In 1775, a young Philadelphia Quaker was sent by his father to gather detailed information on business conditions in the British Isles. Fisher's travels took him throughout Britain and Ireland, even across the English Channel, and the journals that record his observations provide a fascinating and very distinctive commentary on the economic and social life of the time. Detailed and astute descriptions of British manufacturing and trade are balanced by lively comments on landscape gardening and country houses, and there is much material on the transatlantic connections of the Society of Friends during the American Revolution. The travel journals are supplemented by Fisher's cameos of merchants in the major trading centers, with lists of all the goods handled.

The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. During this period modern English society and a modern state began to take shape, and England's position in the world was transformed.

The Century of Revolution tries to penetrate below the familiar events to grasp when happened—to ordinary English men and women as well as to kings and queens or abstractions like "society" and "the state."

In this new edition, Dr. Hill includes the most important conclusions of recent research and has added postscripts drawing attention to especially significant books.

Nothing sums up the tragedy of the English Civil War more than the friendship between Sir William Waller and his opponent Sir Ralph Hopton as "this war without an enemy."However, Waller was also a general respected by both sides during the war, the Royalist Colonel Walter Slingsby described him as "the fox" and the "best shifter and chooser of ground when he was not master of the field." The Parliamentarian John Vicars in his England's Worthies published in 1647 refers to Waller as "one of the most impregnable offensive and defensive walls of the kingdom." His victories in 1642 and early 1643 earned him the nickname of "William the Conqueror," and due to his tactics of marching by night to surprise his enemy, the "Night Owl."It was Waller who also first mentioned the need for the formation of the New Model Army. Using contemporary accounts to describe events, this book looks at Waller's campaigns from the siege of Portsmouth in June 1642 to April 1645 when his army was disbanded. It includeshis victories in the West in 1643, the raising of a new army in August 1643, the sieges of Basing House and Arundel Castle along with the defence of Farnham and the storming of Alton. Also included is Waller's many battles including Lansdown, Roundway Down, Cheriton, Cropredy Bridge, and the Second Battle of Newbury. The book also covers the logistics of putting Waller's Army into the field, including clothing, arms, and taxation as well as the tension between Waller and the Earl of Essex.

This book offers a major reassessment of the place of propertied people in eighteenth-century England. Common views of politics in this period postulate aristocratic dominance coexisting with plebeian vitality. Paul Langford explores the terrain which lay between the high ground of elite rule and the low ground of popular politics, revealing the vigorous activity and institutional creativity which prevailed in it. Dr Langford shows us a society in which middle-class men and women increasingly enforced their social priorities, vested interests, and ideological preoccupations. In an age imbued with the propertied mentality, the machinery, formal and informal, for managing public affairs was constantly revised. Political and religious prejudices are shown in retreat before the requirements of propertied association. Parliament appears as the willing tool of interests and communities which were by no means submissive to the traditional authority of the gentry. The nobility is seen obediently adapting to the demands of those whom it sought to patronize. This perceptive study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century society and politics.