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'.
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This Very Short Introduction focusses on the political history of Britain, and even then, does it pretty badly. Rather than providing a concise overview of the political climate, the writers too often resort to redundant detail and distracting asides. For someone interested in the cultural history, this book was basically useless. It also manages to almost completely gloss over the consequences of colonialism, while the subsection called "Women" contains just one page of text.
