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 important new 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: Modern Glasgow’s Transatlantic Connections 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.

Its publication is timely, given that BAAS are holding this year’s annual conference at the University of Glasgow.