In 1783 Britain had lost America and was unstable domestically. By 1793 it had regained its position as the leading global power. Three successive crises are examined during the intervening years in an effort to throw light on the British state in an "Age of Revolutions" and a crucial period of international development.

This new survey looks at the impact in Britain of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic aftermath, across all levels of British society. Jennifer Mori provides a clear and accessible guide to the ideas and intellectual debates the revolution stimulated, as well as popular political movements including radicalism.

The enormous popularity of his pamphlet Common Sense made Thomas Paine one of the best-known patriots during the early years of American independence. His subsequent service with the Continental Army, his publication of The American Crisis (1776–83), and his work with Pennsylvania’s revolutionary government consolidated his reputation as one of the foremost radicals of the Revolution. Thereafter, Paine spent almost fifteen years in Europe, where he was actively involved in the French Revolution, articulating his radical social, economic, and political vision in major publications such as The Rights of Man (1791), The Age of Reason (1793-1807), and Agrarian Justice (1797). Such radicalism was deemed a danger to the state in his native Britain, where Paine was found guilty of sedition, and even in the United States some of Paine’s later publications lost him a great deal of his early popularity. Yet despite this legacy, historians have paid less attention to Paine than to other leading Patriots such as Thomas Jefferson. In Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions, editors Simon Newman and Peter Onuf present a collection of essays that examine how the reputations of two figures whose outlooks were so similar have had such different trajectories.

In what has established itself as a classic study of Britain from the late eighteenth century to the mid-Victorian period, Eric J. Evans explains how the country became the world’s first industrial nation. His book also explains how, and why, Britain was able to lay the foundations for what became the world’s largest empire. Over the period covered by this book, Britain became the world’s most powerful nation and arguably its first super-power. Economic opportunity and imperial expansion were accompanied by numerous domestic political crises which stopped short of revolution. The book ranges widely: across key political, diplomatic, social, cultural, economic and religious themes in order to convey the drama involved in a century of hectic, but generally constructive, change. Britain was still ruled by wealthy landowners in 1870 as it had been in 1783, yet the society over which they presided was unrecognisable. Victorian Britain had become an urban, industrial and commercial powerhouse. This fourth edition, coming more than fifteen years after its predecessor, has been completely revised and updated in the light of recent research. It engages more extensively with key themes, including gender, national identities and Britain’s relationship with its burgeoning empire. Containing illustrations, maps, an expanded ‘Framework of Events’ and an extensive ‘Compendium of Information’ on topics such as population change, cabinet membership and significant legislation, the book is essential reading for all students of this crucial period in British history.

This study of the French Revolution reveals that from March 1792 to April 1793, French foreign policy was dominated not by the leaders of the French revolutionary government, but by two successive French foreign ministers, Charles-Francois Dumouriez and Pierre LeBrun.

This is a comprehensive study of the peace negotiations which ended the American War of Independence. It uses a wide range of sources to provide an analysis of the negotiations between Britain and France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States.

In February 1793, in the wake of the War of American Independence and one year after British prime minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands. France thus initiated nearly a quarter century of armed conflict with Britain. During this fraught and still-contested period, historian Nathaniel Jarrett suggests, Pitt and his ministers forged a diplomatic policy and military strategy that envisioned an international system anticipating the Vienna settlement of 1815. Examining Pitt’s foreign policy from 1783 to 1797—the years before and during the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France—Jarrett considers a question that has long vexed historians: Did Pitt adhere to the “blue water” school, imagining a globe-trotting navy, or did he favor engagement nearer to shore and on the European Continent? And was this approach grounded in precedent, or was it something new? While acknowledging the complexities within this dichotomy, The Lion at Dawn argues that the prime minister consistently subordinated colonial to continental concerns and pursued a new vision rather than merely honoring past glories. Deliberately, not simply in reaction to the French Revolution, Pitt developed and pursued a grand strategy that sought British security through a novel collective European system—one ultimately realized by his successors in 1815. The Lion at Dawn opens a critical new perspective on the emergence of modern Britain and its empire and on its early effort to create a stable and peaceful international system, an ideal debated to this day.

This book is a political study of the reign of George III which draws upon unpublished sources and takes account of recent research to present a rounded appreciation of one of the most important and controversial themes in British history. It examines the historical reputation of George III, his role as a European figure and his religious convictions, and offers a discussion of the domestic and imperial policies with which he was associated.

This volume takes a thematic approach to the history of the eighteenth century in the British Isles, covering such issues as domestic politics (including popular political culture), religious developments and change, and social and demographic structure and growth. Paul Langford heads a leading team of contributors, to present a lively picture of an era of intense change and growth in which all parts of Britain and Ireland were increasingly bound together by economic expansion and political unification.

The responses of British people to the French Revolution has recently received considerable attention from historians. British commentators often expressed a sense of the novelty and scale of European wars which followed, yet their views on this conflict have not yet attracted such thorough examination. This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the attitudes of various groups of British people to the conflict during the 1790’s: the Government, their supporters and their opponents inside and outside Parliament, women, churchmen, and the broad mass of British public opinion. It presents the debate in England and Scotland provoked by the war both as the sequel to the French Revolution and as a distinct debate in itself. Emma Vincent Macleod argues that contemporaries saw this conflict as one of the first since the wars of religion to be significantly shaped by ideological hostility rather than solely by a struggle over strategic interests.