This book explores the history of the family in Lancashire during and after industrialisation. The family is society’s most basic building block and, as each contributor shows, its ability to adapt to circumstances is one of its most enduring qualities. Economic change created social stresses which, whilst resulting in administrative and institutional change, were primarily absorbed within family groups. Indeed, it could be argued that the family was society’s most effective safety valve and shock absorber, as individuals responded to the pressures created by industrialisation with its associated problems. This book brings together the work of leading historians who have each made unique contributions to our understanding of the family in the North West.

The Lancashire Giant tells the story of a nine-year-old cotton weaver who went on to carve out two extraordinary careers for himself. In the first, David Shackleton became a truly dominating presence in the Edwardian trade union movement, was the third MP to be elected under the banner of the Labor party, and played a critical role in the infancy of the party. His second career, begun at Winston Churchill’s prompting in 1910, took him to the summit of the British civil service and to active participation in the deliberations of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet. Prominent union officials have frequently become government ministers, but none has repeated Shackleton’s achievement in becoming the permanent secretary of a ministry. "This distinctive career is presented and analysed in meticulous detail by Ross Martin... The result is a thorough and rounded portrait strengthened by some suggestive analysis of Shackleton as a private individual."—Labor History "An accessible, detailed, analytic and sympathetic study."—English Historical Review

Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that the advance has occurred through such an outpouring of research and writing that it is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of recent monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three complementary perspectives: those of regional communities, of the working and living environment, and of social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change.