Memory and Modern British Politics

This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World.
As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.

Matthew Roberts is Reader in Modern British History at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He is a historian of 19th-century Britain.

1. From Colston to Canons: Memory, Tradition and the Political Use of the Past in Modern Britain, Matthew Roberts (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
2. A Practical English Past: Commemorating the Glorious Revolution in England, from Tom Paine to T. B. Macaulay (1792-1848), Rémy Duthille (Bordeaux Montaigne University, France)
3. 'Generation 1789': Welsh Dissenters and Radicals Lost in Translation, Marion Löffler (Cardiff University, UK)
4. The Canon of Irish Republicanism: Constructing a Separatist 'Tradition', Colin Reid (University of Sheffield, UK)
5. Romantic Memory? Forgetting, Remembering and Feeling in the Chartist Pantheon of Heroes, c.1790-1840 Matthew Roberts (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
6. 'A New Political Baptism': Memorializing the Reform Acts in 1832, Gordon Pentland (University of Edinburgh, UK)
7. Living in Stone or Marble: The Public Commemoration of Victorian MPs, Kathryn Rix (Assistant Editor, History of Parliament, UK)
8. Peel's Death as Family Tragedy, Richard Gaunt (University of Nottingham, UK)
9. Whatever Happened to all the Heroes? The Monumental Failure of British Plebeian Radicalism, c.1850-1920, Antony Taylor (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
10. Making Martyrs: Contested Histories and the British Labour and Socialist Movements' Commemoration of the Dorchester Labourers, Marcus Morris (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
11. Magna Carta, Memory Diplomacy, and the Use of the Past in Anglo-American Relations, c. 1915-1965, Sam Edwards (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
12. Remembering British Rule: the Uses of Colonial Memory in Hong Kong Protest Movements, 1997-2019, Mark Hampton (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) and Florence Mok (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)