The Collapse of British Power
The Collapse of British Power

Author: Correlli Barnett

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2011-08

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 9780571281695

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This is the first book in the 'Pride and Fall' sequence on British power in the 20th century. Correlli Barnett seeks to explain the decay of British power between 1918 and 1940 and its collapse between 1940 and 1945.

Three Victories and a Defeat
Three Victories and a Defeat

Author: Brendan Simms

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2008-12-09

Total Pages: 836

ISBN-13: 0786727225

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In the eighteenth century, Britain became a world superpower through a series of sensational military strikes. Traditionally, the Royal Navy has been seen as Britain's key weapon, but in Three Victories and a Defeat Brendan Simms argues that Britain's true strength lay with the German aristocrats who ruled it at the time. The House of Hanover superbly managed a complex series of European alliances that enabled Britain to keep the continental balance of power in check while dramatically expanding her own empire. These alliances sustained the nation through the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years' War. But in 1776, Britain lost the American continent by alienating her European allies. An extraordinary reinterpretation of British and American history, Three Victories and a Defeat is a masterwork by a rising star of the historical profession.

Titan
Titan

Author: William R. Nester

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0806155345

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When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than twenty years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory. In Titan, William R. Nester offers a deeply informed and thoroughly fascinating narrative of how England accomplished this remarkable feat. Between 1789 and 1815, British leaders devised, funded, and led seven coalitions against the revolutionary and Napoleonic governments of France. In each enterprise, statesmen and generals searched for order amid a complex welter of bureaucratic, political, economic, psychological, technological, and international forces. Nester combines biographies of great men—the likes of William Pitt, Horatio Nelson, and Arthur Wellesley—with an explanation of the critical decisions they made in Britain’s struggle for power and his own keen analysis of the forces that operated beyond their control. Their efforts would eventually crush France and Napoleon and establish a system of European power relations that prevented a world war for nearly a century. The interplay of individuals and events, the importance of conjunctures and contingency, the significance of Britain's island character and resources: all come into play in Nester's exploration of the art of British military diplomacy. The result is a comprehensive and insightful account of the endeavors of statesmen and generals to master the art of power in a complex battle for empire.

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997

Author: Piers Brendon

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-02-09

Total Pages: 850

ISBN-13: 0307388417

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A WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD NOTABLE BOOK After the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. Yet it grew to become the greatest, most diverse empire the world had seen. Then, within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, a rapid demise that left an array of dependencies and a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire covers a vast canvas, which Brendon fills with vivid particulars, from brief lives to telling anecdotes to comic episodes to symbolic moments.

Roads to Power
Roads to Power

Author: Jo Guldi

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0674264134

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Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking. In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway network led to contests for control over everything from road management to market access. Peripheries like the Highlands demanded that centralized government pay for roads they could not afford, while English counties wanted to be spared the cost of underwriting roads to Scotland. The new network also transformed social relationships. Although travelers moved along the same routes, they occupied increasingly isolated spheres. The roads were the product of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control bureaucrats wielded over decisions relating to everyday life. Does information really work to unite strangers? Do markets unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. Guldi draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the digital divide, and net neutrality. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries.

Forgotten Armies
Forgotten Armies

Author: Christopher Alan Bayly

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 9780674017481

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In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

The Rise And Fall of British Naval Mastery
The Rise And Fall of British Naval Mastery

Author: Paul Kennedy

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0141983833

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Paul Kennedy's classic naval history, now updated with a new introduction by the author This acclaimed book traces Britain's rise and fall as a sea power from the Tudors to the present day. Challenging the traditional view that the British are natural 'sons of the waves', he suggests instead that the country's fortunes as a significant maritime force have always been bound up with its economic growth. In doing so, he contributes significantly to the centuries-long debate between 'continental' and 'maritime' schools of strategy over Britain's policy in times of war. Setting British naval history within a framework of national, international, economic, political and strategic considerations, he offers a fresh approach to one of the central questions in British history. A new introduction extends his analysis into the twenty-first century and reflects on current American and Chinese ambitions for naval mastery. 'Excellent and stimulating' Correlli Barnett 'The first scholar to have set the sweep of British Naval history against the background of economic history' Michael Howard, Sunday Times 'By far the best study that has ever been done on the subject ... a sparkling and apt quotation on practically every page' Daniel A. Baugh, International History Review 'The best single-volume study of Britain and her naval past now available to us' Jon Sumida, Journal of Modern History

Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939
Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939

Author: Keith Neilson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-12-22

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1139448862

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A major re-interpretation of international relations in the period from 1919 to 1939. Avoiding such simplistic explanations as appeasement and British decline, Keith Neilson demonstrates that the underlying cause of the Second World War was the intellectual failure to find an effective means of maintaining the new world order created in 1919. With secret diplomacy, alliances and the balance of power seen as having caused the First World War, the makers of British policy after 1919 were forced to rely on such instruments of liberal internationalism as arms control, the League of Nations and global public opinion to preserve peace. Using Britain's relations with Soviet Russia as a focus for a re-examination of Britain's dealings with Germany and Japan, this book shows that these tools were inadequate to deal with the physical and ideological threats posed by Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism.