[Book annoc]: Wars of the British (History of Britain)

[smart book 2001]

A History of Britain, Volume II
The Wars of the British
By Simon Schama
Published by Talk Miramax Books
October 2001; $40.00US; 0-7868-6752-3

Inside these pages lies the bloody epic of liberty, the British Iliad.

The second volume of Simon Schama's A History of Britain brings the
histories of Britain's civil wars -- full of blighted idealism, shocking
carnage, and unexpected outcomes -- startlingly to life. These conflicts
were fought unsparingly between the nations of the islands -- Ireland,
England, and Scotland -- and between parliament and the crown. Shattering
the illusion of a "united kingdom," they cost hundreds of thousands of
lives: a greater proportion of the population than died in the First World
War.

When religious passion gave way to the equally consuming passion for
profits, it became possible for the pieces of Britain to come together as
the spectacularly successful business enterprise of "Britannia
Incorporated." And in a few generations that business state expanded in a
dizzying process that transformed what had been an obscure, off-shore
footnote to Europe's great powers into the main event -- the most powerful
empire in the world.

Yet somehow, it was the "wrong empire." The British considered it a bastion
of liberty, yet it was based on military force and the enslavement of
hundreds of thousands of Africans. In America, the emptiness of British
claims to protect "freedom" was thrown back into the teeth of colonial
governors and redcoat soldiers, while the likes of Sam Adams and George
Washington inherited the mantle of Cromwell.

Simon Schama grippingly evokes the horror of the battle, famine, and plague;
the flames of burning cities; the pathos of broken families, with fathers
and sons forced to choose opposing sides. But he also captures the
intimacies of palace and parliament and the seductions of profit and
pleasure. Geniuses like John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and Benjamin Franklin
stalk vividly through his pages, but so do Scottish clansmen, women
pamphleteers, and literate, eloquent African slaves like Olaudah Equiano.

Author
Simon Schama was born in London in 1945 and since 1966 has taught history
and art history at Cambridge and Oxford and art history at Cambridge,
Oxford, and Harvard. He is now university professor at Columbia University
in New York. His prizewinning books include Patriots and Liberators; The
Embarrassment of Riches; Dead Certainties; Landscape and Memory; Rembrandt's
Eyes; and A History of Britain, Volume I He was art critic for The New
Yorker for which he won a National Magazine Award. He is the
writer/presenter of documentaries for BBC Television, and the next
installments of his award-winning, fifteen-part documentary series, A
History of Britain, will air on the History Channel in the fall of 2001 and
the spring of 2002.