Richard H. Trainor – författare

Black Country Élites is a study of the people who ran Victorian industrial towns; it also examines the institutions, policies, rituals, and networks these urban élites deployed to cope with urban growth, social unrest, and relative economic decline. Concentrating on a particularly grimy district of the industrial Midlands, the book demonstrates the surprisingly great resources, coherence, sophistication and impact of the area's mainly middle class leaders, who were well linked to regional and national power centres.Richard H. Trainor's extensively researched and richly documented analysis suggests the need to re-examine the influential view that Victorian Britain's social development was dominated by London and by land, the professions, and finance. Instead he indicates the complex give-and-take between the metropolis and its notables, on the one hand, and the industrial provinces and their leaders, on the other. The book is both a substantial addition to regional studies of Victorian Britain, and an important contribution to the history of nineteenth-century elites and of the urban middle class.

This is a coherent and integrated set of essays around the theme of governance addressing a wide range of questions on the organisation and legitimation of authority. At the heart of the book is a set of topics which have long attracted the attention of urbanists and urban historians all over the world: the growth and reform of urban local government, local-centre relationships, public health and pollution, local government finance, the nature of local social élites and of participation in local government. Approaching these topics through the concept of governance not only raises a series of new questions but also extends the scope of enquiry for the historian seeking to understand towns and cities all over the world in a period of rapid change. Questions of governance must be central to a variety of enquiries into the nature of the urban place. There are questions about the setting of agendas, about when a localised or neighbourhood issue becomes a big city or even national political issue, about what makes a ’problem’. Public health and related matters form a central part of the ’issues’ especially for the British; in North America fire and the development of urban real estate have dominated; in India the security of the colonial government had a prominent place. The historical dynamic of these essays follows the change from the chartered governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries towards the representative regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth. However, such historical change is not regarded as inevitable, and the effects of bureaucratic growth, regulatory regimes, the legitimating role of rational and scientific knowledge as well as the innovatory use of ritual and space are all dealt with at length.