Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Historiography frequently privileges the grand epoch, the long century, or the dramatic rupture over the quiet turn of a calendar wheel. Yet, the isolation of a single calendar year offers a remarkably potent micro-historical prism through which the broader structural tectonic plates of an entire civilization can be observed in mid-shift. To freeze the temporal frame at the year 1900 is not to engage in an arbitrary exercise of chronological neatness, but rather to capture Great Britain at a moment of profound, high-wire historical equilibrium. The year 1900 sat precisely upon the boundary between the supreme confidence of nineteenth-century industrial and imperial dominance and the anxious, uncertain realities of the approaching twentieth century. It was a year wherein the Victorian world order was simultaneously celebrating its vast global reach and confronting the unmistakable, encroaching shadows of its own systemic limits. By focusing exclusively on the twelve months of 1900, this volume examines how the economic, political, social, and cultural structures of late-Victorian Britain coped with the immediate, converging pressures of an agonizing imperial war in South Africa, a shifting domestic political landscape, the emergence of organized labor, and deep-seated anxieties regarding national efficiency and racial decline.
