Product Description

The complete Short Oxford History of The British Isles (series editor: Professor Paul Langford) will cover the history of the British Isles from the Roman Era to the present in eleven volumes. In each, experts write to their strengths tackling the key issues including society, economy, religion, politics, and culture head-on in chapters that will be at once wide-ranging surveys and searching analyses. Each book is specifically designed with the non-specialist reader in mind; but the authority of the contributors and the vigour of the interpretations will make them necessary and challenging reading for fellow academics across a range of disciplines. The nineteenth century was Britain's moment as a world power, not only in the narrow political sense, but with respect to a vast range of activities and achievements. This book sets out to describe the force and complexity of that experience, and to cover, in an interdisciplinary way, the political, economic, and cultural history of the British Isles between 1815 and 1901. It looks at the Victorian economy, that transforming great engine of change, as well as Victorian public life as a cultural and political narrative by including chapters on women and domesticity, the remarkable interplay of religion, intellect and science, art, architecture and the city, as well as literature, and the theatre and music of the time. This collection of works by eminent historians brilliantly depicts the nations of the British Isles at the height of Britain's world power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66617 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Victorian Britain was Britain at its best--a dynamic economy, a powerful empire, a stable class society (eventually) and a bold spirit of invention and design. Victorian Britain was also the country at its worst--a yawning poverty gap, a religious fervour that fed racism social neglect and a philistinism that closed British culture off from its European heritage. It was, in other words, an age of contradictions, many of which are neatly captured in this volume in the "Short Oxford History of the British Isles". Colin Matthew and his team offer a series of thematic chapters, which take in the economy, empire, religion, the "woman" question, and the arts and architecture. There are helpful maps and an accurate chronology. There is more on culture than on politics or foreign policy. References to Darwin outnumber those to Disraeli. One or two contributions are too specialised for a volume of this sort, others are too schematic and pointillist. Only Martin Daunton on the economy gets the whole century into perspective. For better or for worse, historians are usually rather reticent and reserved in their judgement of the Victorian achievement, and this collection is no exception. --Miles Taylor

About the Author
Colin Matthew- deceased Colin Matthew is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography.