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Print Price: $102.99

Format:
Paperback
528 pp.
155 mm x 231 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199846504

Copyright Year:
2016

Imprint: OUP US

A New History of Britain since 1688

Four Nations and an Empire

Susan Kingsley Kent

For decades, scholars have been urging a "four nations" approach to British history. Susan Kingsley Kent's ambitious and timely A New History of Britain since 1688: Four Nations and an Empire finally delivers on that promise. Ranging from 1688 to the present, the book covers developments in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, along with the British empire, providing a lively and often gripping account of the ever-changing conflicts that have characterized British history. In prose that is accessible and engaging, Kent not only includes the histories of the four "nations" of the British Isles and the vast overseas empire within a single frame, she also seamlessly interweaves the thematic concerns of her previous scholarship - gender history, environmental history, and imperial and colonial history - into the history of British politics, society, and imperial culture. The result is a brilliant synthesis.

Readership : For undergraduate students as well as general readers.

Reviews

"In this ambitious and highly readable narrative, Susan Kingsley Kent enlivens four centuries of British life and times. Whether they are university students, scholars in the field, or aficionados of Britain's storied past, readers will be captivated by the combination of high politics and everyday experience, land and labor, nation and empire, and gender and social crisis she evokes. Equally impressive is Kent's erudition: worn lightly, but a powerful undercurrent in this engrossing account. British studies has been waiting for years for such an accessible--and teachable--history text."
--Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois
"Kent's A New History of Britain since 1688 is a breath of fresh air, not only for its success in integrating Irish, Scottish, and Welsh perspectives into the traditional, Anglocentric story of Great Britain, but even more so for balancing imperial and domestic concerns and political and cultural history, and for giving gender and race their proper place. The result is a fast-moving yet substantive narrative which will help readers better understand that there is more to Britain than London and Westminster."
--Patrick McDevitt, University at Buffalo
"Susan Kent's book is a stunning accomplishment. This beautifully written survey provides the most richly integrated history of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland available. It will be the standard text on modern Britain and its empire for years to come. Kent expertly covers new questions related to environmental change along with now more familiar topics on gender, race, and class, brilliantly demonstrating how these subjects can be powerful methodological tools of analysis. Crafted with clarity and dramatic flair, A New History of Britain is a book that students and general readers will want to read."
--Lydia Murdoch, Vassar College

List of Maps
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Introduction: The British Isles and the British Empire in 1688
The Land and Its People
Overseas Colonies
A Great Chain of Being
The Sectarian Divide
Politics
A Place in Time: Liverpool, Second City of Empire
1. The Glorious Revolution and the Creation of "Britain," 1688-1707
The Glorious Revolution
The Revolutionary Settlement and the Financial Revolution
The Act of Union, 1707
A "United" Kingdom?
A Place in Time: The Glorious Revolution in Liverpool
2. Consolidating the Kingdom and the Empire, 1707-1763
The War of the Spanish Succession and the Advent of the Hanoverian Kings
The Rising of 1715
The South Sea Bubble
Slavery and the Slave Trade
The Robinocracy
World War and Empire
A Place in Time: Liverpool and the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745
3. Economic and Intellectual Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century
The Demographic and Agricultural Revolutions
Early Industrialization
The Commercial Revolution
The Enlightenment: The Public Sphere
The Enlightenment: The Domestic Sphere
Overseas Scientific Discoveries
A Place in Time: Liverpool's "African Trade"
4. Politics and Imperial Turns, 1760-1789
Popular Politics and the Rise of the Middling Classes
Gender, Politics, and Religious Culture
The Revoult of the American Colonies
The Anti-Slavery Movement
The Gordon Riots
Turning to India
A Place in Time: The Zong Murders: Prelude to Abolition
5. Revolution, War, and Reaction, 1789-1820
The French Revolution
Women and Work
Malthus and More: Discipline and Domesticity
Rebellion in Ireland
Australia
Sierra Leone
Postwar Depression
A Place in Time: Liverpool and the Wars of the French Revolution
6. The Age of Reform, 1820-1848
Industrialization and Social Change
Urbanization and Its Discontents
Political Reform
A Place in Time: The First Passenger Railway
7. "Liberal Empire," 1823-1873
"Liberal" Empire
The White Colonies of Settlement
A Place in Time: The Opium Wars
8. Nation and Empire, Citizens and Subjects, 1848-1873
The Celtic "Nations"
The Racial Contours of Citizenship and "Subjecthood"
The Reform Act of 1867
The Women's Movement, 1850-1873
A Place in Time: The Liverpool-Irish
9. New Politics, New Imperialism
The Second Industrial Revolution
Mass Society and Mass Politics
New Imperialism
A Place in Time: Liverpool Blacks
10. The Crises of the Fin de Siècle, 1899-1914
The South African War
Race Degeneration and a Revolution in Government
Labor Disputes and the Militant Women's Suffrage Movement
The Coming of the Great War
A Place in Time: Militants in Liverpool
11. The Great War and the "Peace," 1914-1922
The Battles
Trench Warfare
The War at Home
The Easter Rebellion
Political Reverberations
A War of Empire
The Peace
Revolts Against British Rule
A Place in Time: The Pals' Brigade
12. Politics and Empire in Interwar Britain, 1919-1935
Ireland: "Flying Columns" and Black and Tans
Strikes and the Fear of Revolution
Race riots
Politics
The General Strike
Changes in the Dominions
Women, Work, and Equal Enfranchisement
Depression, Disillusion, and National Crisis
Colonial Developments
A Place in Time: Race Riots
13. Appeasement, World War, and the Establishment of the Welfare State, 1935-1962
The Fascist Challenge
An Imperial War in Europe
The War in the Pacific
The Home Front
The Color Bar
The Beveridge Report and the Postwar Welfare State
The Impact of Reforms
A Place in Time: The Second World War in Liverpool
14. The Shock of the New: Decolonization and the Creation of a New Society, 1947-1996
Decolonization
The Permissive Society
The "Troubles"
Thatcherism
A Place in Time: The Toxteth Riots
15. The Make-Up of Britain, 1997-2015
The Britain of Tony Blair
A Place in Time: Identities and Traditions at the Liverpool Football Club
Devolution in Scotland and Wales
Peace in Northern Ireland
A Multicultural Society
The Break-Up of Britain
Appendix A: Monarchs of Great Britain
Appendix B: Prime Ministers of Great Britain
Credits
Index

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Susan Kingsley Kent is Professor of Distinction in the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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