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A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture, and Technology on Britain's Atlantic Coast, 1860-1930
Christopher Harvie offers a new portrait of society and identity in high industrial Britain by focusing on the sea as connector, not barrier. Atlantic and 'inland sea' together, Harvie argues, created a "floating commonwealth" of port cities and their hinterlands whose interaction, both with one another and with nationalist and imperial politics, created an intense political and cultural synergy.
At a technical level, this produced the freight steamer and the efficient types of railways which opened up the developing world, as well as the institutions of international finance and communications in the age of "telegrams and anger". And ultimately, the resources of the Atlantic cities, their shipyards and works, enabled Britain to win withstand the test of the First World War.
Meanwhile, as Harvie shows, the continuous attempt to make sense of an ever-changing material reality also stimulated the discourses on which social criticism and literary modernism were based, from Carlyle to James Joyce -- although the ultimate outcome, of slump and emigration, would leave enduring problems in the years to come.
At a technical level, this produced the freight steamer and the efficient types of railways which opened up the developing world, as well as the institutions of international finance and communications in the age of "telegrams and anger". And ultimately, the resources of the Atlantic cities, their shipyards and works, enabled Britain to win withstand the test of the First World War.
Meanwhile, as Harvie shows, the continuous attempt to make sense of an ever-changing material reality also stimulated the discourses on which social criticism and literary modernism were based, from Carlyle to James Joyce -- although the ultimate outcome, of slump and emigration, would leave enduring problems in the years to come.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published March 27, 2008
4 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Harvie
61 books4 followersProfessor Christopher Harvie is a Scottish historian and author. He was Professor of British and Irish Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany and a Scottish National Party Member of the Scottish Parliament for Mid Scotland and Fife from 2007 to 2011.
Harvie grew up in the Borders village of St. Boswells and was educated at Kelso High School and the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1966 with a First Class Honours M.A. in History. He received his PhD from Edinburgh in 1972 for a thesis on university liberalism and democracy, 1860-1886.
As a historian, Harvie was the Shaw-Macfie Lang Fellow and a tutor at Edinburgh University from 1966 to 1969. He joined the Open University in 1969 as a history lecturer, and from 1978 he was a senior lecturer in history.
His publications include Scotland and Nationalism (1977, revised 1994), Fool’s Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil (1994), Broonland: the Last Days of Gordon Brown (2010), and Scotland the Brief: a Short History of a Nation (2010).
Harvie grew up in the Borders village of St. Boswells and was educated at Kelso High School and the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1966 with a First Class Honours M.A. in History. He received his PhD from Edinburgh in 1972 for a thesis on university liberalism and democracy, 1860-1886.
As a historian, Harvie was the Shaw-Macfie Lang Fellow and a tutor at Edinburgh University from 1966 to 1969. He joined the Open University in 1969 as a history lecturer, and from 1978 he was a senior lecturer in history.
His publications include Scotland and Nationalism (1977, revised 1994), Fool’s Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil (1994), Broonland: the Last Days of Gordon Brown (2010), and Scotland the Brief: a Short History of a Nation (2010).
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