There are serious gaps in Irish urban history. Robert Gavin, William P. Kelly, and Dolores O'Reilly have filled one of the most conspicuous of those gaps with their comprehensive history of the Northern Ireland port city of Londonderry—known to those who call it home as “Derry.” Atlantic Gateway: The Port and City of Londonderry since 1700 is a rich mine of detail on the interplay of personal and institutional agendas in the north of Ireland, a compact region notable as an incubator of fierce political and economic rivalries.Atlantic Gateway is the tenth volume in the Ulster and Scotland series produced by Four Courts Press in association with the Institute of Ulster Scots Studies at the University of Ulster. The nine-chapter presentation is supported by eighty-one tables, seven maps, and sixty-four illustrations.

Chapter 1—“Westward Ho!”—examines Derry's role in the Atlantic economy from early in the eighteenth century to about 1830. Growth in that period was driven by expansion in the linen industry, but the failure of the linen manufacture in the northwest of Ireland to adapt to change—together with the general decline in demand for linen cloth—led to large-scale emigration to North America. The second chapter looks at the impact of the transition to steam power on Derry's maritime trade and the region's economy. A noteworthy accomplishment was the establishment of a state-of-the-art shipyard and the construction of the 1,750-ton screw-steamer Great Northern, launched in 1842. For Derry and its hinterland, these were years of regional integration, industrial expansion, and population increase.

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters follow the history of the port through the end of the First World War. In chapter 3, “Navigating the World of Corporate Capitalism,” Derry emerges as a vibrant industrial city but one that by the 1870s has failed to keep pace in expansion with archrival Belfast, a city better situated for access to British markets. Derry's designation as a port of call for transatlantic mail steamers did bring considerable benefits in the years before the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable. Chapter 4, “Derry's Trade Shifts Westward Once More,” returns to the impact of faraway markets on economic development. Closer to home, tensions between steamship and railroad companies threatened to undermine the viability of the port. The growth in the city's industrial base, as is made clear in chapter 5, had begun to falter by the turn of the century. However, shipbuilding and a host of supporting activities were revived by the demand for merchant shipping during the First World War. By the early 1920s, the collapse of shipbuilding led the city—increasingly peripheral and out of step—into the economic malaise of the postwar period.

“During the two years following the end of the first world war, Derry moved brusquely from a peak of unprecedented prosperity to an economic crisis of equally unprecedented proportions” (179). This is the subject explored in the sixth chapter, “Port and City between the Wars.” It was a period marked by labor disruptions and civil unrest that coincided with the contraction of the economy on a broad front. Chapter 7, “Battling for the Atlantic,” opens with a failed attempt to establish transatlantic commercial air travel at Derry in the early 1930s. Although German rearmament after 1935 made a transatlantic airbase a military consideration, the project fell victim to competing interests. Early in the war it became clear that expanded naval facilities at Derry would figure prominently in Britain's efforts to combat the German U-boat menace. World War Two brought dramatic expansion to the port of Derry, but the war's impact on the city was of short duration.

The difficult postwar period—the topic of chapter 8—comprised a long and difficult struggle to shore up a faltering economy in a declining economic region. There were occasional hopeful signs and periodic bursts of investment. But political unrest—a subject only lightly touched upon in this book—undermined the prospects of recovery: “The ten years following 1975 was one of the worst periods in the port's, and indeed the city's, history” (304). Atlantic Gateway concludes with an optimistic inventory of the commercial benefits of sectarian peace highlighted by the involvement of American business in the regeneration of Derry's economy. But such attempts came at a time of sharply rising competitiveness on a global scale.

In spite of this generally dark picture, Atlantic Gateway is not the tale of a hapless provincial city reacting to blind economic forces. The Derry portrayed by Gavin, Kelly, and O'Reilly is—for the most part—dominated by strong and sometimes flamboyant individuals. Some are wiser than others, of course. A few are visionaries. Among these is the mid-nineteenth-century shipbuilder William Coppin, “a man with a remarkably versatile and inventive mind” (51). A visionary of a later time is C. H. Clendinning, the energetic but unsuccessful promoter of Derry as Ireland's principal port of call for transatlantic air service in the mid-1930s. One nineteenth-century industrialist—the Derry shirt-making entrepreneur, William Tillie—even earned mention in Karl Marx's Das Kapital, published in 1864 (79).

Gavin, Kelly, and O'Reilly have spun out their history of the port of Derry in excruciating detail. This is not a complaint. However, it is a striking lapse in so detailed a study that the narrative is only lightly situated in the context of Irish economic, social, and political history. Derry is, after all, an Irish city, and it is an inescapable fact that Derry's history is a part of the fabric of Irish history. For example, the authors make frequent reference to Derry as a center for transatlantic emigration, but they barely mention the port's role in the Great Famine of the 1840s (42). Even more regrettable in a work of Irish urban history, Atlantic Gateway deftly skirts the relationship between sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland and the economic problems facing the city of Derry. Only rarely does the Unionist/Nationalist divide enter the story at all. One cannot put down this otherwise well-conceived book without wondering whether it was those divisions—more than anything else—that hobbled Derry's economy.