A History of Britain

'History clings tight but it also kicks loose,' writes Simon Schama at the outset of At the Edge of the World?,the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain's past. And change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history. At its heart lie questions of compelling importance for Britain's future as well as its past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain - one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it? Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are countless more ordinary lives, depicted in Schama's brilliant portrait of the life of the British people.

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noir_lordApr 2021

So many and over such a wide span to narrow it down to 2-3 definitively so I'll cover ground instead.

1) The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815[1] (actually book 2 but the first covers an earlier period this covers the period across the Act of Union - when England/Scotland became with Wales the United Kingdom and when the British navy went from "decent" to not just first but first by a hilarious margin - the only modern analogue that sorta fits is the US navy compared to everyone else post-WW2 up to well right now)

2) Dreadnought[2] which covers the late 19th early 20th (Birth of Queen Victoria to the start of WW1) - when the Dreadnought type-class battleship was considered the premier strategic weapon of it's day.

For the rest it's a vast field (that I've barely scratched - history is a hobby for me part of the perpetual "why is the world the way it is" fascination with everything) as always wikipedia is your friend :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_18th%E2%80%931...

For more modern naval stuff (where modern equals ~a century ago) I can heartily recommend the https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4mftUX7apmV1vsVXZh7RTw Drachinifel - he has a way of providing information dense content in an entertaining way - his video on the technological arms race in metallurgy for ships armour for example is superb.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Command-Ocean-History-Britain-1649-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_(book)

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ralferooAug 2024

I guess you might be technically correct with that date being the official cut-off for pre-history, but the Romans who recorded successfully invading in 43 AD also recorded unsuccessful invasion attempts in 55 and 54 BC, so it's not entirely true to say that's the start of British recorded history.

I also think it's funny that Schama's History of Britain Volume 1 is titled "3000 BC - AD 1603" and yet only has 6 pages of information for before 55 BC, and certainly nothing specific date-wise that would justify choosing 3000 BC over any other random year.

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therealdrag0Jun 2015

I'm taking a trip to UK in the fall, so I'm doing related reading until then. Currently: "A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-AD 1603" by Simon Schama [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/155314.A_History_of_Brit...]

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