anti-fascist political alliance. Gollancz founded the LBC as an instrument of mass education for democratic citizenship; his allies in the Communist Party of Great Britain saw it as an instrument of Popular Front politics. The LBC movement mediated the most sectional political claims offered in its books, situating them instead inside an inclusive, ‘democratic’ culture. Members did so in personal and collective engagements with LBC books; interventions in civic life and local political debate; and mobilisations for a United or Popular Front, humanitarian aid to Republican Spain and China, against Appeasement, and, during the Second World War, against past Tory domestic and foreign policy and for a socialist peace. The LBC movement helped diversify political debate in the 1930s, made socialism commensurable to democracy, and took part in the reconstruction of public politics on inclusive, deliberative, sober, and rational lines. In these respects, it aided the Labour Party’s attempts to commend itself to, particularly, the lower middle-class voting public.