A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture, and Technology on Britain's Atlantic Coast, 1860-1930 (review)

Christopher Harvie has produced an intriguing, deeply interesting, and at times frustrating book. Its stakes are high and revisit some of the key questions of British history and identity: what does it mean to be "British?" What is the relationship between the "Celtic fringe" and the metropolitan core? More precisely, what influence did cultural and industrial production have on notions of "Britishness" along the western littoral of Scotland, England, and Wales (and Ireland's eastern coast) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Methodologically, the author sees the Irish and Celtic Seas as a smaller version of Ferdinand Braudel's Mediterranean world system. As Harvie argues, it was in this "antechamber of Britain" that print capitalism, trade, transportation, and industrialization forged a regional, and to be sure, unique quasi-national "Western British" bourgeoisie elite. One cannot help but reflect on "West British" identity as akin to Max Weber's Protestant capitalist ethic. This dynamic Faustian world likewise included a striking cultural array, embracing at various times Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, George Bernard Shaw, and a host of other writers.

The difficulty though, as Harvie sees it, is that the "West British" intellectual and business leaders engaged in an ambiguous "contractual" cultural nationalism, one that was always beholden to the "core" of London in some way. Later, nineteenth-century Scots, for example, may have read and admired Burns, but they also had a pound to earn. Their civic and cultural pride did not lend itself to ethnic separatism or the violent millenarian nationalism so evident on the continent. This was true of Wales also, whose respectable and völkisch inhabitants were steady and undramatic in their behavior save periods of labor unrest. One gets the sense that it was a different sort of "Victorian Compromise," a trade-off between identity politics and the perceived prosperity of the Union; the contours of "Western British" identity were fuzzily defined and made malleable by class interests.

According to the author, the real backbreaker for this regional ethos was the crucible of World War I and David Lloyd George's centralization of the munitions industry toward the Home Counties and away from the Western British littoral. George, the "Welsh Wizard," may have been from the Celtic fringe, but his policies were decidedly centripetal and in keeping with contractual nationalism. One cannot help but detect a trace of disappointment in the author's voice here and a lingering leeriness of the power of the metropole—no surprise given his service as a member of Scotland's devolved parliament.

Harvie's most direct critique, however, is contemporary and rests on Benedict Anderson's view of nationalism as a product of modern "print capitalism." He takes to task historians such as Linda Colley, Niall Ferguson, and Simon Schama for reiterating a romanticized mythology of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and ignoring the rationale for devolution and local control. He attributes this fault to a "surrender of critical responsibility led by the BBC and compounded by the acumen of the publishing and PR trade" (p. 10). While this is a fair enough critique of the "heritage industry," one cannot help but note the irony. Popular culture, both in print media and in film, gave a tremendous boost to the construction of national identity, and hence devolution, in Scotland and Wales. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the UK is the competition for "heritage"-based tourism income among its various "kingdoms." In short, it pays to be different.

Similarly, the imposition of control by the imperial core requires cooperation from the fringes, whether in the North Atlantic, India, or Africa. Power cannot be imposed only by the structural systems of capitalism. Bearing this in mind, Harvie aptly reveals the willingness of noncore "Britons" to co-opt the centers of power. Bonar Law and Lord Beaverbrook...