Product Description

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'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78632 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-10
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 172 pages

About the Author
Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew were both brought up and educated in Edinburgh. Harvie went via the Open University to become Professor of British and Irish Studies at Tübingen in Germany, becoming a historian of modern Scotland and North Sea oil; from Oxford, Matthew edited the Gladstone Diaries, wrote an award-winning life of the Victorian statesman, and became Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography in 1992. Colin Matthew died in 1999.

Customer Reviews

A Good Start to Study
The nineteenth century is a hideously complex period of British history. It has an incredibly wide-ranging scope of political, social, industrial and imperial dimensions. Colin Matthew does his best to provide a snapshot of the most salient features of each. It is no surprise that this is one of the longest of the VSI, and at times it is painfully clear that a very great amount of detail has been omitted in order to create a manageable volume. I cannot criticise Matthew for doing this, after all, these are supposed to be Very Short Introductions. Nevertheless, I felt that some issues - particularly electoral reform and the imperial dimension - were covered so briefly as to be almost useless. Major political study is also beyond the capacity of such a short book, and titanic figures such as Disraeli get very brief coverage. Again, this is not so much a failing of Matthew, but rather a revelation of the remarkable complexity of 19th century British history.

I am an advocate of the VSI series, and believe that they provide an essential narrative overview which is invaluable to a student embarking for the first time on an new area of study. In this regard, I would endorse Matthew's effort as a useful work. Yet with all the VSI's, it is important to be very aware that they are only the very beginnings of knowledge of the field. I was particularly aware of this in the case of Matthew's introduction to 19th century Britain, and would caution all readers that some of the (necessarily) truncated narrative is so deficient that it practically constitutes a half truth. However, if the reader bears this in mind, the book can still provide a useful overview of the major events and issues in the 19th century, and will be a useful backdrop for further study.