Christopher Harvie

"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' - from Cornwall to the Clyde - Harvie argues, together 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 new railways which opened up the developing world, as well as the institutions of international finance and communications in the age of 'telegrams and anger'. Ultimately, the resources of the Atlantic cities, their shipyards and engineering works, enabled Britain to 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 Thomas Carlyle to James Joyce, although the ultimate outcome - revolt in Ireland, slump and emigration - would leave enduring problems in the years to come."--Jacket.

With the acceleration of European integration, the traditional defence-based nation-states are under threat. The steady transfer of power in mainland Europe to new, powerful regional authorities has started to build up new forms of intra-European integration. The author explores both the good and bad aspects of the present European situation, and shows how setting these in the context of cultural, economic and political history dramatically alters the way in which we have traditionally surveyed the European past. Christopher Harvie's challenging study argues that we are only beginning to realise the shift in consciousness, as well as in politics and administration, that an integrated Europe will involve

Scotland's history is a subject of endless fascination. But where to start? The Romans or the Picts? The influence of the English from Norman times? The Auld allicance with the French and the Scottish Enlightenment? Chris Harvie gives a brief outline for the beginner which includes all of these themes and more.