Available From UC Press

What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern?

In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers.

Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.

James Vernon is professor of history at UC Berkeley. He is author or editor of several books including, most recently, Hunger: A Modern History and The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (UCP/GAIA, 2011), and is coeditor of the Berkeley Series in British Studies. 

"A fresh look at some well-known issues.  In this lively and accessible work, James Vernon finds in the study of Victorian Britain a way to reenergize and make useful the slippery category of modernity.  Neither a valorization nor a celebration of Britain’s explosive nineteenth-century growth, Vernon’s account instead offers a framework for global histories of modernity as well as a radical interpretation of modern Britain. Vernon takes familiar materials and arguments and transforms them into a highly original argument that reaches well beyond the shores of this small island kingdom."
—Philippa Levine, author of The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset

"With his signature intellectual ambition and rhetorical force, James Vernon routes the history of Britain’s modernity through the rise and fulfillment of what he calls 'the charismatic state.' Both an influential abstraction and an increasingly powerful mediator of Britons’ experience of their material lives, that state made new subjects, political and economic, who adapted to the society of strangers Britain was becoming. Vernon takes us on a bracing journey through these historical processes, flying over big swaths of time and space, reaching deeply into the recesses of modern culture and illuminating the richest traces as he goes. Readers will feel they are in the hands of a true craftsman, someone at the very height of his synthetic and persuasive powers."
—Antoinette Burton, author of Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism

"With great clarity and great verve, James Vernon reengages some of history's biggest questions -- what does it mean to be modern, how should we characterize the modern world, how did we get there? -- while grounding them carefully in a particular place and time. By building an argument so ambitiously, with such subtlety and erudition, he not only fires up a British debate but generally renews history's confidence and vision. Here is one of our best historians writing at the peak of his prowess."
—Geoff Eley, author of After the Nazi Racial State