2024/03/01 by Hannah Charnock, Shahmima Akhtar, Sarah Crook +3 · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Historical Economic and Social Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwae028
openalex publication_date 2024/03/01 · openalex created_date 2024/05/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
Twentieth Century British History is now Modern British History. The volume numbering has not reset to 1, and the editorial board and the advisory and international boards remain as they were. There is more continuity than change. But the need to update the journal’s name, now that we are nearly a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, calls for some reflection on the history of the journal and the future of the field. Launching a journal called Twentieth Century British History (TCBH) a decade before the end of the twentieth century was probably asking for trouble. At the time, however, the political-history orientation of the journal combined with the thirty-year rule that applied—with many exceptions—to the transfer of government department files to the Public Record Office, as it then was, meant that empirical research on British history seldom went beyond the immediate post-war decades. Archival material from the more recent past was more readily available for some cultural history topics (chiefly through the papers of literary and artistic figures deposited in research libraries), but the scholarly literature on British culture in the post-war decades was still thin in the early 2000s.1 The explosion of digital source material and the Blair government’s Freedom of Information Act, which provided for requests for expedited opening of public records, have made empirical research on the recent past more feasible. Maintaining a notional cut-off date of 2000 would not only commit the journal to a periodization that few historians would want to defend strenuously; but it would also exclude exciting new work. There are, moreover, major problems in ‘twentieth-century British history’ that extend beyond the 1990s: for instance, neoliberalism, relations with the European Union (EU), and many topics in the history of sexuality. So the journal needed a new name that indicated its openness to work extending into the 2000s and up to the present. The editors and the advisory and international boards settled on ‘Modern British History’.