Strong Government

Linda Colley

  • The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788 by John Brewer
    Unwin Hyman, 289 pp, £28.00, April 1989, ISBN 0 00 444529 5
  • Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution by John Gascoigne
    Cambridge, 358 pp, £32.50, June 1989, ISBN 0 521 35139 1
  • Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World by C.A. Bayly
    Longman, 295 pp, £16.95, June 1989, ISBN 0 582 04287 9

Anyone seeking to make sense of British history from the last quarter of the 17th century to the first quarter of the 19th must confront two closely-related questions. How did this small island, so sparsely-populated in comparison with its major rivals, manage to become the prime European and imperial power? And how was it able to remain fundamentally cohesive while it did so? Other polities succumbed to successful invasions from without or to major convulsions within: but Great Britain after 1688 did neither. Why not? Why was there no second wave of civil wars, no further shift in dynasty enforced by foreign troops, and no revolution from below?

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