Albion Ascendant
Albion Ascendant

Author: Wilfrid R. Prest

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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Between the restoration of Charles II and the battle of Waterloo, England gradually emerged as the core nation of the most formidable superpower the world had yet seen. Wilfrid Prest investigates this remarkable transformation from domestic instability and external weakness to global, economic, and military predominance. Geographically, the main focus is on England and Wales, but Prest also analyses the broader British context, discussing the role played by Ireland and Scotland, as well as the interrelations between England, Europe, and the wider world. He examines the lives of ordinary people as well as the ruling elite, and explores the distinctive nature of women's experiences; allowing the voices of the past to speak directly to the modern reader. The result is a lively, up-to-date, and comprehensive overview of Britain's long eighteenth century. It will remain a standard text on the subject for many years to come.

From Empire to Humanity
From Empire to Humanity

Author: Amanda B. Moniz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190240377

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In the decades before the Revolution, Americans and Britons shared an imperial approach to helping those in need during times of disaster and hardship. They worked together on charitable ventures designed to strengthen the British empire, and ordinary men and women made donations for faraway members of the British community. Growing up in this world of connections, future activists from the British Isles, North America, and the West Indies developed expansive outlooks and transatlantic ties. The schism created by the Revolution fractured the community that nurtured this generation of philanthropists. In From Empire to Humanity, Amanda Moniz tells the story of a generation of American and British activists who transformed humanitarianism as they adjusted to being foreigners. American independence put an end to their common imperial humanitarianism, but not their friendships, their far-reaching visions, or their belief that philanthropy was a tool of statecraft. In the postwar years, these philanthropists, led by doctor-activists, collaborated on the anti-drowning cause, spread new medical charities, combatted the slave trade, reformed penal practices, and experimented with relieving needy strangers. The nature of their cooperation, however, had changed. No longer members of the same polity, they adopted a universal approach to their benevolence, working together for the good of humanity, rather than empire. Making the care of suffering strangers routine, these British and American activists laid the groundwork for later generations' global undertakings. From Empire to Humanity offers new perspectives on the history of philanthropy, as well as the Atlantic world and colonial and postcolonial history.

Advancing with the Army
Advancing with the Army

Author: Marcus Ackroyd

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-01-04

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0191514837

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Providing the first ever statistical study of a professional cohort in the era of the industrial revolution, this prosopographical study of some 450 surgeons who joined the army medical service during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, charts the background, education, military and civilian career, marriage, sons' occupations, wealth at death, and broader social and cultural interests of the members of the cohort. It reveals the role that could be played by the nascent professions in this period in promoting rapid social mobility. The group of medical practitioners selected for this analysis did not come from affluent or professional families but profited from their years in the army to build up a solid and sometimes spectacular fortune, marry into the professions, and place their sons in professional careers. The study contributes to our understanding of Britishness in the period, since the majority of the cohort came from small-town and rural Scotland and Ireland but seldom found their wives in the native country and frequently settled in London and other English cities, where they often became pillars of the community.

The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain
The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain

Author: Thomas McGeary

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 110700988X

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Thomas McGeary's book explores the relationship between Italian opera and British partisan politics in the era of George Frideric Handel.

The Lion at Dawn
The Lion at Dawn

Author: Nathaniel Jarrett

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 0806191368

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In February 1793, in the wake of the War of American Independence and one year after British prime minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands. France thus initiated nearly a quarter century of armed conflict with Britain. During this fraught and still-contested period, historian Nathaniel Jarrett suggests, Pitt and his ministers forged a diplomatic policy and military strategy that envisioned an international system anticipating the Vienna settlement of 1815. Examining Pitt’s foreign policy from 1783 to 1797—the years before and during the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France—Jarrett considers a question that has long vexed historians: Did Pitt adhere to the “blue water” school, imagining a globe-trotting navy, or did he favor engagement nearer to shore and on the European Continent? And was this approach grounded in precedent, or was it something new? While acknowledging the complexities within this dichotomy, The Lion at Dawn argues that the prime minister consistently subordinated colonial to continental concerns and pursued a new vision rather than merely honoring past glories. Deliberately, not simply in reaction to the French Revolution, Pitt developed and pursued a grand strategy that sought British security through a novel collective European system—one ultimately realized by his successors in 1815. The Lion at Dawn opens a critical new perspective on the emergence of modern Britain and its empire and on its early effort to create a stable and peaceful international system, an ideal debated to this day.

Political Jurisprudence
Political Jurisprudence

Author: Martin Loughlin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0198810229

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Political jurisprudence is the branch of jurisprudence that treats law as an aspect of human experience called 'the political'. This is an approach that many contemporary jurists, those whose work presupposes the autonomy of legal order, tend to suppress. In this book, Martin Loughlin assesses the contribution made by political jurists and explains its contemporary significance. Political jurists maintain that the essential characteristics of modern legal order can only be revealed by considering how political authority is constituted. The political is orientated to the fact that people are organized into territorially-bounded units within which authoritative governing arrangements have been established, but the authority of this way of viewing the world is strengthened only through institution-building. Law may be an aspect of the political, but to perform its authority-generating functions effectively it must operate relatively autonomously. The political and the legal operate relationally, without one being reduced to the other. Loughlin introduces the rich literature of political jurisprudence through essays on innovative political jurists such as Hobbes, Burke, Constant, Romano, and Schmitt, and on such central themes as political right, institutionalism, constitutional legality, and reason of state. Building on his earlier books, The Idea of Public Law (OUP 2003) and Foundations of Public Law (OUP 2010), this collection extends his account of this influential strand of European legal thought.

Dury and Andrews’ Map of Hertfordshire
Dury and Andrews’ Map of Hertfordshire

Author: Andrew Macnair

Publisher: Windgather Press

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1909686743

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This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London mapmakers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews. For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the late 18th century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain and the period witnessed several episodes of comprehensive map making. The map which forms the subject of this book followed on from a large number of previous maps of the county but was greatly superior to them in terms of quality and detail. It was published in a variety of forms, in nine sheets with an additional index map, over a period of 60 years. No other maps of Hertfordshire were produced during the rest of the century, but the Board of Ordnance, later the Ordnance Survey, established in the 1790s, began to survey the Hertfordshire area in 1799, publishing the first maps covering the county between 1805 and 1834. The OS came to dominate map making in Britain but, of all the maps of Hertfordshire, that produced by Dury and Andrews was the first to be surveyed at a sufficiently large scale to really allow those dwelling in the county to visualize their own parish, local topography and even their own house, and its place in the wider landscape. The first section examines the context of the map’s production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online . The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire’s landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.

Historiography, Empire and the Rule of Law
Historiography, Empire and the Rule of Law

Author: Ian Duncanson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-10-06

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1136626816

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Historiography, Empire and the Rule of Law considers the intersection of these terms in the historical development of what has come to be known as the ‘rule of law’. The separation of governmental powers, checks and balances, and judicial independence signified something entirely new in the way in which politics was imagined and practiced. This ‘rule of law’ cannot, as it often is, be traced to the justification and practice of government as originating in a social contract among the governed; but rather, by analogy with a popular conveyancing innovation of the era, to the trust – a device by which the power of ownership of land could be restrained. But how could the restraint of power remain consistent with the avoidance of anarchic disagreement among those granted the task of supervision and restraint? In response, it is argued here, the central legal and political task became one of managing disagreement and change peacefully and constructively – by drawing on a colonial tradition that emphasised civility, negotiation and compromise. And the study of all of these qualities as they evolved, Ian Duncanson contends, is vital to understanding the emergence of the ‘rule of law’. Historiography, Empire and the Rule of Law will be invaluable for all those engaged in research and the postgraduate study of socio-legal and constitutional studies, and early modern and modern history.

Between Wales and England
Between Wales and England

Author: Bethan Jenkins

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1786830310

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Between Wales and England is an exploration of eighteenth-century anglophone Welsh writing by authors for whom English-language literature was mostly a secondary concern. In its process, the work interrogates these authors’ views on the newly-emerging sense of ‘Britishness’, finding them in many cases to be more nuanced and less resistant than has generally been considered. It looks primarily at the English-language works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) in the context of both their Welsh- and English-language influences and time spent travelling between the two countries, considering how these authors responded to and reimagined the new national identity through their poetry and prose.

Bishops and Power in Early Modern England
Bishops and Power in Early Modern England

Author: Marcus K. Harmes

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-24

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1472509757

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Armed with pistols and wearing jackboots, Bishop Henry Compton rode out in 1688 against his King but in defence of the Church of England and its bishops. His actions are a dramatic but telling indication of what was at stake for bishops in early modern England and Compton's action at the height of the Restoration was the culmination of more than a century and a half of religious controversy that engulfed bishops. Bishops were among the most important instruments of royal, religious, national and local authority in seventeenth-century England. While their actions and ideas trickled down to the lower strata of the population, poor opinions of bishops filtered back up, finding expression in public forums, printed pamphlets and more subversive forms including scurrilous verse and mocking illustrations. Bishops and Power in Early Modern England explores the role and involvement of bishops at the centre of both government and belief in early modern England. It probes the controversial actions and ideas which sparked parliamentary agitation against them, demands for religious reform, and even war. Bishops and Power in Early Modern England examines arguments challenging episcopal authority and the counter-arguments which stressed the necessity of bishops in England and their status as useful and godly ministers. The book argues that episcopal writers constructed an identity as reformed agents of church authority. Charting the development of this identity over a hundred and fifty years, from the Reformation to the Restoration, this book traces the history of early modern England from an original and highly significant perspective. This book engages with many aspects of the social, political and religious history of early modern England and will therefore be key reading for undergraduates and postgraduates, and researchers working in the early modern field, and anyone who has an interest in this period of history.