From Europe to India and America, Britain's Colonial Wars relates empire to the fortunes of war. In less than a century, between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the settlement following the War of the American Revolution, the modern British state was born. This penetrating new analysis questions the centrality of the colonial enterprise to Westminster policy-makers obsessed with European issues, and explains how the impact of their strategies necessarily shaped the destiny of a multi-national and incoherent empire beyond the shores of Europe.

Bruce Lenman's hugely ambitious study explores three interacting themes: the growth of England's sprawling colonial empire; its military dimension; and the impact of colonial warfare on national identity. He starts in Ireland, with the renewed assault of English settlers on the Irish Gaeltacht. Under the (Scottish) Stuarts, England then began a dramatic expansion across the North Atlantic. In America, the 'Indian Wars', fought with minimal Crown support, helped forge an independent military capability among the colonists; while, in the West Indies, slave numbers and French intervention forced English settlers into a new dependency on the Crown. In India, the East India Company achieved ascendancy by sepoy armies under British control. These were very different kinds of empire; and a showdown became inevitable. The climactic conflict, the American Revolution, would not only dictate the future shape of colonial expansion, but also decisively reshaped the identities of all the participants.

The period from the Jacobite rebellion (1745) to the Scottish Reform Act (1832) saw the rise of some of the most influential thinkers of the contemporary world. Bruce Lenman provides a compact survey of developments in Enlightenment Scotland.The Reform Act spelled the end of political and social systems that had presided over industrial and agricultural revolutions turning Scotland from a rural society to one of the most urbanised and industrialised of European nations. Scotland also moved from being simply an active participant in the cultural life of western Europe to being a leader in a new, more expansive, Atlantic and European world where the ideas of its great Enlightenment thinkers circulated from Moscow to Philadelphia.The political framework for changes was the Union of 1707 which incorporated Scotland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and after 1800 Great Britain and Ireland. However, within the UK a distinctive political system run for most of this period by either the Dukes of Argyll or the so-called 'Dundas Despotism' dominated Scotland. This volume studies how that system first stimulated and exploited cultural and economic change and then was finally destroyed by it. This book is a revised and expanded edition of Integration and Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 1993).

From Europe to India and America, Britain's Colonial Wars relates empire to the fortunes of war.

In less than a century, between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the settlement following the War of the American Revolution, the modern British state was born.

This penetrating new analysis questions the centrality of the colonial enterprise to Westminster policy-makers obsessed with European issues. Nevertheless it explains how the impact of their strategies necessarily shaped the destiny of a multi-national and incoherent empire beyond the shores of Europe.

Explores the birth of England's sprawling colonial empire from its origins in the middle of the sixteenth-century to the Glorious Revolution.

Bruce Lenman explores three interacting themes: the growth of England's sprawling colonial empire; its military dimension; and the impact of colonial warfare on national identity. The climactic conflict, the American Revolution, would not only dictate the future shape of colonial expansion, but also decisively reshaped the identities of all the participants.

This is a study of Scottish society from the defeat of the last Jacobite rebellion at Culloden in 1746 to the passing into law of the Scottish Reform Bill in July 1832. It is a period when the Scottish Enlightenment reached and perhaps passed its peak, but if the earlier decades saw the rise of some of the most influential thinkers of the contemporary world, the latter part of the period saw a flourishing of imaginative literature. Economically, the period saw quite unprecedented change in the Lowlands, in the HIghlands, too, though there the transformation demanded by the more advanced areas of the British Isles proved incompatible with an ancient culture and way of life. Bruce Lenman's account catches the hey-day of the Ancien Regimein Scotland, but an Ancien Regime that after Culloden was totally committed to integrating into Great Britain. The people who mattered were the North Britons, and the creative minds of the period had to find a place within the chains of patronage and dependency that held North British society together.