Glen O'Hara

O'Hara presents the first general history of Britons' relationship with the surrounding oceans from 1600 to the present day. This all-encompassing account covers individual seafarers, ship-borne migration, warfare and the maritime economy, as well as the British people's maritime ideas and self perception throughout the centuries.

Since 1600

Britain and the Sea

This is the first book to cover the British people’s late twentieth century engagement with water in all its domestic, national and international forms, and from bathing and household chores to controversies about maritime pollution. The British Isles, a relatively wet and rainy archipelago, cannot in any way be said to be short of liquid resources. Even so, it was the site of highly contentious and revealing political controversies over the meaning and use of water after the Second World War. A series of such issues divided political parties, pressure groups, government and voters, and form the subject matter of this book: problems as diverse as flood defence to river and beach cleanliness, from the teaching of swimming to the installation of hot and cold running water in the home, from international controls over maritime pollution, and from the different housework duties of men and women to the British state’s proposals to fluoridise the drinking water supply.

The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain

Glen O'Hara draws a compelling picture of Second World War Britain by investigating relations between people and government: the electorate's rising expectations and demands for universally-available social services, the increasing complexity of the new solutions to these needs, and mounting frustration with both among both governors and governed.

The Paradoxes of Progress, 1951-1973

Governing Post-War Britain

Tom Crook

Statistics and the Public Sphere is the first scholarly volume to address directly the place and function of numbers in modern British political culture, from roughly 1800 through to the present.

Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, C. 1800-2000

Statistics and the Public Sphere

Glen O'Hara looks at modern British politicsfrom 'top' to 'bottom' 6 from Prime Ministers' relationship with US Presidents and the Cabinet room, to individual neighbourhoods and schools. In doing so, he fuses the new political history of the everyday and the humdrum with high political accounts involving economic and social advisers, top politicians and senior civil servants. Post-war Britain emerges as a country that experienced increasingly tense relations between governors and the governed. The electorate demanded ever wider access to fairly-provided and universally-available social services; elites looked to other European and American countries for how this search for quality might be mounted. However, new solutions became ever more complex, and increasingly likely to conflict with one another or involve unintended additional effects. Drawing on new archival findings from across the United Kingdom, among personal and political papers as much as the files of national and international governance, O'Hara uses the new economics of organization, management and complexity to draw a compelling picture of the post-war settlement as it came under strain during the 1950s and 1960s.

In this first full-scale treatment of Britain's relationship with the surrounding oceans, Glen O'Hara examines the history of British people's maritime lives and, in turn, the formation of British cultural identities. A lens through which to view British life, Britain and the Sea spans more than 400 years, beginning in 1600 and taking us through to the present day. Tying together every aspect in the development of Great Britain, from state formation, industrialization and modernization, through to histories of transport, migration, slavery, warfare and crime, this book illustrates how the rich tapestry of Britain's narrative was decided not among the fields of the 'green and pleasant land', but out at sea.

Glen O'Hara

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