(Source: Palgrave)
Palgrave is publishing a new book on population
registers and the law in Britain during the period 1936-1984
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book
examines the fraught political relationship between British governments, which
wanted information about peoples’ lives, and the people who desired privacy. To
do this it looks at something that Britain only experienced in wartime, a
centralized and up-to-date list of everyone in the country: a population
register. The abolition of this wartime system is contrasted with later
attempts to reintroduce registration, and the change in the political mind-set
driving these later schemes to develop centralised webs of so-called objective
data is examined. These policies were confronted by privacy campaigns, studied
here, but it is shown how government responses succeeded in turning political
debates about data into technical discussions about computerization; thus
protecting its data, largely on paper, from oversight. This reformulation also
shaped the 1984 Data Protection Act, which consequently did not protect privacy
but rather increased government’s ability to gain knowledge of, and hence power
over, the people.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Kevin Manton teaches History and Politics at both the School of
Oriental and African Studies and Birkbeck College, University of London,
UK. He is the author of numerous articles on British history.
More information here
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