Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660-1815.(Review)

History: Review of New Books, March, 1999 by JONES, W.J.

Prest, Wilfrid Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660-1815 New York: Oxford University Press 363 pp., $27.95 paper ISBN 0-19-820418-3 Publication Date: September 1998

Albion Ascendant, by Wilfrid Prest, is a story of changes: agrarian, demographic, imperial, industrial, political, urban. Personalities are kept in place, even Walpole and the Pitts, but there is an evocative employment of detail: relief for Scots in Norwich; London Welsh coffee houses. Beginning with timekeeping and calendars, ending with English peculiarities, exposing remarkable success and some luck on the road to becoming a geopolitical world power, the book, indeed the series (The Short Oxford History of the Modern World), is suited to North American undergraduates. Perhaps the more...

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