In 2000, when atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and limnologist Eugene F. Stoermer proposed to introduce a new geological era, the Anthropocene, they could not have foreseen the remarkable career of the new term. Within a few years, the geological community began to investigate the scientific evidence for the concept and established the Anthropocene Working Group. While the Working Group has started to examine possible markers and periodizations of the new epoch, scholars from numerous other disciplines have taken up the Anthropocene as a cultural concept. In addition, the media have developed a deep interest in the Anthropocene's broader societal ramifications. The article sheds light on the controversial debate about the Anthropocene and discusses its inextricably linked dual careers, first as a geological term and second as a cultural term. Third, it argues that the debate about the "Age of Humans" is a timely opportunity both to rethink the nature-culture relation and to re-assess the narratives that historians of science, technology, and the environment have written until now. Specifically, it examines both the heuristic and analytical power of the concept. It discusses new histories, new ideas to understand historical change, and new temporalities shaped by scholars who have taken up the challenge of the Anthropocene as a cultural concept that has the ability to question established stories and narratives. Fourth, it ends by stressing the potential of the Anthropocene concept to blur established epistemological boundaries and to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaborations between the sciences and the humanities.

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The Anthropocene : A Challenge for the History of Science, Technology, and the Environment.

Part V. The Underlying Framework: 13. A minimal theory of social transfers 14. A guide to the tests Part VI. Accounting for Social Spending, Jobs and Growth: 15. Explaining the rise of mass public schooling 16. Explaining the rise of social transfers 17. What drove postwar social spending? 18. Social transfers hardly affected growth 19. Reconciling unemployment and growth in the OECD Appendices.

Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century

Growing Public examines the question of whether social policies that redistribute income impose constraints on economic growth. Taxes and transfers have been debated for centuries, but only now can we get a clear view of the whole evolution of social spending. What kept prospering nations from using taxes for social programs until the end of the nineteenth century? Why did taxes and spending then grow so much, and what are the prospects for social spending in this century? Why did North America become a leader in public education in some ways and not others? Lindert finds answers in the economic history and logic of political voice, population aging, and income growth. Contrary to traditional beliefs, the net national costs of government social programs are virtually zero. This book not only shows that no Darwinian mechanism has punished the welfare states, but uses history to explain why this surprising result makes sense. Contrary to the intuition of many economists and the ideology of many politicians, social spending has contributed to, rather than inhibited, economic growth.

Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century, Vols. 1 (The Story) and 2 (Further Evidence)

Trust and Governance

Why is English national identity so enigmatic and so elusive? Why, unlike the Scots, Welsh, Irish and most of continental Europe, do the English find it so difficult to say who they are? The Making of English National Identity, first published in 2003, is a fascinating exploration of Englishness and what it means to be English. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Krishan Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from earliest times to the present day. He argues that the long history of the English as an imperial people has, as with other imperial people like the Russians and the Austrians, developed a sense of missionary nationalism which in the interests of unity and empire has necessitated the repression of ordinary expressions of nationalism. Professor Kumar's lively and provocative approach challenges readers to reconsider their pre-conceptions about national identity and who the English really are.

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The making of English national identity

What kind of people are "the English"? What characteristic traits and behavior (if any) distinguish them from other people? This highly original and wide-ranging book traces the surprisingly varied history of ideas among the English about their own "national character" over the past two centuries. Two hundred years ago, the very idea of a national character was novel and not very respectable. Today, it is again difficult for the many who think of themselves as unique individuals to imagine a "national character" that binds the English together in a national unit. But in between, as Britain became a democracy, "national character" became part of the national common sense, reflected in depictions of "John Bull" and his twentieth-century successor, the "Little Man," and in a set of stereotypes about English traits, follies, and foibles. Not at all shy to talk about themselves, the English have produced a vast outpouring of material on what it means to be English--material on which this book draws: lectures, sermons, political speeches, journalism, popular and scholarly books, poems and novels and films, satires and cartoons and caricatures, as well as up-to-the-minute social science and public opinion research. In this comprehensive and lucidly argued book, a leading historian of modern Britain challenges long-held assumptions and familiar stereotypes and proposes an entirely new perspective on what it means to think of oneself as being English.

The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair

OVER the last fifteen years, a substantial literature has welled up, practically from nowhere, purporting to anatomise ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’, this literature suggests, is not a true estimate of national character, an enduring national essence, but rather a historical construct that was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by the ‘dominant classes’ in British society in order to tame or thwart the tendencies of their day towards modernism, urbanism and democracy that might otherwise have overwhelmed elite culture. These aspirations for social control determined the lineaments of the new ‘Englishness’. Nostalgic, deferential and rural, ‘Englishness’ identified the squire-archical village of Southern or ‘Deep’ England as the template on which the national character had been formed and thus the ideal towards which it must inevitably return. Purveyed by the ‘dominant classes’ to the wider culture by means of a potent array of educational and political instruments—ranging from the magazine Country Life to the folk-song fad to the National Trust to Stanley Baldwin's radio broadcasts—‘Englishness’ reversed the modernising thrust of the Indus-trial Revolution and has condemned late twentieth-century Britain to economic decline, cultural stagnation and social division.

Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940

Challenging the prevailing view of a modern English culture besotted with its history and aristocracy, Mandler portrays instead a continuously changing society where both intellectual and popular attitudes have only recently turned to admiration.

The fall and rise of the stately home

The making of the new poor law redivivus

The recent historiographical revolution in our understanding of the eighteenth-century state has broad implications, analytical as well as empirical, that are only beginning to be plumbed. Due largely to the work of Patrick O'Brien and John Brewer, the old picture—of a small, amateurish, corrupt central apparatus largely maintained (between sporadic wars) to dignify the crown and assist gentlemanly (i.e., parliamentary) plunder—has been pretty completely effaced. We now see that by the end of the French wars the British state was one of the largest and most efficient in Europe; certainly it engorged the largest proportion of national product by means of a ruthlessly regressive tax system. The French wars were the climax, not the sole begetters of this system, which had been spawned by a chain of wars mounting in scope and sophistication since the late seventeenth century and requiring commensurate improvements in fiscal policy: thus Brewer's memorable naming of the system as the “fiscal-military state.”For historians of the early nineteenth century, this revision raises a host of questions about the relationship of social change and social class to government growth. Particularly, it casts doubt on the customary association made between growth in the size or scope of government and the rise in the Industrial Revolution of new social and economic questions and a bourgeoisie to answer them; that is, it casts doubt on the implicit “modernization” model that hitches together economic growth, government growth, bureaucracy, professionalism, and embourgeoisement.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S002193710002284X

Peter Mandler

Papers

The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair

Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940

The fall and rise of the stately home

The making of the new poor law redivivus

From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-faire State, 1760–1850