Locality, politics and culture : Poplar in the 1920s.
Abstract
The thesis begins with a discussion of the literature on
local working-class politics, which includes the work of
labour historians, political geographers and locality-study
writers. The latter have been especially keen to
acknowledge the unique causal powers of the social
formations of specific localities and to explore the
implications of these for local political behaviour.
Nonetheless, locality studies share with other approaches
to local politics an interest in class to exclusion of
other bases of social action, and a structuralism which
denies human agency.
The history of Poplar in the 1920s denies such
explanatory logic. The Labour Party came to power in the
borough in 1919. Yet although the class and economic
structure of Poplar was very similar to that of the rest of
east London, Poplar Labour Party was unique in the degree
of its militancy.
In order to explain this radicalism, the thesis turns
away from structural analysis and towards cultural
interpretation, exploring Poplar's politics in terms of
local culture and civil society, focussing on five themes:
the politics of class and of gender, the discourses of
citizenship, the morality of the neighbourhoods and the
religious faiths. The influence of these cultural
'communal sensibilities' on Poplar Labour Party are traced
in order to stress the complexity and contingency of the
relationship between a locality and its politics.
That contingency is further emphasised in the
conclusion, which describes the shift in Poplar Labour
Party away from a left-wing and participatory form of
politics and towards a right-wing and elitist mode as the
1920s progressed. It is concluded that both types of
politics were closely linked to Poplar's culture and that,
although local culture in all its complexity is vital for
the understanding of local politics, there is no necessary
relationship between a culture and the form of political
expression it may take.
Authors
Rose, Gillian CathrynCollections
- Theses [3706]