Portable City : Modern Glasgow’s Transatlantic Connections

‘Portable City: Modern Glasgow’s Transatlantic Connections is a gem of a book. Like the modern city at the centre of its multi-faceted gaze, this wonderful volume offers us a highly original set of chapters on modern Glasgow''s many different faces and facets. From an eclectic sense of expansive connections, new readings of Glasgow''s reputation for grime, crime, and chronic ill-health, to thoughtful reinterpretations of its post-imperial and transatlantic aligned municipal, diasporic, and socio-cultural makeup, this new volume should be required reading for those wishing to understand Scotland''s largest metropolis and, arguably, its first truly de-globalised city.’

– Professor Andrew Mackillop, University of Glasgow

Glasgow is Scotland’s metropolis. It has long been the country’s largest city and the place where the challenges and changes wrought by modernity emerged most clearly. As this book shows, many of these challenges and changes were shaped by Glasgow’s status as a transatlantic city and by its historical entanglements with North America in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Drawing together contributions from new and established scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, this edited collection is about the tangible and intangible significance of transatlantic Glasgow as muse, as site of personal and collective memory, as imperial and industrial metropolis, as home for new immigrants, as bigoted slum, and as pioneering provider for the poor.

Portable City combines traditional archival research with cultural approaches to provide the most original urban history of Glasgow in a generation and the first to offer a reappraisal of Bernard Aspinwall’s seminal 1984 book, Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820–1920.