Showing titles in 18th Century

In this sweeping consideration of Britain in the 18th century, Jeremy Black explores the interconnected roles of power and geography in the creation of a global empire. Geography was at the heart of Britain’s expansion into India, its response to uprisings in Scotland and America, and its revolutionary development of railways.

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe.

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on Marie-Antoinette's story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. 

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt.

How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.

Written in 1791 as a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is a seminal work on human freedom and equality. Using the French Revolution and its ideals as an example, he demonstrates his belief that any government must put the inherent rights of its citizens above all else, especially politics. After its publication, Paine left England for France and was tried in his absence for libel against the crown.

In 1755, New England troops embarked on a "great and noble scheme" to expel 18,000 French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia, killing thousands, separating innumerable families, and driving many into forests where they waged a desperate guerrilla resistance. The right of neutrality - to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England - had been one of the founding values of Acadia. John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it.

Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core, the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect. But a precondition for the Industrial Revolution was also the establishment in British North America of a unique type of colony - for the settlement of people and culture, rather than the extraction of things.

This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s, and then follows its line of warrior kings into the next century until the Swedes finally meet their demise, in an overreach into the vastness of Russia. A small Scandinavian nation, with at most one and a half million people and scant internal resources of its own, there was small logic to how Sweden could become the dominant power on the Continent.

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of John Dewey in just one hour. In early twentieth-century America John Dewey was regarded as the foremost philosopher of his age – no mean feat when his colleagues included the likes of Russell, Wittgenstein and Heidegger...

Henry Stuart’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years’ War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous. NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2...

An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism. "Clever and intellectually persuasive ... A thoughtful introduction to this famous paradigmatic opposition.” -Washington Post In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the...

This panoramic book tells the story of how revolutionary ideas from the Enlightenment about freedom, equality, evolution, and democracy have reverberated through modern history and shaped the world as we know it today.

The Haitian Revolution: The History and Legacy of the Slave Uprising that Led to Haiti’s Independence chronicles how the only successful slave uprising came about, and why it ended French control of the island. You will learn about the revolution like never before.

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late 17th- and early 18th-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior.

From the day she was born, Charlotte won the hearts of her subjects and yet behind the scenes she was used, abused and victimized by rivalries-between her parents; between her Father (the Prince Regent, later George IV) and (Mad King) George III: between her tutors, governesses and other members of her discordant household; and ultimately between the Whigs and the Tories. Her death in childbirth-the result of medical incompetence-was followed by an unseemly scramble to produce a substitute heir.

On February 27, 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice - in present-day Guyana - launched a massive rebellion that came amazingly close to succeeding. Surrounded by jungle and savannah, the revolutionaries (many of them African-born) and Europeans struck and parried for an entire year. In the end, the Dutch prevailed because of one unique advantage - their ability to get soldiers and supplies from neighboring colonies and from Europe. Blood on the River is the explosive story of this little-known revolution, one that almost changed the face of the Americas.

Highlighting the key events, ideas, and individuals that have shaped modern Europe, this fresh and lively book provides a concise history of the continent from the Enlightenment to the present. Drawing on the enduring theme of revolution, David S. Mason explores the political, economic, and scientific causes and consequences of revolution; the development of human rights and democracy; and issues of European identity and integration.

The Great Northern War was a war waged by Russia, Denmark-Norway, and Saxony-Poland-Lithuania against the Swedish Empire from 1700 to 1721. It also engaged several of the other great powers of Europe at the time, engulfing much of the continent and its colonies in more than two decades of war. It was part of a long and almost constant series of wars fought home and around the world by European nations over control of more land, resources, and wealth. By its end, Russia had firmly established its ascendency, while Sweden would no longer pose a threat as a major empire.

El relato de los tres últimos siglos en la historia de España: el vertiginoso proceso de la elaboración de un estado que aún hoy no está exento de debate y polémica. La historia de España desde el S. XVIII a la actualidad es un relato vertiginoso que el autor sabe hacernos llegar con toda la tensión de estos tres últimos siglos.