The rise of ‘no religion’ in Britain: The emergence of a new cultural majority

This paper reviews new and existing evidence which shows that ‘no religion’ has risen steadily to rival ‘Christian’ as the preferred self-designation of British people. Drawing on recent survey research by the author, it probes the category of ‘no religion’ and offers a characterisation of the ‘nones’ which reveals, amongst other things, that most are not straightforwardly secular. It compares the British situation with that of comparable countries, asking why Britain has become one of the few no-religion countries in the world today. An explanation is offered that highlights the importance not only of cultural pluralisation and ethical liberalisation in Britain, but of the churches’ opposite direction of travel. The paper ends by reflecting on the extent to which ‘no religion’ has become the new cultural norm, showing why Britain is most accurately described as between Christian and ‘no religion’.

Reinventing the corporation

The corporation has undergone a fundamental change over the last few decades from an organisation with predominantly tangible assets, such as buildings and equipment, to the ‘mindful corporation’ with intangible assets, such as brands, patents and reputations. While the corporation has made immense contributions to economic prosperity and development, it is also associated with growing levels of income and social inequality. To correct its deficiencies and restore trust, it needs to be reinvented for the 21st century. It should be reconceived as a means of commitment to the promotion of the interests of its customers and communities as well as enhancing the wealth of its investors. This requires a careful reconsideration of the purpose of the corporation and its associated forms of ownership and governance. The humanities have a vital role to play in achieving this.

The Shakespearean unscene: Sexual phantasies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Post-Freudian and post-Foucauldian readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream assume that the play celebrates the freeing-up of female sexual desire from neurotic inhibitions or disciplinary norms. But this is incompatible with what we know historically about 16th-century society’s investment in female chastity. This paper addresses the problem of this incompatibility by turning to Shakespeare’s use of forensic or legal rhetoric. In the Roman forensic rhetoric underlying 16th-century poetics, probable arguments of guilt or innocence are ‘invented’ from topics of circumstance, such as the Time, Place or Manner of the deed. The mysterious Night, Wood and Moonlight of Shakespeare’s play can be seen as making sexual crimes (violence, stealth, infidelity) take on the form of probability and fairy agency. The play thus brilliantly represents the stories of Theseus’s notorious rapes, abandonments and perjuries as fearful ‘phantasies’ or imaginings experienced by Hermia and Helena. This explains how the Victorians could interpret the play as a chaste, childlike ballet, while moderns and postmoderns take it to be a play about psychological repressions working against the free play of sexual desire.

Rival jihads: Islam and the Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1918

The Ottoman Empire, under pressure from its ally Germany, declared a jihad shortly after entering the First World War. The move was calculated to rouse Muslims in the British, French and Russian empires to rebellion. Dismissed at the time and since as a ‘jihad made in Germany’, the Ottoman attempt to turn the Great War into a holy war failed to provoke mass revolt in any part of the Muslim world. Yet, as German Orientalists predicted, the mere threat of such a rebellion, particularly in British India, was enough to force Britain and its allies to divert scarce manpower and materiel away from the main theatre of operations in the Western Front to the Ottoman front. The deepening of Britain’s engagement in the Middle Eastern theatre of war across the four years of World War I can be attributed in large part to combating the threat of jihad.

Food globalisation in prehistory: The agrarian foundations of an interconnected continent

This article explores grain crop movement across prehistoric Eurasia. It draws on evidence from archaeobotany, stable isotope studies, and archaeogenetics to date and map the process of food globalisation, and relate it to human consumption, culinary practice and crop ecology. It reviews the findings of a project funded by the European Research Council, Food Globalization in Prehistory, placed in the context of the expansion of research across Eurasia over the last two decades. This major episode of food globalisation has discernible roots in the third millennium BC, which during the second millennium BC fully crystallises into a contiguous network following foothills and mountain corridors with the Himalayan uplift at its heart. We infer a significant bottom-up component to the establishment of this pattern, which serves as a prelude for the top-down valley-bottom agrarian systems that recur from the second millennium BC onwards.

Passionate, eloquent and determined: Heroines’ tales and feminine poetics

This article studies a group of romances, appearing first in French in the mid-12th century in the Roman d’Eneas, and later in Anglo-Norman and Middle English (including Ipomadon and William of Palerne), in which the heroine is given priority over the male protagonist in falling in love and acting to bring that love to fruition. These relationships are aimed at marriage and, very often, procreation, in a way that opens the potential for the founding of a dynasty; they thus go against received ideas of both courtly love and antifeminism. The texts are characterised by long soliloquies given to the heroines that anticipate the Petrarchan discourse of desire, though here it is distinctively feminine and carries the hope of fulfilment; and fulfilment and mutuality are in turn given their own distinctive, mimetic form of poetry.

Social class mobility in modern Britain: changing structure, constant process

The class structure provides an important context for the study of social mobility. The evolution of the class structure is the all-important factor determining individuals’ changing experience of mobility, as expressed in absolute rates. The total mobility rate shows long-term stability; but, because of structural change, trends of rising upward and falling downward mobility in the mid-20th century are now being reversed. Relative mobility rates, comparing the chances of individuals of different class origins arriving at different class destinations, also show long-term stability. All this is evident over a period of more or less continuous educational expansion and reform—thus calling into question the belief that educational policy is key to promoting mobility. Education is best considered as a ‘positional’ good; and the motivation, and capacity, of parents in more advantaged class positions to help their children maintain their competitive edge in the educational system, and in turn in labour markets, underlies the resistance to change that the mobility regime displays.

Thomas Hobbes: Liberal illiberal

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) has often been regarded as a very illiberal thinker —a defender of ‘despotism’ and an advocate of the principle that ‘might is right’. While those accusations are false, it is true that there are distinctly illiberal elements in his thinking. These include absolutism, authoritarianism, anti-constitutionalism and a hostility to democracy. Yet his political theory also contains some of the most important building-blocks of modern liberal thinking about the state and its citizens: the crucial role of consent; natural rights; egalitarianism; the idea of the state as a device to protect people against oppressors; the homogeneity of legal authority within the state; the concept of the state as a public realm; and the idea that the sovereign acts publicly—above all, through law. (These last three points are preconditions of a Rechtsstaat.) And whilst Hobbes denies that people are ruled by a constitution, his theory does acknowledge the need for rule through a constitution.

Cúchulain in the General Post Office: Gaelic revival, Irish rising

This article looks at the importance of the Gaelic language for the development of Irish nationalism in the decades leading up to, and following the Easter Rising of 1916. This importance was mainly symbolical: the Irish language was used mainly by revivalist activists, in a restricted number of functional registers, and largely as an enabling platform of other consciousness-raising activities. It is suggested, however, that such a symbolical instrumentalisation is by no means inconsequential and should be analysed as an important feature of cultural nationalism, not only in Irish history.

Economic impossibilities for our grandchildren?

The paper looks at the development of the secular stagnation thesis, according to which insufficient investment demand could lead to unemployment being a problem in the long run. It does so in the context of the economic history of the time. It explores some 19th-century antecedents of the thesis, before turning to its interwar development. Not only Alvin Hansen, but Keynes and Hicks were involved in the conversations that led to Hansen’s eventual statement of the thesis that economists are familiar with today. The argument made sense in the context of the interwar period, but more so in Britain than the US. The paper concludes by looking briefly at the relevance of the thesis for today.