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' - 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.

Christopher Harvie is Emeritus Professor of British Studies at the University of Tubingen, Germany, Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Honorary Professor of History at Strathclyde University.