Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900
Showing all 12 results
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A history of the Netherlands
£24.99A history of the Netherlands
This work offers a modern, integrated outline of Dutch history, from the period in which the country took shape as a geographical, administrative and political entity, and undermines the presumption since the 16th century it has been characterised by political consensus and religious toleration. Domestic and foreign politics take pride of place, interwoven with the broad lines of economic and cultural developments, as Friso Wielenga uses the Netherlands’ geographical location and its international relations to better understand its sometimes tumultuous past and present.
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Bismarck’s war
£12.99Bismarck’s war
Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe’s pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. ‘Bismarck’s War’ tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century.
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Decadent divorce
£22.99Decadent divorce
A fascinating, revealing examination of divorce in Victorian Britain – and what it meant for society as a whole. It is a story of high drama, humour, pathos and tragedy, brimming with moral comment that throws a light on the preoccupations of the age.
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Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England
£12.99Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England
Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of the English language, lived from 1775 to 1817. Her fiction focuses on the gentry and aristocracy, and her heroines are young women looking for love. Yet the comfortable, tranquil country that she brilliantly devised is a complete contrast to the England in which she actually lived. Roy and Lesley Adkins vividly portray fascinating aspects of the daily lives of ordinary people, from forced marriages and the sale of wives in marketplaces to boys and girls working down mines or as chimney sweeps.
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George III
£8.99George III
King of Britain for 60 years and the last king of the future United States, George III has traditionally had a bad press as the villain of Whig history and for America’s Founding Fathers a monarch of madness – and, more recently, a figure of fun and menace in the musical Hamilton. Black turns back to the archives and instead locates George within his age as a man of duty and piety, and a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain’s longest period of war. George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He was also a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art and science.
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Jane Austen’s men
£22.99Jane Austen’s men
The lives of the men in Austen’s life, her relationships, how typical they were of men of their time and their impact on her life and writing. It also considers how the novels portray the lives of men and what they reveal of their author’s views on the relationship between the sexes.
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Literature for the people
£25.00Literature for the people
A fascinating, evocative history of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, two poor but idealistic young men who created a Victorian publishing empire.
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Love and marriage in the age of Jane Austen
£25.00Love and marriage in the age of Jane Austen
What happened when Jane Austen’s heroines and heroes were finally wed?
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Normal women
£25.00Normal women
‘A genuinely new history of our nation’ DAN JONES
‘Radically reframes our national story’ OBSERVER
‘This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history’ SPECTATOR
‘A lasting work of social history’ THE TIMES
‘Normal Women is Gregory’s finest moment’ GLAMOUR UK£25.00 -
Pirate enlightenment, or, The real Libertalia
£10.99Pirate enlightenment, or, The real Libertalia
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late 17th century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends – but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. For Graeber, Madagascar’s lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to ‘decolonise the Enlightenment’, demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe.
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Why empires fall
£10.99Why empires fall
Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline. But this is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration – a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence. In ‘Why Empires Fall’, Peter Heather and John Rapley use this Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it.
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Women in Victorian society
£22.99Women in Victorian society
In this highly readable and illuminating book, Anne Louise Booth looks at the status of society women during the Victorian period, the expectations and limitations they faced, and the ways in which these norms were challenged and boundaries were pushed.
£22.99