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2008: A Floating Commonwealth
2007: Broonland
2004: Mending Scotland
2002: Scotland, a Short History
2001: Deep-Fried Hillman Imp: Scotland's Transport
2000: The Road to Home Rule
1999: Scotland and Nationalism
1999: Travelling Scot
1997: No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Twentieth Century Scotland
1994: Fool's Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil
1993: The Rise of Regional Europe
1991: The Centre of Things
A Floating Commonwealth (2008)
The book comes wrapped in the image of a great Cunard liner of about
1903, taken from the first volume of a characteristic publication of
the epoch, Arthur Mees Childrens Encyclopaedia. The ship is cut open to show the machinery, boilers and engines below, and rising above them the divisions of the society to be cared for, from the austerities of the emigrants in the steerage to the ornate saloons in first class and the telegraphs and speaking-tubes of the bridge. Attempting to précis three hundred pages, I thought of a figure in a privileged saloon, the American diplomat, writer and historian Henry Adams, 1838-1918, surveying his own transatlantic world in his remarkable Autobiography (1907), and adopted his third-person narration not out of conceit, but because such dispassion seemed to work, guiding rather than preaching.
reviews
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Broonland (2007)
We have to see Gordon Browns career and its current crisis in the triple contexts of Scotland, the UK, and a global capitalism in which vast often private wealth has flown the coop. Brown is its useful idiot, as Stalin used to say of his fellow travellers. If his cover is to be blown, this is the book that will do it.
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Mending Scotland (2004)
At various times in the last few months the condition of Scotland has intruded itself into our conversations or correspondence. At Tübingen I have also taken over the supervision of seventy or so lively students of 'Economics and Regional Studies'. The dialogue thus generated struck me as valuable both in terms of ideas and in the teaching techniques it enabled me to practice. It also coincides with two publishing deadlines: the much-revised fourth edition for Routledge of my Scotland and Nationalism, first published in 1977, and the completion of North Britain: West Britain, 1860-1920 for Oxford, which featured Scotland at the top of its industrial tide.
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Scotland, a Short History (2002)
Scotland got its first parliament for nearly 300 years in July 1999, but there is no other short history of the country available which deals with these recent developments, and places them within their historical and cultural context. This book is be a clear narrative history of Scotland from prehistoric times until the present day, taking account of attitudes to Scotland which tend to be filtered through enduring stereotypes.
Synopsis
In this history of Scotland, Christopher Harvie discusses land, people and culture. Harvie's six chapters cover the shaping of the kingdom, medieval Scotland, reformation and dual monarchy, union and enlightenment, industrialization, and the troubled but ultimately triumphant 20th century. Harvie deals with old clichés, applies the results of research, analyzes Scotland's disproportionate role in European nationalism, technocracy, empire and regionalism, and shows how Hugh MacDiarmid's "winds wi warlds to swing" affected the outlook and environment of the Scots, from hill-fort and peel tower to multi-storey flat and oil rig.
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Deep-Fried Hillman Imp: Scotland's Transport (2001)
This short book argues that transport in Scotland is deep-fried unhealthy, and is time-warped in the age of the car. Failure to address the issue has social, economic and ecological costs. Yet there are solutions - and they are being applied elsewhere. Professor Harvie argues that developed rail, light rail and tramways are the progressive way for the future. But they require public awareness and popular pressure to be taken forward. Chris Harvie is Professor of Scottish and Irish Studies at the University of Tübingen and has long been an active campaigner for the restoration of trains on the Waverley Route to the Scottish Borders.
full version
The Road to Home Rule (with Peter Jones) (2000)
When the Scottish Parliament sat in Edinburgh for the first time in nearly 300 years it was the climax of Europe's most peaceable and legalistic national movement. The struggle for self-government in a country both industrial and underdeveloped may have been the work of the foxes rather than the lions, but they got there by many ingenious routes. This volume documents the demonstrations and protests, the journalism and poetry, the party politics and international upheavals which swept the Scottish cause along - and all too frequently adrift - in the 20th century. There is a core essay by historian Christopher Harvie and the political correspondent, Peter Jones.
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Scotland and Nationalism (1999)
First published in 1977, this study of Scottish culture and politics since the Union of 1707, has been extensively rewritten to bring the story up-to-date and to draw on the output of Scottish historians and writers in the 1980s. Beneath the political level, but interacting with it, the author sees the evolution of a "civic republicanism" which, unless checked by real measures of federalism, renders the future of the Union unpromising.
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Travelling Scot (1999)
Tom Nairn
"articulate and irrepressible. . . uniquely imaginative and stimulating. . . one of Scotland's leading historians. . . there is more to be learned from the jokes and salutary asides in this book than from most sober narratives"
Pat Kane, Sunday Herald
"arguably the country's most brilliant contemporary thinker"
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No Gods and Precious Few Heroes:
Twentieth Century Scotland (New History of Scotland) (1997)
Christopher Harvie analyses the pressures and influences that have eroded to the point of destruction Scotland's position as a world industrial power over the last century. In this new edition, he brings the century right up-to-date with an assessment of Scotland's new constitutional status and the opportunities now open to the country.
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Fool's Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil (1994)
This is a survey of the essentially disastrous handling of North Sea oil - stocks and revenue squandered - and the implications for Scotland and the rest of Britain. Technology, finance, organizational bodies - both bureaucratic and private - political change and development are analyzed with interviews with key participants.
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The Rise of Regional Europe (1993)
In this study, Christopher Harvie alters the ways in which we have traditionally surveyed the European past by setting the positive and negative aspects of the present European situation in their historical context. This textbook: reappraises the actors of "national" politics, the persistence of types of civic and internationalist discourse; looks at the transactions which have created "bourgeois regionalism" and its implications for the future of Europe; and provides case studies illustrating different aspects of the regionalism movement. Harvie argues that we are only beginning to realize the shift in consciousness, as well as in politics and administration, that an integrated Europe will involve.
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The Centre of Things (1991)
This is the first full length study of the political theme
in literature and entertainment in Britain for over 60 years,
since the American scholar Morris Speare's "The Political
Novel" of 1924. Christopher Harvie attempts to combine the
approaches of political scientist, historian and literary
critic, in arguing that a corpus of some 600 odd works
represents an important element of the conventions on which
the British "unwritten constitution" has depended since
parliament took on a representative function over 150 years
ago. It has done this, Harvie argues, because political fiction
(the breadth of the definition is important) has managed since
Disraeli's day to combine didactics with historical awareness
and a strong sense of parliamentary politics as popular theatre.
It has recruited the literary and publishing organizations of
the metropolis to sustain the political centre, and either
co-opted or marginalized radical critiques emanating from the
provinces and the other nationalities of Britain. A genre which
includes Trollope, Meredith, Wells, Buchan and Joyce Cary is a
formidable one and the failure so far to engage with it leaves
large lacunae both in literary history and in the study of politics.
If, as the events of the last couple of decades - the growth of
confrontational politics and of centralization, the break-up of
homogenous voting - seem to indicate, a fundamental crisis in
the British political system is now imminent, it is important to
reassess the way this system was imagined and presented.
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