A History of the British Isles

A World by Itself

A magisterial new one-volume history of the British Isles from the Romans to the present day, by six of our most prestigious and engaging historians.

A thought provoking and uncompromising book...[which] will surely influence the way we regard ourselves and our country (not just Britain but also Scotland) in the years to come

[A] confident and fascinating history of Britain... Masterful...  It is a volume that speaks well to our own sense of Britain today as a globalised, trading island retreating back to the edges of power... damned good

This single-volume history manages to combine a balanced new survey of the past with a rousing declaration of the historian's moral obligations... This is a very good book to have on the shelf

I thoroughly recommend the book, written by a collection of top-hole experts in their field... Excellent

[A World By Itself] tells how a small group of islands on the rain-swept edge of the Roman Empire came to shape the civilised world, effectively inventing parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, free trade and globalisation, as well as bequeathing to posterity the greatest body of literature on earth

Formerly of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford, Jonathan Clark is currently Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas. James Campbell, until 2002 Professor of Medieval History at Oxford, is a Fellow of the British Academy. John Gillingham is Emeritus Professor of History at LSE and the Fellow of the British Academy. Jenny Wormald is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh, and formerly of St Hilda's College, Oxford. William D. Rubinstein is Professor of History at the Universty of Wales, Aberystwyth. Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University, and author of a multi-award-winning three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes.

Scholarship on the history of the British Isles is currently experiencing a golden age. The breakdown of modernism and the eclipse of both the Marxist tradition and the 'Whig interpretation' that sees all history as progress, combined with the trajectories of nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have generated unprecedented intellectual activity. 
 
Nor has the world stood still: the collapse of communism, the issue of integration into the EU, and the advance of multiculturalism have led more and more people in the English speaking world as a whole to sense that their collective landscape now looks profoundly different from that inhabited by their ancestors even a few decades ago. 
 
In A World By Itself, six distinguished historians offer the most definitive and compelling history of the British Isles to date. Tracing the political, religious and material cultures from the Romans to the present day, this is at once an urgent reassessment of our shared past, and an inspirational celebration of British history. It focuses on the major themes and most dramatic moments of the last two millenia: the rise and fall of empires; reformation, revolution and restoration; wars both civil and global; and the enduring question of what it means to be British.

Jonathan Clark

This is a masterful study which takes regional diversity very seriously

The British Isles 1660-1832

‘It is hard to write the history of the British Isles in these years as anything other than a success story.’ 
 
In reality, nothing about these successes was preordained. 
 
In the mid seventeenth century the British Isles were marginal to Europe. A warring group of islands, frequently the scene of catastrophe, they counted for less than the sum of their parts. Yet, by 1832, the reverse was true. United politically as never before, these isles thrived when their European neighbours were torn by war and revolution. 
 
Recovering from the turmoil of the Civil Wars, these four countries surmounted successive domestic and foreign challenges. They prospered and extended their power throughout the world. This long eighteenth century, so often seen as a prosaic, polite era, must instead be understood as one of dynamic and perilous conflict. 
 
Tracing the political, religious and material cultures of the period, as well as what might have been, Jonathan Clark argues that the set of problems this period poses is of vital importance to the present.

Jonathan Clark

Praise for From Restoration to Reform

This is a masterful study which takes regional diversity very seriously

Books by Jonathan Clark

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter