Festschriftiness

• Structures and Transformations in Modern British History edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence
  Cambridge, 331 pp, £50.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 0 521 51882 6
• BuyThe Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon
  California, 271 pp, £20.95, May 2011, ISBN 978 0 9845909 5 7
• Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin edited by Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte
  Oxford, 320 pp, £65.00, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 19 957988 4

Publishers hate festschrifts, but scholars love them, and this has been a good year, with the publication of collections honouring three men who have done much to shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good friends. But for several reasons – location, intellectual formation, sex and especially nationality (I am an American, one of those interlopers whose contribution to British history has been, in Boyd Hilton’s words, ‘respectable at best’) – I stand at a slight distance from them.