In a little over a century, between 1830 and 1939, both the landscape and society of Britain were a rural world became an urban (and suburban) world. The pace and scale of change a vast surge in population was housed in cities and towns, while the countryside became stagnant and neglected. Industry and trade demanded communication and transport on an unparalleled scale, and a network of railways spread into almost every corner of the British Isles. Technology was applied not on a local and limited scale, as in earlier centuries, but in every facet of life. Motor cars, radio and cinema, new and better means of waging war-were all part of this technological transformation of what had been a predominantly traditional society. By 1939, Britain had won and then lost the industrial supremacy of the world; the colonial empire gained over the same period was shortly to go the same way.
