Customer Reviews

We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars

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Simon Pugh's social history of Britain between the First and Second World Wars is an excellent text for the period. Well set out into themed chapters from dietary habits through to sexuality and gender, with excursions into areas as diverse as monarchy, empire, divorce and aviation his book gives readers a thorough understanding of the period. Essentially an advanced text book it reads well and easily, lending itself to dipping in and out to read specific chapters in isolation - very good if you have an essay on interwar society....

However reading all the chapters does reveal several interesting aspects of the period. One is the increasing demise of Scotland (suffering over twice the loss of life of any other region of Great Britain in the War then hit economically very hard by the decline of its heavy industry). More significantly, Pugh argues that far from being the period of economic depression, doom and gloom that it is usually portrayed as, outside depressed areas like Scotland the years were ones of growing prosperity which saw the emergence of much of modern consumerist Britain: aspirations of property owning, the increasing desire for consumer durables, and the restructuring of the economy on services based in the south rather than the traditional heavy industries of the north. Pugh even suggests the second World War is then perceived by society as an obstruction to all of this - hence the widespread desire from very early on in the war to seek an outcome that will broaden this process across society when war ends through a welfare state and greater planned economic development.