When I have been asked to describe this book I have found myself saying “it is a general history, but it is not a textbook.” By “a general history” I mean a book that makes an argument about a particular phase of a society's history, but (unlike a textbook) a book that contains no ambition to offer a survey of social experience. I also mean that I have endeavored to produce a work that could be read with profit by persons with differing degrees of knowledge about the period the book covered. This is a book that I hope will interest experts in the many subspecialties of modern British history. Yet the book has not been written only for them. I have tried to make it accessible to less specialized audiences of students and others who might have the inclination to read what is undeniably an “academic” history.

The “general” character of the book was determined by the argument that developed in the course of its writing. The book presents the argument that the years from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century composed a distinct stage in the history of modern Britain. This perspective presents the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a very different light than most of the historical writing about those centuries. Yet it is a perspective, I would maintain, that provides a fuller understanding of both centuries than most conventional accounts; it illuminates more historical fact.

In order to make this argument I have engaged with much of the historiography of modern Britain. In addition, I have offered my own reckoning about large swathes of that history.