Explaining the English Revolution

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Jason Tomes

This is a study of the foreign policy views of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, which examines his understanding of foreign relations, his perception of contemporary foreign and Imperial affairs, and his prescriptions for British policy. The book spans international thought, diplomatic history, and biography. Theory is, however, not divorced from practice, still less practice from people. In elucidating Balfour's mind, the author touches on most of the major issues of four decades of international history and some fundamental questions of international relations. Little attention has been paid hitherto to Balfour's political thought, but here he is shown as an intellectual with a deep and coherent philosophy, which led him to emphasise the importance of Anglo-American partnership in world affairs.

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Antony Thomas

Cecil Rhodes conquered an area the size of England, Germany, France, and the Low Countries combined, adding a million square miles to Britain's African Empire and lending his name to a new country - Rhodesia. By age thirty-four, Rhodes had founded the DeBeers Company, achieving a worldwide monopoly on diamond production. He went on to earn a second fortune in gold, becoming the richest man in the western world before he was forty. A stalwart patriot and racist, Rhodes laid the foundations of modern apartheid and drew Britain into the bloody Boer War. He mercilessly pinned Africa under his control, believing it England's duty to colonize the world. Today, the monopolies are gone, apartheid is over, and Rhodes, once a hero, has been decried as a racist and imperialist whose only remaining legacy is the scholarship that bears his name. Antony Thomas's biography of Cecil Rhodes is the study of an idealist corrupted by power and of a nation forced under England's control against its will.

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Alastair Bellany

"This is the first detailed study of the political significance of the seventeenth century's most notorious and sensational court scandal, the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The book rejects earlier approaches to the history of court scandal, assuming neither that scandal inevitably undermined royal authority nor that courtiers' salacious behaviour was politically irrelevant. Instead, the book adopts a multilayered, interdisciplinary approach to the Overbury affair and its complex political meanings. It explores the factional politics that made and destroyed Overbury and his murderers, reconstructs the news culture through which information about the scandal circulated, analyses the creation and composition of the early Stuart 'public', and decodes the representations of the affair that were produced and consumed during 1615-16 and in subsequent decades. By situating the Overbury case in both short- and long-term political contexts, the book suggests that court scandal deserves a place among the cultural origins of the English revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jim Egan

The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies.