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Hunger - A Modern History (Hardcover) Loot Price: R1,316
Discovery Miles 13 160
Hunger - A Modern History (Hardcover): James Vernon

Hunger - A Modern History (Hardcover)

James Vernon

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Loot Price R1,316 Discovery Miles 13 160 | Repayment Terms: R123 pm x 12*

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From British academic Vernon, a dense social history of hunger in Britain from the mid 19th century to the 1940s. Less than 200 years ago, Vernon notes, people dying of hunger were considered to be something less than human: "Their vulnerability to acts of nature or providence, illustrated only their lack of industry and moral fiber." The classical political economy of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus had established hunger as an avoidable man-made phenomenon. However, by the 1840s, the humanitarian reaction against the New Poor Law and the famine in Ireland put a face to those dying of starvation. A new generation of crusading journalists such as Vaughan Nash, Henry Nevinson and Henry Brailsford published shocking exposes, and famine in Ireland and India became identified with the failure of British colonial rule. May 1905 saw the first Hunger March, as hungry unemployed boot-workers marched from Raund (Leicestershire) to London, aiming to refute the claim that the unemployed were degenerate. Hunger strikes spread from suffragettes to Irish republicans, and Indians used their deep tradition of fasting and hunger striking to dramatize the illegality of colonial rule. After identifying the humanitarian concern and the advent of the modern welfare state, Vernon moves to the science of nutrition, or dietetics, which measured a minimum nutritional standard and was used to calculate the social costs of hunger in terms of productivity, efficiency and social stability. By the 1920s, hunger was redefined in terms of quality of diet. The World Wars saw the introduction of "collective feeding," i.e., factory canteens and school meals, and the 1940s saw the rise of domestic science and the efficient kitchen. Throughout the book, Vernon focuses in close academic detail on the precarious achievements of the British welfare state and the United Nations.From starvation to malnutrition to dieting, the knotty, slippery struggle to define and regulate hunger in the modern world. (Kirkus Reviews)
Hunger is as old as history itself. Indeed, it appears to be a timeless and inescapable biological condition. And yet perceptions of hunger and of the hungry have changed over time and differed from place to place. Hunger has a history, which can now be told.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, hunger was viewed as an unavoidable natural phenomenon or as the fault of its lazy and morally flawed victims. By the middle of the twentieth century, a new understanding of hunger had taken root. Across the British Empire and beyond, humanitarian groups, political activists, social reformers, and nutritional scientists established that the hungry were innocent victims of political and economic forces outside their control. Hunger was now seen as a global social problem requiring government intervention in the form of welfare to aid the hungry at home and abroad. James Vernon captures this momentous shift as it occurred in imperial Britain over the past two centuries.

Rigorously researched, "Hunger: A Modern History" draws together social, cultural, and political history in a novel way, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions, such as the United Nations, committed to the conquest of world hunger. All those moved by the plight of the hungry will want to read this compelling book.

General

Imprint: The Belknap Press
Country of origin: United States
Release date: November 2007
First published: November 2007
Authors: James Vernon
Dimensions: 235 x 156 x 33mm (L x W x T)
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02678-0
Categories: Books > Humanities > History > World history > General
Books > History > World history > General
LSN: 0-674-02678-0
Barcode: 9780674026780

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