Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783 - Hardcover

Simms, Brendan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713994266 ISBN 13: 9780713994261

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2007

Synopsis

This highly original, extremely enjoyable book tells the story of Britain’s extraordinary scramble to world power in the 18th century and how, through hubris and incompetence, it lost almost everything it had gained.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was an important European power, but few would have predicted her global pre-eminence by 1760. As Brendan Simms shows with great flair and originality, Britain had a crucial card to play. It was the joining of the British crown to Hanover that gave Britain two empires: one scattered around the world and another – the more important of the two - firmly locked into Germany.

Having created a new empire Britain then spectacularly lost it, this time because of its chaotic failure to maintain its European alliances. This is an epic and often unexpected story, and Simms tells it brilliantly.

About this title

Review:

'...there is no arguing with his scholarship, and there is no better history of British foreign policy in this crucial period'
-- Dominic Sandbrook, Telegraph Books of the Year

'[An] enthralling, argumentative masterpiece...revisionist history at its bracing best...[a] compellingly readable book'
-- Christopher Clark, author of Iron Kingdom, writing in the Sunday Telegraph

About the Author:

Brendan Simms is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge and Reader in the History of International Relations at the Centre for International Studies, University of Cambridge and the author of The Struggle for Mastery in Germany and Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0713994266
• ISBN 13: 9780713994261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 800