Distant Strangers Ho Britain Became Modern [Hardcover]

What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern?

InDistant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers.

Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.

James Vernonis professor of history at UC Berkeley. He is author or editor of several books including, most recently,Hunger: A Modern HistoryandThe Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain(UCP/GAIA, 2011), and is coeditor of the Berkeley Series in British Studies.?

List of Figures
Preface

1 What Is Modernity?
2 A Society of Strangers
3 Governing Strangers
4 Associating with Strangers
5 An Economy of Strangers

Conclusion
Notes
Index

A fresh look at some well-known issues.? In this lively and accessible work, James Vernon finds in the study of Victorian Britain a way to reenergize and make useful the slippery category of modernity.? Neither a valorization nor a celebration of Britains explosive nineteenth-century growth, Vernons account instead offers a framework for global histories of modernity as well as a radical interpretation of modern Britain. Vernon takes familiar materials and arguments and transforms them into a highly original argument that reaches well beyond the shores of this small island kinlÃs