British Society 1680–1880
Dynamism, Containment and Change

A major interpretation of British history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Richard Price (Author)

9780521657013, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 October 1999

364 pages
23.2 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.702 kg

'I think this is a fine book … Richard Price has discharged his task with quite extraordinary scholarship. the book deserves to be treated as a scholarly synthesis and its arguments should be engaged by scholars in the field. The book's ambition not to be a textbook is amply fulfilled. But it is also a goldmine for the tribe of plunderers we commonly call undergraduates.' International Review of Social History

Richard Price here offers a sweeping interpretation of modern British history. He challenges the dominant assumption that the nineteenth century marked the beginning of modern Britain. British Society argues on the contrary that nineteenth-century British society was the extension of an earlier era whose main themes first appeared in the late seventeenth century and which continued to shape the social, economic and political history of the country until the end of the nineteenth century. This book casts light on the main themes of economic, political and social history, and offers alternative interpretations on questions and issues that are central to the history of modern Britain. It follows in the great tradition of works such as Briggs's Age of Improvement, and Perkin's Origins of Modern English Society, and will be of enormous interest to all students and scholars of the period.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: beginnings, periods and problems
1. The economy of manufacture
2. A universal merchant to the world: the political economy of commerce and finance
3. The ambiguities of free trade
4. The reach of the state: taxation
5. The age of localism
6. The public, the private and the state: civil society 1680–1880
7. Exclusion and inclusion: the political consequences of 1688
8. Exclusion and inclusion: defending the politics of finality 1832–1885
9. The stabilities and instabilities of elite authority: social relations c.1688–c.1880
Afterword
Index.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1]