Nineteenth-Century Britain

A Very Short Introduction

By Christopher Harvie

2000

First Published

3.38

Average Rating

193

Number of Pages

5H53M

Audio Length

Part of Series

Very Short Introductions

Series · 359 books

By Georgios Papanicolaou, Jacob K. Olupona, Patrick L. Gardiner, and more

The nineteenth century was a time of massive growth for Britain. In 1800 it was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half-Celtic. A century later it was largely urban and English. The effects of the Industrial Revolution caused cities to swell enormously. London, for example, grew from about 1 million people to over 6 million. Abroad, the British Empire was reaching its apex, while at home the world came to marvel at the Great Exhibition of 1851 with its crowning achievement—the Crystal Palace. Historians Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew present a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the social, economic, and political events that marked the era on which many believed the sun would never set.

Avg Rating

3.38

Number of Ratings

182

5 STARS

12%

4 STARS

33%

3 STARS

40%

2 STARS

13%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Christopher Harvie

Author · 4 books

Professor 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).