The author and politician analyzes the troubled state of Britain's post-World War II political and economic systems, and proposes a solution. When World War II ended for Great Britain in 1945, MP John Strachey wondered what he and his country were going to do with the freedom they had fought for and won. The men who ran the country before the war had taken England so far down the road to disaster that it seemed almost impossible to save. To prevent...

The Western world has experienced extraordinary economic progress throughout the last six decades, a prosperous period so extended that continuous economic growth has come to seem normal. But such an era of continuously rising living standards is a historical anomaly, economist Stephen D. King warns, and the current stagnation of Western economies threatens to reach crisis proportions in the not-so-distant future.

Praised for the "dose of realism"

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"In 2018, UN representatives spent two weeks in a single country investigating child poverty, concluding that it was 'not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster'. That country was the United Kingdom. Who are the new faces of poverty? The same people we applaud as heroes: policemen, nurses and firefighters. While a select few have gotten unthinkably rich in the past ten years, crushing levels of personal debt, high rents, low...

"In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Moving through Westminster 's lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones lays bare the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, and reveals a far more complex reality: the increasing poverty and desperation of people left abandoned by the aspirational, society-fragmenting...

A reframing of the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and the emergence of industrial capitalism presents them as inextricable from the gun trade and the story of disgraced Quaker gunmaker Samuel Galton. "We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing...

This book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer a first-hand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom....

"The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of...

Pinchbeck looks at life in agrarian society, the transition to industrialization, and specific industries employing women in what is still one of the best discussions of the impact of industrialization on women's lives.

Explores what life was like for children, both rich and poor, in Victorian Great Britain.