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This book traces the history of male beauty, male grooming, and masculine self-presentation in Britain from the rise of photography in the 1840s to the present age of the selfie. It urges historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously as important points of access for understanding topics ranging from advertising and physical fitness to pornography and the rise of celebrity culture. Aside from establishing these general points, this book also argues that the ability to discern beauty and ugliness in men was a cornerstone in the emergence of modern visual literacy and visual culture. It was also essential to the development of modern sexual identities, particularly as notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality emerged and solidified over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several other arguments emerge in this work. The first of these relates to the ways in which good looks and attractiveness were cast as assets in Britain’s capitalist economy and thriving culture of competition. The second concerns the central roles that standards of attractiveness, understandings of personal grooming, and ideas about sex appeal played in the emergence of modern psychological selfhood, particularly in the twentieth century. A third and final argument illustrates how assessments of male beauty allowed Britons to valorize youthfulness, Whiteness, and able-bodiedness. Traversing topics as diverse as nineteenth-century physiognomy, facial reconstructive surgery in the First World War, film culture, and the rise of the male model, this book narrates an important and frequently neglected aspect of the British past (and present).

This book provides a history of the causes, experiences, and consequences of Britain's post-1750 shift to a diet rich in meat, wheat, and sugar. The origins of this shift lay in Britain's industrialization from the later eighteenth century, which catalyzed a transition from predominantly locally produced, plant-based, food to food sourced from around the planet. The diet provided increased energy flow necessary for an industrial labour force, and it produced taller, heavier, and more powerful male workers. However, the diet also produced unintended health consequences (from tooth decay to heart disease) a greatly expanded ecological footprint, and novel issues of food security. As this diet became Americanized and globalized in the twentieth century, these health and ecological problems became planetary issues. The book thus provides a deeper history of today's food, health and ecological crises.

This book examines British responses to disease during the Seven Years War with a particular focus on the role of the state and its relationship to the welfare of the armed forces. Alongside fiscal and logistical capability, British success required consistent and well-publicized attention to the welfare of troops to maintain manpower strength, support recruitment, and retain public support and public financing for the war. The strength and success of the British state during the war is shown to be dependent on its ability to secure public support through attention to troop welfare. This was accomplished by encouraging and supporting medical research, applying medical knowledge, and adapting to local conditions around the globe. The incidence of disease thus played a crucial role in the formation of strategy and policy; in turn, the war stimulated new ways of thinking about disease and medicine, particularly in colonial environments. By tracing how imperial warfare shaped the development of British medical expertise, this book highlights the central role that the British state played in shaping eighteenth-century medicine and scientific innovation. Not only did the discipline of tropical medicine have its roots in the war, but the experience of war provided naval and military medical practitioners with the opportunity for observation and experimentation. Moreover, wartime medical experience conferred authority and status on naval and military medical practitioners. Medicine became a form of expertise in the service of the British Empire, applied during campaigning and influencing both imperial policy and the nature of imperial authority.

The broad goal of this book is to combine historical materialism and historical institutionalism through a gendered lens. Both concern how durable social structures construct and maintain asymmetries of power. The study pursues a concerted institutional analysis of class power and the labor process and ways that legal practices beyond the workplace impact struggles over its control. The labor contract was integral to labor control in historical capitalist development, and how labor control was accomplished through juridical authority. To do so it goes beyond current neo-marxist perspectives on labor control. The substantive analysis centers on master and servant laws in mid-Victorian England, with local and national studies. Under the law disobeying a master in a contract of service was a criminal offense. The book presents local case studies of how employers in the pottery (Hanley), fish trawling (Hull), needlemaking and agricultural (Redditch) sectors institutionalized reliance on these laws for labor control for 1864-75. They highlight how configurations of the production process, the social relations in them, the shape of labor markets, and the local organization of political and juridical power determined this path. The national analysis involves a critique and reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and his thesis of the ‘double movement’. It argues that labor remained legally embedded in society throughout most of the nineteenth century, and its relative disembedding was at the hands of labor unions, against the interests of many employers in retaining these laws. The book concludes with contemporary reflections on its broad thesis.

Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain examines how Britons organized and conceptualized the property market from the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth centuries. It argues that while land and houses had been bought and sold for quite some time, the social and cultural conditions of exchange changed dramatically in this period, resulting in novel institutions and practices that gave new meaning to the property market as a whole. For the first time, new professions, places, forms of print culture, and government authorities made it possible to speak of the property market in the abstract and to represent the commoditization of real estate as a normal aspect of everyday economic life. The difficulty in thinking about land as a mere commodity never disappeared--indeed, it remains a problem today. To the contrary, the need to address the problem of property's marketable status was often used to rationalize further reform of commercial practice. At once a history of business and of culture, this book offers a new perspective on the meaning of land and commercial culture in modern life.

Lawyers representing Oscar Wilde claimed that the Marquess of Queensberry had libelled their client by scrawling a phrase on a card that the latter had left at the Albemarle Club in London. At the ensuing trial this was taken to refer to posing as a sodomite. This implies that there was an identifiable way in which to behave and appear in public life as a being sexually interested in other men. But what then what did sodomites look like? And has the role of Wilde been over-emphasised? This study asks whether his example should be appreciated not so much for having revolutionised the ability of such men to appear visible to each other as for having made the general public think that they knew how to recognise a sexual deviant on the spurious grounds that all homosexuals were like Wilde. The implication of this is that this period may have seen not so much the creation of a social identity for men who desired sex with men as the crude imposition of a stereotype upon them. These concepts are explored through case studies of the interactions of dandyism and caricature in the construction of queer forms of masculinity from the mid-Georgian to the late Victorian periods.

Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world. That debate continues today and this book draws on novels, plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex-change operations, and in vitro fertilization. The book brings together the experience and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and ecological concerns into a discussion of science's place in reproduction in British and American cultural history.

Responsibility for the invention of moving pictures has traditionally been contested, largely between American and French pioneers, with some recognition of early achievements in England. But the London-based electrical engineer Robert Paul has never received the recognition he deserves, despite figuring in many histories for his imaginative response to H. G. Wells’ Time Machine story of 1895. Although no such machine was attempted, Paul, like the Lumières in France, built upon Edison’s Kinetoscope breakthrough to become Britain’s most successful manufacturer and producer in 1896, the year that film swept the world. After early success with actuality films, he and his wife Ellen opened a studio in North London in 1898 where they produced the first multi-scene dramas, widely shown and imitated. The Anglo-Boer war in South Africa prompted new kinds of film, both documentary and allegorical, while Paul’s studio kept pace with the trick films produced by one of his early customers, Georges Méliès. Paul’s original instrument-making business continued to flourish, and after abandoning film in 1909 in the face of market pressures, he contributed to defence work during World War I, and in his final years played an active part in both science and film history. Despite his many achievements, Paul has remained a shadowy, underestimated figure, now brought to life in this closely researched study that makes the case for him being considered one of cinema’s major pioneers.

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.

The book explores the British cultural tradition of queer martyrdom that originated in the Roman and Anglican Catholic Revivals of the nineteenth century. As a devotional practice this centred on the envisioning of Christ as an unmarried, suffering, beautiful, queer martyr. Those who wished to purge their own sinful desires and live eternally with Him could seek idealised visions of His eroticisable body in the Mass as the reward for a life of arduous devotion. Men with such tastes might band together in communities of the like-minded. Others, who appreciated the homoerotic potential of such worship but who could not cope with the limits on lives in the Christian closet and who yearned for a wider public witness of sexual preferences rather than of self-denial, moved increasingly to alternative forms of self-expression, many of them rooted in socialism. Such people could then use queer aspects of ecclesiastical style as elements of camp or pastiche. Others remained within the space of the Churches and established a discrete niche within society sustained by their own visions of queer pain and delight. This last phenomenon helps to explain the role of the post-war Anglican Church in being instrumental in helping to bring about the partial decriminalisation of homosexual relations in England in 1967. Many in the gay liberation movement subsequently rejected the heritage of religion and yet, with tragic irony, the experience of AIDS gave a renewed prominence to older, queer traditions that were rooted in the aestheticized endurance of suffering.