Greater Britain, 1516–1776 : Essays in Atlantic History

The articles and essays in this volume represent the results of a decade's work on British history as a set of interlocking national histories, as a transnational history linked to the history of continental Europe and as an international history within the Atlantic world.

Greater Britain, 1516-1776 brings together a series of studies by David Armitage on the history of the early modern British Atlantic world. The essays examine the history of the Britain and its empire from the 16th century to the 18th and place special emphasis on the intellectual histories of the Three Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland in their Atlantic context. They range in time from the Reformation to the American Revolution and treat not only the forces that encouraged the growth of the first British Empire but also the anxieties that constrained it. All are placed in a wider context of the relations among the Three Kingdoms, Europe and the British Empire from the middle ages to the late eighteenth century. Taken together, they offer an account of the ideological history of the anglophone Atlantic world which will be of use to historians of Britain, the British Empire and colonial America, as well as to literary critics and historians of political thought.