The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660-1722 (Foundations of Modern Britain)

The fruit of a lifetime's work by one of the country's leading historians, this is history writing on a grand scale. By the 1790s Britain was constitutionally united and newly established as a major European power - in marked contrast with the England of the 1660 Restoration, shakily emerging from the upheavals of the Civil Wars. Geoffrey Holmes' important study shows how this transformation came about.