Alison Shaw at The Policy Press rewrote the structure of this book and very tactfully persuaded me to at least try to be less self-indulgent and wordy; I am very grateful to her, to three anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on an early draft, to Jo Morton, who oversaw the production of this volume, to Dave Worth, for typesetting it and to Margaret Vaudrey for compiling the index. Dawn Rushen copy-edited the book and convinced me to stop repeating myself so much. Paul Coles at the University of Sheffield redrew all the figures, more than once. Thank you all.
Dimitris Ballas, John Bibby, Stacy Hewitt, Bob Hughes, Steve Kidd, Bill Lodge, Charles Pattie, Kate Pickett, Molly Scott Cato, Ludi Simpson, Judith Watson and Richard Wilkinson also commented constructively on all or parts of earlier versions. The British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust funded most of the time out needed to begin and end the work, and I am very grateful to them. My colleagues in the Departments of Geography at both the University of Sheffield (UK) and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) have also been extremely understanding. In particular this book draws on the experiences of working with the Social and Spatial Inequalities Group at Sheffield, with colleagues from the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol, with many other colleagues who have been producing reports on poverty and wealth for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the British government, and with those with whom I am working internationally on inequality, often as a result of the Worldmapper project (www.worldmapper.org).
Dave Gordon of the University of Bristol kindly provided the contemporary statistics on poverty used in Chapter 4, and I am grateful to Dan Vale of The Young Foundation who did me a similar service as regards the statistics on mental health used in Chapter 7. Helena Tunstall at the University of York helped draw up an earlier version of Table 7 and pointed me to the original source. Jon Minton, also from York, introduced me to the literature combining social evil, social control and war. Tomoki Nakaya of Ritsumeikan University introduced me to social statistics on Japan, and Kjartan Sveinsson, of the Runnymede Trust, kindly pointed me to information on Iceland I would not otherwise have found, as also did Ben Hennig. I am also grateful to Dimitris Ballas, Anna Barford, Ben Hennig, John Pritchard, Mark Ramsden, Jan Rigby, Bethan Thomas, Dan Vickers and Ben Wheeler for their collaboration over recent years in Sheffield. Half a dozen former PhD students feature in these lists; I have almost certainly learnt more from them (and others I have ‘taught’) than they have learnt from me: thank you.
Observers of social change in Britain know that when times get desperate the people you fall back on are your mother and your lover. Bronwen Dorling and Alison Dorling both helped turn my initial dyslexic encodings into slightly more readable text, and have had to put up with my attempts to write for far too long. I am very grateful and will probably be buying them flowers, because that is what we do. All the mistakes remain mine, although they are also partly a collection of other men and women’s posies.1
Danny Dorling, Sheffield
A full bibliography, tables and the Excel spreadsheets that were used to create the figures in this book are available on the Injustice webpages at www.policypress.co.uk
1 See pages 9 to 11 for an explanation of ‘posies’. All other notes appear at the end of the book (pages 333-88) rather than as footnotes and so can be skipped (although you won’t know what you’re missing if you do).