Counting the Cost of Drink in Britain, 1830-1918

17 Jul 2015

All day

CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, CB3 9DT - SG1&2

Description
Programme

Description

Please register online for this event.
Conference fee: £20 (full), £10 (students) – includes lunch, tea/coffee
Deadline: 15 July 2015

Twitter Hashtag: #CRASSHdrink

Convener

David Beckingham (University of Cambridge)

Summary

In debates about alcohol in Britain competing ideologies have shaped how people have read the evidence available to them and indeed how they have gone about collecting such evidence. This conference examines the construction and use of such evidence in the control of drinking and drunkenness, taking as its parameters the nineteenth-century and the regulations of World War One.

Scholars working across the social sciences and humanities are invited to address the connection between assessments of the cost of drink – however defined – and attempts to shape policy at local or national scales. By so doing, the conference will offer an important opportunity to consider the evidence base that has informed policy development on the drink question. But it also aims to further our understanding of what counted as evidence and whose evidence could be counted. Examples might include medical analyses, police statistics, brewery and taxation records, insurance calculations, and various religious and moral assessments that attempted to document the social costs of drinking and drunkenness.

Interrogating how these costs were counted will help us understand the trajectory of past regulation as well as holding out the potential for better historically-informed policy debates in the present.

Programme

FRIDAY 17 JULY 2015 (provisional)
9.30-10.00	Registration
10.00-11.15	SESSION 1: POLITICS OF DRINK David Beckingham (University of Cambridge): The nation’s drink bill John Greenaway (University of East Anglia): How policy-based evidence always trumps evidence-based policy: reflections from the history of alcohol control in Britain
11.15-11.45	Coffee break
11.45-12.45	SESSION 2: COUNTERING THE COSTS OF DRINK Peter Hession (University of Cambridge): “A docile and obedient people”: the political costs of temperance in 1840s Ireland Annemarie McAllister (University of Central Lancashire): One million more
12.45-13.45	Lunch
13.45-14.45	SESSION 3: WRITING THE COSTS OF DRINK Pam Lock (University of Bristol): The moral and economic price of female drinking and drunkenness in Hard Times and 'Janet's Repentance' Philip Howell (University of Cambridge): The drunkard’s nose: making and unmaking the person in Trollope’s 'The Spotted Dog’
14.45-15.15	Coffee break
15.15-16.15	SESSION 4: HOW DRINKING WAS COUNTED James Kneale (University College London): Mapping, counting and measuring drink: temperance statistics in Britain,1840-1911 Stella Moss (Royal Holloway, University of London): “Proper Safeguards”: separation allowances and the regulation of women's drinking in the First World War
16.15-16.30	Short break
16.30-17.30	GENERAL DISCUSSION