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Professor Jim Tomlinson

Contact Details

j.d.tomlinson@dundee.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0) 1382 3 84516

Profile

Before joining the Programme at Dundee in 2004, I taught for many years in the Economics and then the Government Departments at Brunel University.

My teaching will focus on twentieth-century British history.

My interests are particularly in the history of economic policy, and its ideological and political underpinnings and consequences. I am particularly concerned to integrate the study of the history of the economy with other aspects of British history.

My aim at Dundee will be to follow the Department's tradition of closely integrating my research with my teaching, for the benefit of both.

Teaching Interests

  • Undergraduate modules
  • Britain since 1945
  • Postgraduate
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Publications

Books

  • Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years, 1945-1951 (Cambridge University Press 1996).
  • The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-war Britain (London, 2000).
  • The Labour Governments 1964-70, Vol. 3, Economic Policy (Manchester, 2004).

Articles

  • 'Tale of a Death Exaggerated: how Keynesian Policies Survived the 1970s' Contemporary British History (forthcoming).
  • 'Credible Keynesianism?: New Labour's Macroeconomic Policy and the Political Economy of Coarse Tuning' British Journal of Political Science. Forthcoming, Volume 36, (2006) (with Ben Clift).
  • 'Managing the economy, managing the people: Britain circa 1931-1970' Economic History Review 58 (2005) pp. 555-585.
  • 'Fiscal policy and capital mobility: the construction of economic policy rectitude in Britain and France' New Political Economy 9 (2004), pp.515-537 (with Ben Clift).
  • 'The Labour party and the capitalist firm, c.1950-1970', Historical Journal, September, 2004).
  • 'The Decline of Empire and the Economic 'Decline' of Britain', Twentieth Century British History, 14 (2003).
  • 'The Commonwealth, the Balance of Payments and the Politics of International Poverty: British Aid Policy, 1958-71', Contemporary European History, 12 (2003).
  • 'The "Productivity Problem" in Britain in the 1960s', Past and Present, 175 (2002).
  • 'Tawney and the Third Way', Journal of Political Ideologies, 7 (2002) (with Ben Clift).
  • 'Labour and the Market in Historical Perspective: the Limits of Tawney's Ethical Socialism', Contemporary British History, 16 (2002).

Research Statement

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My current long-term project is entitled 'managing the economy, managing the people' and aims to move beyond the analysis of elite discourses in the history of economic policy to try and analyse how 'the economy' was presented to the population at large, the mechanisms deployed to shape such understandings and their effects.

In addition, I am working on the comparative development of recent macroeconomic management in Britain and France (with Ben Clift of Warwick University), and on the political economy of the decline of jute in Dundee since the Second World War, with Carlo Morelli.

Suggested areas for postgraduate supervision

National economic management and 'Keynesianism' in Britain.
The Labour Party and the economy.
Popular understanding of the economy.
The history of British overseas development policy.

Research Problems

Historians working on very recent history can easily be drawn into allowing the frameworks deployed by contemporary actors to shape their understanding. For example, because so much of Britain's post-war history has been told in terms of 'decline' many historians have taken such decline for granted, rather than investigating the highly specific conditions under which such a term came to be deployed. The aim of much of my research is to 'historicize' such ways of looking at recent British history, by locating them in their conditions of origin, and treating them as historical products rather than taken for granted ways of understanding.

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