The National Sample from the 1851 Census of Great Britain an Interim Report on Methods and Progress

Abstract

In the last years, the use of geographical information systems has been common in many historical and geographical studies. Perhaps one of the least known applications is network analysis, a series of functions related to hydrology and mobility. Since 1994, researchers have used network analyses to understand costs and time expenditure in transportation in Roman times, with the aim of modeling commercial routes. Archaeological objects were employed to confirm those commercial distributions whose quantities were related basically to transport costs. The present articles go far beyond and attempt to understand decisions in building a transport network based on time series. It seems that not all Roman decisions in transport infrastructure were due to economic reasons; some parts of Roman roads were built basically for political reasons and affected later developments.     

The Decline of the Empire and the Economic 'Decline' of Britain

In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization coincided with the ‘goldenage’ of British capitalism, with record rises in popularliving standards. Economic historians have understandably usedthis coincidence to suggest that by this period the BritishEmpire was no longer offering substantial economic benefitsto the mass of the metropolitan population. Yet there were linksbetween economic performance and the decline of the Empire.First, despite the good performance, profoundly pessimistic‘declinist’ accounts of British society and theeconomy abounded in the early 1960s, and these had a major impacton policy formation. A key underpinning for such accounts wasthe ‘culture of decline’ intimately linked withthe loss of imperial status. Secondly, while it has become acommonplace of discussion of post-war Britain to assume thatreversing ‘decline’ and modernizing the economyrequired a re-orientation of policy away from the Empire andCommonwealth towards Europe, such a reorientation was not aconstant feature of modernization strategies. Indeed, a centralfeature of the initial period of Wilsonian ‘modernization’after 1964 was its attempt to use closer links with the Commonwealthto achieve this objective.     

Britain,Empire and the Origins of the Cold War Youth Race

The Soviet politicization of international youth during the inter-war and wartime years was identified by British policy-makers as a most serious threat to British imperial power. Asserting the significance of and interplay between colonial youth and imperial ideology in the politics of the cultural Cold War, this article thus examines how the British conceptualized and sought to compete in the Cold War ‘youth race’ between 1945 and 1949. While funding was the most obvious disadvantage, this article argues that Britain’s fatal weakness was its inability to escape the consequences of colonialism, including the tendency to rely on repressive legislation.