A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire 1776-2000 - Hardcover

Schama, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771079222 ISBN 13: 9780771079221

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2003

Synopsis

Simon Schama’s dramatic, broad-ranging, and immensely readable epic history of Britain reaches its triumphant conclusion in this third and final volume, which stretches from the American Revolution to the present.

The Fate of Empire tells the eventful and exhilarating story of Britain’s rise and fall as an imperial power, from the political turmoil of the 1770s to the struggle of present day leaders to find a way to make a different national future. The volume also examines the Romantic generation, the role of women in Victorian England, industrialization, and the liberal empire from Ireland to India, which promised material improvement, but delivered coercion and famine. As in the previous volumes, Schama vividly portrays the lives of extraordinary personalities – Queen Victoria, Churchill, Dickens, and “ordinary” individuals including the author of the first British travel guide, and Elizabeth Anderson, the first woman doctor.

Finally, Schama asks an essential question: what kind of Britain can hold together when its island isolation and its imperial dominion have both vanished? An examination of the legacy of the British ideal of freedom is at the heart of this entertaining and well-researched book. With The Fate of Empire, Simon Schama has proven himself, again, as a masterful writer of narrative history.

About this title

About the Author:

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. His publications include Patriots and Liberators, The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Dead Certainties, Landscape and Memory, and Rembrandt’s Eyes.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0771079222
• ISBN 13: 9780771079221
• Binding: Hardcover