James Vernon is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.
A work of exciting originality that uses hunger to challenge our
essential ideas about the history of the welfare state and of
democracy and citizenship in twentieth-century Britain. This is a
very major book.
*Geoff Eley, University of Michigan*
A lively and engaging study that demonstrates how hunger is as much
a historical condition as it is a biological one. Elegant,
intelligent, and ambitious, it will be widely read and admired.
*Philippa Levine, University of Southern California*
Hunger: A Modern History moves impressively between the British
domestic and political, the colonial and the global, without
straining the argument or losing touch with the sources. James
Vernon's research ranges over vast tracts of material,
demonstrating concretely and graphically how discussion about
famine originating in nineteenth-century India became central to
discussion about nutrition in twentieth-century Britain.
*Gareth Stedman Jones, Cambridge University*
This is history writing of the most jolting and publicly
significant kind.
*Bruce Robbins, Columbia University*
We think of hunger and famine as symptoms of a failed economy and
government. But shifting cultural perceptions of hunger are
historical agents in their own right, as this probing study,
concentrating on 19th- and 20th-century Britain, shows...Vernon
offers much lucid, trenchant rethinking on a resonant subject.
*Publishers Weekly*
Vernon has put together a persuasive and wide-ranging history of
hunger. His central tenet that hunger is not a natural
catastrophe--it emerges into public view within historical contexts
and for precise political reasons--is compelling.
*The Times*
This survey of British attitudes towards hunger is no mere liberal
guilt-inducer...The book ends in the 1940s with glances forward to
Thatcher, Tebbit, and Blair. Its range is political, sociological,
and media-aware: "Tell the bastards!" says a 1930s documentary
film-maker. Scholarly and unjudgmental, the book does.
*Financial Times*
Hunger is a thought-provoking book. Sharply focused and tightly
argued.
*Nature*
Charts, in great detail, the way hunger was constructed in the 19th
century as something that the lazy and spineless brought upon
themselves and how this perception changed in the 20th century with
the emergence of the welfare state. Hunger may well be the subject
of the book but in many ways it is the site for a discussion of the
claims of market-based liberalism and social democracy and the way
both camps depicted the very welfare state that, among other
things, sought to eliminate malnutrition.
*The Age*
This tension--between the global and the local, the high-calorie
west and the hungry rest--lies at the heart of Hunger: A Modern
History. Historian James Vernon's widely acknowledged grasp of
political history from the ground up brings depth and discernment
to this compellingly argued and cogently written book. Vernon aims
to provide a history of hunger in the UK and the British Empire in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, beginning with the pomp and
circumstance of the 1851 Great Exhibition aand ending with the
cheerful austerity of the 1951 Festival of Britain. He uses
changing British responses to hunger as a window on the rise of new
forms of civil society and social welfare, and as a way to explore
another recurring theme in his work--the question of
responsibility. Who was to blame for hunger, and who could be
expected to relieve it?...This eye for both sides of a debate makes
Hunger: A Modern History both acutely moving and, in the main,
profoundly persuasive...Hunger: A Modern History is politically
engaged history at its most humane, and Vernon uses his compassion
and erudition to drive home a deeply disquieting truth. In the
secular, postmodern west, hunger is perhaps the closest we get to
guilt.
*Lancet*
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