be communicated to the emerging working classes. Graeme Moreton and Lindsay Paterson both argue that the lack of interference of the British state in civil society meant that the middle classes had no reason to object to the union. Atsuko Ichijo argues that national identity cannot be equated with a movement for independence. Moreton suggests that there was a Scottish nationalism, but that it was expressed in terms of "Unionist nationalism". Victorian and Edwardian eras (1832–1910) Industrialisation From the second half of the eighteenth century Scotland was transformed by the process of Industrial Revolution, emerging as one of the commercial and industrial centres of the British Empire. It began with trade with Colonial America, first in tobacco and then rum, sugar and cotton. The cotton industry declined due to blockades during the American Civil War, but by this time Scotland had developed as a centre for coal mining, engineering, shipbuilding and the production of locomotives, with steel production largely replacing iron production in the late nineteenth century. This resulted in rapid urbanisation in the industrial belt that ran across the country from southwest to northeast; by 1900 the four industrialised counties of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire, and Ayrshire contained 44 per cent of the population. These industrial developments, while they brought work and wealth, were so rapid that housing, town-planning, and provision for public health did not keep pace with them, and for a time living conditions in some of the towns and cities were notoriously bad, with overcrowding, high infant mortality, and growing rates of tuberculosis. The new companies attracted rural workers, as well as large numbers immigrants from Catholic Ireland, changing the religious balance and national character, particularly in the urban centres of the west. In cities like Glasgow a sense of civic pride emerged as it expanded to become the "second city of the Empire", while the corporation remodelled the town and controlled transport, communications and housing. Michael Lynch sees a new British state emerging in the wake of the Reform Act of 1832. This began the widening of the electoral franchise, from less than 5,000 landholders, which was to continue with further acts in 1868 and 1884. Lynch argues that there were concentric identities for Scots, where "a new Scottishness, a new Britishness and a revised sense of local pride – were held together by a phenomenon bigger than all of them – a Greater Britain whose