Nineteenth-Century Britain (Very Short Introductions)

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely urban and English. Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew show the forces behind Britain's rise to its imperial zenith, and the continuing tensions within the nations and classes of the 'union state'. Table of Contents: 1. Reflections on the revolutions; 2. Industrial development; 3. Reform and religion; 4. The wars abroad; 5. Roads to freedom; 6. Coping with reform; 7. Unless the Lord build the city; 8. The ringing grooves of change; 9. Politics and diplomacy: Palmerstons years; 10. Incorporation; 11. Free trade: an industrial economy rampant; 12. A shifting population: town and country; 13. The masses and the classes: the urban worker; 14. Clerks and commerce: the lower middle class; 15. The propertied classes; 16. Pomp and circumstance; 17. A great change in manners; 18. Villa Tories: the Conservative resurgence; 19. Ireland, Scotland, Wales: Home Rule frustrated; 20. Reluctant imperialists?; 21. The fin-de-siecle reaction: new views of the State; 22. Old Liberalism, New Liberalism, Labourism, and tariff reform; 23. Edwardian years: a crisis of the State contained; 24. Your English summers done; Further reading; Chronology; Prime ministers 1789-1914; Index