Glasgow has always argued, and its arguments have often shaped Scotland and Britain. In the eighteenth century its university was a powerhouse of the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Smith held a chair there from 1751, and the merchant city he observed fed directly into The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The same century gave a darker lesson in industrial politics, when soldiers fired on striking weavers in the Calton in 1787 and six were killed, often remembered as Scotland’s first working-class martyrs.

The city’s radical reputation was made in the decade around the First World War. The rent strikes of 1915, led by Mary Barbour and the women of Govan and Partick, forced the government to pass the Rent Act, which became law on 27 November that year. The movement known as Red Clydeside peaked in January 1919 with the Battle of George Square, described in George Square 1919, after which troops were sent into the city and tanks arrived on 3 February. At the 1922 general election Glasgow sent a group of Independent Labour Party members to Westminster, cheered off from St Enoch station by vast crowds. The General Strike of 1926, the campaign for women’s votes and the long history of the trade unions complete that picture.

Housing was the great political question of the twentieth century. The housing crisis left hundreds of thousands of people in overcrowded single-ends, and the answers, from slum clearance and the redevelopment of the Gorbals to the overspill new towns, remade the map of the city and dispersed its people.

Glasgow has also been shaped by those who came to it. Irish migration transformed the nineteenth-century city, and the Italian, Jewish and South Asian communities each added a chapter of their own. Immigration in Glasgow brings these stories together.

Every article in this chapter: