Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that the advance has occurred through such an outpouring of research and writing that it is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of recent monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three complementary perspectives: those of regional communities, of the working and living environment, and of social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change.

‘Social history is at last ceasing to be the Cinderella of scholarship, and these fine volumes will do much to help raise it to its rightful place in the palace of academe. Uniformly lucid and erudite, Professor Thompson’s crew of some two dozen leading historians together present a coherent succession of first-rate thematic syntheses of the latest research. The balance is right. For the student, there is sufficient density of detail to render this … an admirable basic text; while bold revisionism and scholarly joisting give real intellectual distinction to the enterprise.’

Roy Porter Source: New Statesman and Society

‘These unique, comprehensive, collaborative volumes offer compelling evidence of the richness and vitality of British social history some three decades after its emergence in the later 1950s and early 1960s … certain to become standard reference works charting the course of scholarship at a particular point in time.’

Richard A. Soloway Source: Social Science Quarterly