David Cowan

I am a Hallsworth Research Fellow (in Political Economy) based in the Department of History. You can email me at [email protected] - I'd love to hear from you if our research interests intersect.

I am working on my next book, about the rich in modern Britain. It will ask how the public have felt about the rich in a period in which economic inequalities reduced, only to then intensify again in the late-twentieth century. I'm interested in the changing purchase of popular ideas about charity, industriousness, and inheritance; and in the effects of proximity and visibility on attitudes towards the rich - how have the rich people knew personally or through the mass media been treated differently to the more distant, anonymous rich?

I have completed the research for chapters on the commercial service staff who laboured serving the rich in the 1920s and 1930s; a scandal surrounding celebrity Gracie Fields's money during the Second World War; social-scientific investigations into images of the class structure after 1945; the Labour Party's planned wealth tax in the 1970s; and the introduction of the National Lottery in the 1990s. A recent article in Contemporary British History on the Lottery, part of a special issue on the 1990s, spun out from this project and underlines my interest in the 'moral economies' of inequality.

My first book, Politics of the Past, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 in the 'Modern British Histories' series. The book asks how memories of the 1920s and 1930s evolved and cohered in Britain since the Second World War, and considers the implications of these memories for popular politics. It argues for a lively picture of 'everyday politics' shaped by family story-telling about the recent past.

Articles related to that earlier project appeared in Twentieth Century British History (winning the Duncan Tanner prize), Social History, and Cultural and Social History.

Before joining the University of Manchester, I completed my postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where I also held post-doctoral research and teaching positions.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy.