Staff Profiles

Undergraduate

• U67724: Politics, Society and Culture in Modern Britain

I currently lead one second-year module. Politics, Society and Culture in Modern Britain, c. 1815-1997—which I also convene with my colleague Dr Glen O’Hara—is designed to introduce students to some of the ways Britain became a recognizably modern society, albeit in often peculiar ways. Beginning with considerations of class, gender and empire, it goes on to examine the political make-up of modern Britain, and institutions such as public schools, the Boy Scouts and trade unions.

• U67881: Evil in European Thought and Culture, c. 1750-1950 (third-year, advanced study module)   

I also lead one third-year specialist module, entitled Evil in European Thought and Culture, c. 1750-1950. Offered as an Advanced Study Module in the History of Ideas, the module introduces students to some of the ways key European thinkers (Voltaire, Nietzsche, Arendt) and writers (Dostoyevsky, Conrad) grappled with extremes of human behaviour and suffering during the period c. 1750-c. 1950.

Postgraduate

• P67510: Worlds of Risk: Technology, Health and the Environment since 1800

With my colleague Dr Viviane Quirke, I offer a specialist MA module on the history of health-related risks since roughly 1800, in particular those of an environmental, technological and medical sort. The aim is encourage students to reflect on the novelty of the present age, and to explore questions about when and how understanding and managing risks became such a key feature of modern societies. Key topics include climate change and technological catastrophes, and the risks that have accompanied the rise of new technologies, particularly synthetic chemicals, drugs, artificial foodstuffs, and the nuclear industry.

Supervision

Research supervision

I am very happy to supervise doctoral research on all aspects of Victorian and Edwardian governance, especially those concerned with public health and welfare, and logistics and technology (considerations of time, space and speed). I’m also keen to supervise projects that relate to my current research projects on the history of secrecy, corruption and public life in modern Britain, and the history and historiography of systems (see below).

My current and completed research students as Director of Studies—doctoral and post-doctoral—are as follows:

• Dr Mike Esbester, “Living in Safety: The Culture of ‘Safety’ and Accident Prevention in Everyday Life in Britain, c.1900-2000” (AHRC-funded, Early Career Fellowship, Nov 2010-Aug 2011)
• Dr Stefan Fisher-Høyrem: “Time Machines: Technology and the Performance of Secular Time in Victorian England” (Norwegian Government scholarship, Sep 2008-Sep 2012)
• Dr Steven Byrne: “Variation, Classification and Education: The Making and Remaking of the ‘Normal Child’ in England, c. 1880-1914” (AHRC-funded, Sep 2009-Sep 2013)
• Dr Pete Mills: “Popular Conspiracism in Britain, c. 1880-1914” (AHRC-funded, Sep 2010-Sep 2014)
• (Co-Director with Dr Jim Cooper) Sarah Slator: “Politics in the Court Room: International Communism, the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Rivonia Trial in South Africa, 1963-64” (Sep, 2015-Present)

My last major research project came to fruition in 2016, in the form of my first monograph, Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910, published as part of the Berkeley Series in British Studies by University of California Press. Briefly put, the book was an attempt to rewrite the history of the modernity of modern public health in terms of the contested formation and functioning of multiple, interlocking systems, human and material, administrative and technological. It was an attempt to displace the state as the principal agent of modern power by combining the insights of both the cultural and the material turns—if also to move beyond them by a novel focus on systems (though wisely or otherwise, I left my debts to systems theory out of the book). A number of reviews have now appeared; and the most extensive—including a response from me—can be found here: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2166

(i) Corruption and the history of the political 

My current research interests lie in two areas, both of which, or so I like to think, can be found in embryonic form in Governing Systems. One of these is new ways of writing the political history of modern Britain, and rethinking where it is we might locate “the political”, which for me extends much beyond what we think of as “party-politics”. This is something I’m currently working on in the form of a new—and most likely quite short and essayistic—history of political corruption, from roughly 1830 up to the present: or more precisely, the persistence, if also reworking, of corruption as a recurrent feature of public life. The basic argument is that “corruption”—the very word, in all of its varied applications, as much as the murky practices that sustain it and arouse suspicion—allows us to rethink some of the central antagonisms that animate the exercise of modern power, in this case between competing visions of the (general) public good and (particular) class-based economic interests.

(ii) An ecological history of health and welfare    

The second is more obviously indebted to my first book and concerns developing what, for the moment, I’m styling as an “ecological” (or more simply, systems-based) approach to writing the history of health and welfare in modern Britain during the long nineteenth century. The aim is to offer a fresh and more holistic history of this much-studied field by abandoning hitherto crucial organizing concepts, notably “the state.” Instead, it will foreground the systemic qualities of what happened, and in particular the growth of ever-more dense and complex interrelations between human and environmental life-cycles on the one hand, and bureaucratic, political and technological forms of mediation and abstraction on the other. Partly building on recent work on the history and sociology of risk, the basic argument is that this growth of systemic complexity and interpenetration was the cause and effect of a remarkable structural paradox, whereby growing human mastery and control (over nature, technology and our own welfare) was accompanied by growing indeterminacy and a radical loss of control (again, over nature, technology and our own welfare). What we call “the welfare state” is perhaps the best known product of this paradox; but it can also be seen in attempts to regulate pollution and eradicate danger from the workplace and home.

Books

• Crook T, Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, c. 1830–1910, University of California Press (2016)
  ISBN: 9780520290341
  Website 
• Crook T, Esbester M, Ed., Governing Risks in Modern Britain: Danger, Safety and Accidents, c. 1800–2000, Palgrave Macmillan UK (2016)
  ISBN: 9781137467447 eISBN: 9781137467454
  Abstract For more than 200 years, everyday life in Britain has been beset by a variety of dangers, from the mundane to the life-threatening. Governing Risks in Modern Britain focuses on the steps taken to manage these dangers and to prevent accidents since approximately 1800. It brings together cutting-edge research to help us understand the multiple and contested ways in which dangers have been governed. It demonstrates that the category of `risk', broadly defined, provides a new means of historicising some key developments in British society. Chapters explore road safety and policing, environmental and technological dangers, and occupational health and safety. The book thus brings together practices and ideas previously treated in isolation, situating them in a common context of risk-related debates, dilemmas and difficulties. Doing so, it argues, advances our understanding of how modern British society has been governed and helps to set our risk-obsessed present in some much needed historical perspective.Website 
• Crook T, Ed., Sanitary Reform, Class and the Victorian City, Pickering & Chatto (2013)
  ISBN: 9781848931633 eISBN: 9781848931640
  Abstract Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, it caused unprecedented urban growth and significantly increased the spread of disease. This presented new challenges to public health not least because the relationship between sanitary conditions and disease was not universally acknowledged. The multifaceted nature of the debate over the course of the nineteenth century is reflected in the material included in this collection. Opinions from those involved in medicine, engineering, civic development, architecture and politics are all represented. The collection accounts for provincial cities as well as London, offering a nationwide perspective on the conditions of British urban life. This reset edition, published in two parts, makes available for the first time a modern, edited collection of rare nineteenth-century documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. The documents included come from newspapers and journals, reports of Medical Health Officers and government agencies, architectural guides and promotional literature from sanitary communities. An extensive general introduction sets the material in context and extends the debate to provide a contemporary international perspective. Each volume will begin with an introduction, and the documents presented will have headnotes and endnotes provided. A full index will appear in the final volume. This unique resource is an invaluable tool for researchers of the History of Science and Medicine and Victorian Studies.
• Crook T, O'Hara G, Ed., Statistics and the public sphere: numbers and the people in modern Britain, 1800-2000, Routledge (2011)
  ISBN: 9780415878944 eISBN: 9780203818671
  Abstract Contemporary public life in Britain would be unthinkable without the use of statistics and statistical reasoning. Numbers dominate political discussion, facilitating debate while also attracting criticism on the grounds of their veracity and utility. However, the historical role and place of statistics within Britain's public sphere has yet to receive the attention it deserves. There exist numerous histories of both modern statistical reasoning and the modern public sphere; but to date, there are no works which, quite pointedly, aim to analyse the historical entanglement of the two. Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c.1800-2000 directly addresses this neglected area of historiography, and in so doing places the present in some much needed historical perspective.Website 
• Crook T, Gill R, Taithe B, Ed., Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c.1830–2000, Palgrave Macmillan (2011)
  ISBN: 9780230241275 eISBN: 9780230319325
  Abstract Evil and barbarism continue to be associated with the totalitarian 'extremes' of twentieth-century Europe. Addressing domestic and imperial conflicts in modern Britain and beyond, as well as varied forms of representation, this volume explores the inter-relations of evil, atrocity and civilizational prejudice within liberal cultures of governance.Website 

Journal articles

• Crook T, 'Model institutions and the geography of social reform in early Victorian Britain'
  Historical Journal 62 (3) (2019) pp.789-812
  ISSN: 0018-246X eISSN: 1469-5103
  Abstract This article reconsiders the nature and novelty of social reform in Britain during the early Victorian period. Historians have long ceased to debate the period in terms of a ‘revolution in government’, or the beginnings of a welfare state. Instead, the current consensus presents a picture of only modest, fitful change. Neither the state, nor the overall ideological landscape, was radically transformed. This article seeks to reinject a sense of transformative change back into these decades. It does so by examining a neglected facet of this otherwise richly served period of social reform: the formation and functioning of a series of self-styled ‘model’ institutions that spanned the fields of education, prisons, housing and sanitation. In particular, what the use of these model institutions brings into sharp focus are the radical changes that occurred in the geography of social reform, which at this point began to develop according to multiple spatial relations, extending at once within and beyond Britain. Between them, they helped to engineer a truly cosmopolitan culture of social policymaking, which was both multi-directional – policies flowed outwards and inwards – and composed of multiple relations, national, imperial, and transnational.Website 
• Crook M, Crook T, 'Contesting "Corruption": Electoral Morality and the Reform of Voting Practices in Britain and France, c. 1789‒1914'
  Zeitsprünge 23 (1-2) (2019) pp.136-149
  ISSN: 1431-7451 eISSN: 1431-7451
  
• Crook T, Velkar A, 'Review of periodical literature published in 2013: 1850–1945'
  Economic History Review 68 (1) (2015) pp.326-339
  ISSN: 0013-0117
  Website 
• Crook M, Crook T, 'Ballot papers and the practice of elections: Britain, France and the United States of America, c. 1500–2000'
  Historical Research 88 (241) (2015) pp.530-561
  ISSN: 0950-3471 eISSN: 1468-2281
  Abstract

  The humble ballot paper is a defining technology of elections throughout the world. This article interrogates its contested past by demonstrating – over a long period and in the context of three contrasting countries – how and why it emerged in the early modern period and how it was then used, abused and regulated in the context of the expanded, and eventually mass, electoral arenas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ironically, by the time that the ballot paper was firmly established, its monopoly was already being challenged by mechanical and then electronic media, which may eventually condemn it to extinction.

  Website 
• Crook T, Velkar A, 'Review of periodical literature published in 2012: 1850–1945'
  Economic History Review 67 (1) (2014) pp.269-282
  ISSN: 0013-0117
  Website 
• Crook T, 'Habit as switchpoint'
  Body and Society 19 (2013) pp.275-281
  ISSN: 1357-034X
  Abstract

  Building on Mary Poovey’s reflections, this article outlines a two-fold genealogy of habit in the context of the philosophy and practice of liberalism. One aspect relates to the word ‘habit’, which by the 19th century had come to mean the repetitive actions of the body and mind, thus shedding its former association with dress and collective customs. The second relates to how ‘habit’ functioned as a means of mediating the tensions of liberalism, three in particular: between the self and the social; between an individual’s past, present and future actions; and between the role of the state and the role of self-government.

  Website 
• Crook T, Velkar A, 'Review of periodical literature published in 2011: 1850–1945'
  Economic History Review 66 (1) (2013) pp.326-337
  ISSN: 0013-0117
  Website 
• Crook M, Crook T, 'Reforming voting practices in a global age: the making and remaking of the modern secret ballot in Britain, France and the United States, c.1600-c.1950'
  Past and Present 212 (1) (2011) pp.199-237
  ISSN: 0031-2746
  Website 
• Crook M, Crook T, 'L’isoloir universel? : L’avènement d’un scrutin secret global au XIXe siècle'
  Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 43 (2) (2011) pp.41-55
  ISSN: 1265-1354 eISSN: 1777-5329
  Abstract http://journals.openedition.org/rh19/4151
  Le vote secret est actuellement considéré comme la seule méthode qui puisse assurer la sincérité des élections. Tel n’a pas toujours été le cas. Cet article se veut une contribution à une histoire critique et en devenir de l’acte de vote. Au cours du «  long  » dix-neuvième siècle, l’adoption du vote secret provoqua un grand débat dans les pays occidentaux. Cette discussion devint globale à travers la comparaison entre les systèmes électoraux. Cette approche transnationale de la réforme, fondée sur des réseaux internationaux de communication plus rapides, est cependant restée dans l’ombre, alors qu’elle est essentielle pour comprendre l’invention et la diffusion à travers le monde de l’«  australian ballot  », avec son bulletin officiel imprimé et surtout son isoloir. Une innovation d’origine coloniale a ainsi inspiré le renouveau des procédures électorales en Angleterre et aux États-Unis, puis en Belgique et en France. La diffusion du vote secret offre un excellent exemple de circulation des idées et des pratiques. Dans ce cas néanmoins, des spécificités locales ont persisté, faisant ainsi obstacle à l’adoption d’un modèle uniforme. = These days we take it for granted that the secret ballot is the only method of voting compatible with free and fair elections. However, this has not always been the case and the study that follows contributes to a critical history of the vote that historians are beginning to construct. During the long nineteenth century, as countries considered adopting the secret ballot, there was much argument over its relationship to democracy. This debate was conducted on a global scale, as different western countries compared and contrasted various aspects of their respective electoral systems. This transnational approach to reform, based on improved communications and international mobility, has not been recognised. Yet without it the pioneering ‘Australian Ballot’, with its printed ballot papers and polling booths, would not have been invented, nor disseminated across the world. This colonial innovation directly inspired reform in Britain, then the United States, and it was later relayed to France after its adoption in Belgium. Even so, while the diffusion of the secret ballot offers a striking illustration of transnationalism, it was far from imposing uniformity as local variations in practice persisted.
• Crook T, 'Civil Religion and the History of Democratic Modernity: Probing the Limits of the Sacred and the Secular'
  Religion Compass 4 (6) (2010) pp.376-387
  ISSN: 1749-8171
  Abstract The aim of this essay is to introduce readers to recent work on the concept of"civil religion" , what might be regarded as the democratic variant of political religion. Ever since 1967, when the sociologist Robert Bellah published his article"Civil Religion in America" , the concept has been the subject of intense debate and ongoing refinement. The essay reviews the recent contributions of Marcela Cristi and Emilio Gentile. However, it also seeks to introduce readers to some old and recent work on the history of democratic modernity (including Charles Taylor" s A Secular Age), which, it is argued, represents an alternative way of thinking about the sacred dimensions of ostensibly secular national republics. Given the increasing tendency to question the equation of modernity and secularity, the concept of civil religion is likely to be the subject of further scrutiny in years to come. The essay concludes by highlighting a key problem which still awaits satisfactory resolution: whether or not civil religions might be understood in relation to an underlying set of universal, anthropological needs.Website 
• Crook T, 'Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England'
  Journal of Modern Craft 2 (1) (2009) pp.17-32
  ISSN: 1749-6772
  Abstract This article seeks to rethink the modernity of modern craft by revisiting one of its first manifestations, the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Current scholarship suggests that the movement was both modern and antimodern. This article argues instead that it embodied an alternative modernity, forged within a broader modernity characterized by a multiplicity of "dialogs" between past, present and future; Europe and the rest of the world; and defining modern processes and counter-processes.Website 
• Crook T, 'Putting matter in its right place: dirt, time and regeneration in mid-Victorian Britain'
  Journal of Victorian Culture 13 (2) (2008) pp.200-222
  ISSN: 1355-5502
  Website 
• Crook T, 'Accommodating the outcast: common lodging houses and the limits of urban governance in Victorian and Edwardian London'
  Urban History 35 (3) (2008) pp.414-436
  ISSN: 0963-9268 eISSN: 1469-8706
  Abstract This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.Website 
• Crook T, 'Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain'
  Body and Society 14 (4) (2008) pp.15-35
  ISSN: 1357-034X
  Abstract This article examines the spatialization of sleep in Victorian Britain across a range of institutions, including homes and dormitories. It situates the emergence of modern sleeping space at the intersection of two key narratives regarding the history of the body: Elias's `civilising process' and Foucault's account of the realization of a `disciplinary society'. Beginning in the early modern period, sleeping bodies were gradually accorded their own space set apart from others, and by the end of the 19th century the individual bed was regarded as an essential ingredient of civilized society. However, the evolution of modern sleeping space was only in part informed by ideas of privacy and civility: it was also animated by ideas concerning the functioning of `normal' bodies and minds, the governmental agency of space and the moral integrity of nuclear families. Furthermore, the bed remained a highly problematic, indeterminate space, facilitating deviant as much as civilized behaviour, and giving rise to all manner of pathologies, perversities and phobias. In this respect, the history of sleeping space also sheds light on the reciprocities of rule and resistance, pleasure and power, which at once constitute and imperil the integrity of the modern body. Website 
• Crook T, 'Power, privacy and pleasure: Liberalism and the modern cubicle'
  Cultural Studies 21 (4/5) (2007) pp.549-569
  ISSN: 0950-2386 eISSN: 1466-4348
  Abstract This paper examines the establishment and appropriation of a hitherto overlooked space: the modern cubicle. The principal aim of the paper is to develop a political understanding of cubicle space in terms of the everyday practice of liberalism, and in particular Victorian liberalism. The key function it played in this respect was to afford subjects the freedom to operate on themselves in private and effect a moral and physical individuation of the self; part of its novelty as a site of power was the relative intensity with which it bound together various ethical norms, the body and the senses. But the modern cubicle illuminates much else besides. It allows for an exploration of the various cultural values – class, nature, gender, economy, amongst others – that liberalism sought to secure in material terms, and the equally varied spatial, technological and administrative tactics through which it operated. The cubicle, however, was always something of a fragile and indeterminate amalgam of human and non-human agency: civilised indulgence might develop into deviance; and technological fluency deteriorate into breakdown. To this extent, the cubicle also illuminates some of the reciprocities of rule and resistance, power and pleasure that characterise modern liberalism.Website 
• Crook T, 'Sanitary inspection and the public sphere in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain: A case study in liberal governance'
  Social History 32 (4) (2007) pp.369-393
  ISSN: 0307-1022
  Abstract http://www.jstor.org/stable/25594164Website 
• Crook M, Crook T, 'The Advent of the Secret Ballot in Britain and France, 1789-1914: From Public Assembly to Private Compartment'
  History 92 (2007) pp.449-471
  ISSN: 0018-2648
  Abstract These days the secret ballot is taken for granted and it is often seen as the natural complement of universal, democratic suffrage. Its emergence, however, was just as contested and varied as the franchise and raised similar issues concerning the nature and practice of citizenship. This article focuses on the emergence of the secret ballot in Britain and France, two countries with a long history of parliamentary and local elections. In Britain, the secret ballot was introduced in 1872, while in France, which introduced universal male suffrage in 1848, it was as late as 1913 before envelope and polling booth rendered the vote completely secure. This study documents the varied polling practices employed in both countries prior to the onset of the secret ballot. It also highlights the contentious nature of polling reform. For some, the secret ballot was regarded as a means of safeguarding electoral independence and eliminating corruption. Others, including radicals, argued quite the opposite: that secret voting was an affront to honourable, public-spirited citizenship. In the end, full secrecy was achieved as part of the broader process of domesticating and disciplining the exercise of a mass franchise.Website 
• Crook T, '“Schools for the moral training of the people”: Public baths, liberalism and the promotion of cleanliness in Victorian Britain'
  European Review of History/Revue européenne d’Histoire 13 (1) (2006) pp.21-47
  ISSN: 1350-7486
  Abstract This article examines Victorian public baths as institutions of active, embodied liberalism: as political spaces where subjects went to practise and enhance their powers of self-government, and in so doing embody and perform a clean and respectable lifestyle. To some extent, public baths can be understood as disciplinary institutions. According to its promoters, personal cleanliness went hand in hand with sober, industrious habits and a conscientious sense of domestic and social responsibility. At the same time, they also formed significant ethical sites, for bathing was a privilege that had to be paid for and as such actively adopted as a lifestyle choice; and, to this extent, they were about facilitating, rather than coercing, a certain civilised freedom. Public baths also allow for an exploration of the material facets of Victorian liberalism, of its spatial and corporeal dimensions. Washing was a practice that not only took place within a privatising architecture but one that also entailed an intensified awareness of the materiality of the self, and especially its covering, the skin. As an art of the self, as a form of subjective individualisation, washing was at once an ethical and a sensory, a moral and a physical, enactment of power. = Cet article se penche sur les bains publics comme un exemple pratique et physique du libéralisme, comme un espace ou les possibilités de la connaissance de soi et de la gouvernementalité pouvaient s'exprimer. Dans un certain sens les bains publics avaient une fonction disciplinaire dans le sens d'un parallèle entre la propreté et la sobriété, la responsabilité et la domesticité. En un autre sens les bains représentaient un site éthique dans la mesure où ils restaient un privilège payant et un choix de vie qui facilitait plutôt qu'il ne forçait une entrée dans le domaine de la liberté et de la civilité. Les bains publics permettent aussi une exploration de l'espace physique et matériel du libéralisme et des rapports entre une entreprise de type privé et les soins du corps et plus particulièrement de la peau. Dans ce sens les soins corporels et les bains représentaient un ensemble d'exercices du pouvoir de soi sur soi: éthique, sensorial, moral et physique.Website 

Book chapters

• Crook M, Crook T, '‘Une technologie démocratique: l’invention du bulletin de vote, 1500-1900’' in Christophe Le Digol, Virginie Hollard, Christophe Voilliot and Raphaël Barat (ed.), Histoire(s) d’élection(s). Représentations et usages du vote de l’Antiquité a nos jours, Éditions du CNRS (2018)
  ISBN: 978-2-271-08809-3
  
• Crook T, Esbester M, 'Risk and the History of Governing Modern Britain, c. 1800-2000' in Crook T, Esbester M (ed.), Governing Risks: Danger, Safety and Accidents in Modern Britain, c.1800-2000, Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
  ISBN: 9781137467447 eISBN: 9781137467454
  Abstract In the introduction to the volume, Crook and Esbester critically explore how risk and its governance are characterized and periodized, both by historians and by social scientists such as Giddens, Beck, Luhmann and Ewald. By considering what is meant by concepts such as risk, danger and accident, they also demonstrate the significance of this area for historians of modern Britain and argue that it should be foregrounded as a subject of analysis. Central to this is the importance of governance extending beyond the ‘state’ as often defined. The chapter ends by outlining the volume structure and some of the bigger themes highlighted by the contributors.Website 
• Crook T, 'Danger in the drains: Sewer gas, sewerage systems and the home, 1850-1900' in Crook, T, Esbester M (ed.), Governing Risks: Danger, Safety and Accidents in Modern Britain, c.1800-2000, Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
  ISBN: 9781137467447 eISBN: 9781137467454
  Abstract Crook’s chapter analyses some of the contestation surrounding the introduction of large-scale, technologised, water-borne sewerage systems in towns and cities. It focuses on the early installation of water-closets in middle-class homes and the danger of ‘sewer gas’. He argues that these problems were managed in much the same way as other hazards created by urban infrastructural projects: standards were set and revised; inspectors were called in; and technological solutions were implemented and reviewed. Sewer gas is particularly significant because it targeted the home, arousing fear on account of its ability to infiltrate what was supposed to be an inviolable sphere of familial intimacy and safety. Thus, sewer gas was very much a composite risk: a risk defined as much by public fear and dispute as by expert ‘rationality’ and technological savvy.Website 
• Crook T, 'Health Care and the Design and Management of Public and Private Space: Britain, France and the US, c.1750-c.1950' in P Weindling (ed.), Healthcare in Private and Public from the Early Modern Period to 2000, Routledge (2015)
  ISBN: 9780415727006 eISBN: 9780415727006
  Abstract https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781317578307
  It would be claiming too much to say that healthcare has been responsible for constituting the distinction between public and private space – a distinction, in any case, that scholars have used to examine the built form of societies from antiquity up to the present.1 Here, as elsewhere, much depends on what we mean by ‘public’ and ‘private’. As the introduction to this volume has detailed, the meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are many and profoundly historical, and this extends to their spatial applications. But a good case can be made for locating the birth of our modern – and Western – architecture of public and private space in the period covered by this chapter, roughly 1750 to 1950. For it was during these two centuries that the spatial fabric of both institutional and everyday environments was transformed, so that they came to embody a number of features still present today: among others, strict adherence to regulatory standards of construction; a commitment to strong codes of bodily privacy; the incorporation of relative technological complexity; and the provision of clearly defined public spaces, dedicated either to the circulation of goods and people, or to recreational pursuits. How might we explain this transformation? Existing histories resort to various factors, from the civilizing and disciplinary processes described by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault to those associated with the birth of the public sphere (Habermas) and the modern self and family (Taylor, most recently). Yet, if a not key causal driver, the care of health certainly has its place here and for at least two reasons: first, because it is impossible to differentiate entirely from any of the above factors; second, because healthcare has helped to render the boundary between public and private space more precise. In particular, as will be argued here, healthcare has helped to fill out the details, so to speak: to determine the micro-technologies and tactics that comprise public and private space; the minimum standards and dimensions that render them liveable; and the way they combine with natural variables such as air, light and water. We are all beneficiaries of the way considerations of health have shaped our environment. Indeed, that we now take this environment largely for granted is testament to the way it has shaped so much of our routine, daily habits: the use of
  taps in a private bathroom; walks to work along streamlined, sewered streets; a good night’s sleep in an airy bedroom. This chapter develops this reading by examining Britain, France and the
  US. This is a partial selection, of course; but besides overlapping with the geographical scope of other chapters in this volume, it also allows for a productive consideration of some of the complexities at stake. To be sure, the commonalities were many in what was already an era of transnational dialogue and borrowing; and as Andrew Lees long ago argued, all three states confronted the problem of mass urbanization at roughly the same time, during the 1830s and 1840s.3 Yet, just as striking are the multiple variations of architectural development and spatial access. Most notably, Britain was the first to become an urban nation, doing so long before France and the US. In the 1870s, roughly 60 per cent of the British population lived in towns and cities compared to only 25 per cent in France and 20 per cent in the US. In fact, both nations would have to wait until the interwar period before they could describe themselves as urban.4 At the same time, within each country, class and regional differentials generated a remarkably mixed provision of public and private spaces – to say nothing of the struggles to achieve a clear distinction between public and private space in the first place, especially in poorer districts. Summarizing such a complex set of developments is no easy task. One option, however, is to think in terms of spatial-architectural processes on the one hand, and their composite character on the other. By ‘composite’ is here meant the way these processes combined various rationales, more or less pronounced in any given site, such as the disciplinary and the civilizing, as well as the sanitary. The chapter begins with a series of confined, institutional spaces and a process of cellularization. It then examines two further processes, decongesting and privatizing spaces, before finally dwelling on the emergence of more rigorous practices of hygiene.
• Crook T, 'Introduction' in Crook T (ed.), Sanitary Reform, Class and the Victorian City, Pickering & Chatto (2013)
  ISBN: 9781848931640
  
• Crook T, 'Suspect figures: Statistics and public trust in Victorian England' in Crook T, O'Hara G (ed.), Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, Routledge (2011)
  ISBN: 9780415878944 eISBN: 9780203818671
  Abstract https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781136737817/chapters/10.4324%2F9780203818671-18
  Do we really trust statistics-or, to quote the title of one of Theodore Por­ter’s books, do we really ‘trust in numbers’? It would seem that we do and do not. On the one hand, the very prevalence of statistics in today’s public sphere would suggest that we do trust them, and emphatically so. To give but one example, newspapers brim with numbers and statistically derived numerical rates: immigration figures, price indices, and trade balances. And we trust them because we believe they are (objective) facts, as opposed to (subjective) opinions, generated by experts or institutions with claims to technical neutrality. Statistics seem non-political, beyond the realm of interests and ideologies. But on the other hand, it is also apparent that we distrust statistics. Politicians accuse newspapers of selectively highlight­ ing certain statistical facts for political reasons, whilst newspapers accuse politicians of doing the same. Crime figures, among others, are traded between MPs, who often, after critical questioning, have to add caveats regarding the particular measurements used and what the figures do and do not encompass. Meanwhile, the saying ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’, popularized by Mark Twain at the start of the twentieth century, continues to enjoy currency. It even features in the titles of books dedicated to unrav­ elling the myriad ways numbers are manipulated for political gain.
• Crook T, O’Hara G, 'The “torrent of numbers”: Statistics and the public sphere in modern Britain, c. 1800-2000' in Crook T, O’Hara G (ed.), Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, Routledge (2011)
  ISBN: 9780415878944 eISBN: 9780203818671
  Abstract https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781136737817/chapters/10.4324%2F9780203818671-7
  Modern political life would be unthinkable without statistics. Politicians use statistics to track public opinion; numbers proliferate in the media; academics, state bureaucrats, and corporations provide an ‘informed pub­ lic’ with a steady stream of facts and figures. The public thus defi nes itself and its fortunes in terms of statistics and statistical norms: among others, growth rates, house prices, and crime indices. As the historian Adam Tooze has observed, ‘a torrent of numbers accompanies both the bureaucratic com­ munication and the public discourses that are characteristic of modernity’.
• Crook T, 'Secrecy and liberal modernity in Victorian and Edwardian England' in S Gunn and J Vernon (ed.), The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, University of California Press (2011)
  ISBN: 9780984590957 eISBN: 9780520289536
  Abstract [Open Access:] https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wj6r222
• Crook T, 'Evil in question: the Victorian social and the politics of prostitution, 1830-1900' in T Crook, R Gill and B Taithe (ed.), Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c.1830-2000, Palgrave Macmillan (2011)
  ISBN: 9780230241275 eISBN: 9780230319325
  Abstract It is well-known that the Victorians often referred to prostitution as the ‘great social evil’. It is a designation which today appears excessive. Few would dispute that prostitution is attended by much suffering and exploitation; but the use of the term ‘evil’ jars, suggesting, as it does, something truly monstrous and inhuman. Indeed, the term ‘evil’ is seldom used these days in relation to prostitution. However, the designation also contains an element of modernity, one which we can more readily identify with: the adjective ‘social’. With this term, prostitution is brought within the realms of society, and various practices and professionals we associate with modern governance and the ‘social domain’: statistical reasoning, for instance, and police officers and social workers. That is, the adjective ‘social’ locates prostitution within the province of human agency as a problem that can be regulated and monitored in rational and bureaucratic terms. It also points to a mode of understanding which, if not entirely erasing, nonetheless mitigates individual responsibility by pointing to social conditions and structures, of which the prostitute is the manifestation or effect – which suggests, that is, there is something socially systemic about prostitution.Website 
• Crook T, Gill R, Taithe B, 'Liberal civilisation and its discontents: Evil, barbarism and empire' in Crook T, Gill R, Taithe B (ed.), Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c.1830–2000, Palgrave Macmillan (2011)
  ISBN: 9780230241275 eISBN: 9780230319325
  Abstract Good and evil, Nietzsche stressed in his aphorisms of 1886, were the obsolete moral legacies of more credulous times. Yet, for many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, good and evil remained forces of great power and vitality. Often transposed on to notions of civilisation and barbarism, good and evil were thought to be at restless work in the world: in the movements of history; in the rise and fall of empires; in the cosmopolitan cities of an ever-shrinking globe. We have only to recall George W. Bush’s evocation of an ‘axis of evil’ in the wake of 9/11 to observe that the antithesis of good and evil still enjoys considerable currency.2 Then, as now, languages of evil and barbarism were put to work in relation to all manner of threats, both at home and abroad. It made for an abundant discourse, capable of manifold applications and variations, not least because it intersected with considerations of race, class, imperial geopolitics and religion, among others.Website 

Membership of professional bodies

I am a member of the British Association for Victorian Studies; the Urban History Group; the Voluntary Action History Society; the Historical Association; the Economic History Society; and the Social History Society.

Public engagement and conferences

Over the years I’ve given scores of talks at schools, libraries, museums and branches of the Historical Association on subjects close to my research interests. I’m very happy to consider any and all invitations, so please do get in touch! I’ve also organized a number of conferences—some of which resulted in the edited collections noted above—and I’m currently organizing a two-day symposium (with Ian Cawood of Newman University, Birmingham) on the history of corruption and public service in modern Britain, which will take place at Brookes in January 2019. See here for more information: /hss/events/corruption/

A more recent public engagement project derives from an event I created with colleagues Bev Clack and Russell Anderson for the Think Human Festival at Oxford Brookes in May, 2018: a performance piece that invited the audience to consider the contrasting lives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Adolf Eichmann, which mixed narrative sections and dramatic monologues. We’re now working on how we can develop the piece further and engage audiences in schools and the local community. See here for the original advert: /hss/events/thinking-evil-in-dark-times/

I also try to speak at a handful of conferences, seminar series and public workshops and events every year: below are some of the papers I’ve given since the start of 2018:

(28/6/2018) “The Public in Public Health, c. 1830–1940: Democracy, Strategy, Epidemiology.” Keynote lecture given to the “Publics and their Health: Historical Perspectives, Future Directions,” 28-29 June 2018, Institute of Historical Research, London.

(22/3/2018) “The politics of performance measurement: Searching for standards in Victorian public health and education.” Presented to the History of Medicine Seminar Series, University of Winchester.

(21/2/2018) “ ‘Damn the lot of them!’ Despising MPs in modern Britain.” Presented to the Bloxham branch of the Oxfordshire Historical Association.

(25/1/2018) “Notes on cynicism and populism.” Presented to the “Populism 2.0” workshop, organized by the GPES Centre and International and Political History Group, Oxford Brookes University.