- Bloomsbury Academic
To Lose an Empire: British Strategy and Foreign Policy, 1758-90
Key Metrics
- Jeremy Black
- Bloomsbury Academic
- Paperback
- 9781350216068
- -
- -
- History > Military - Strategy
- English
Book Description
Bringing strategy, foreign policy, domestic and imperial politics together, this book challenges the conventional understanding as to why the British Empire, at perhaps the height of its power, lost control of its American colonies. Critiquing the traditional emphasis on the value of alliance during the Seven Years' War, and the consequences of British isolation during the War of American Independence, Jeremy Black shows that this rests on a misleading understanding of the relationship between policy and strategy.
Encompassing both the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence and grounded in archival research, this book considers a violent and contentious period which was crucial to the making of modern Britain and its role in the wider world. Offering a reinterpretation of British strategy and foreign policy throughout this time, To Lose an Empire interweaves British domestic policy with diplomatic and colonial developments to show the impact this period and its events had on British strategy and foreign policy for years to come.
Author Bio
Jeremy Black, a Senior Fellow, is professor of history at Exeter University. He studied at Queens’ College Cambridge, St John’s College Oxford, and Merton College Oxford before joining the University of Durham as a lecturer in 1980. There he gained his PhD and ultimately his professorship in 1994.
Black is a prolific lecturer and writer, the author of over 100 books. Many concern aspects of eighteenth century British, European and American political, diplomatic and military history. But he has also broadened his perspective, both temporally and geographically, and published on the history of the press, cartography, warfare, culture and on the nature and uses of history itself. Jeremy’s work adds up to the most sustained presentation of British history in recent decades. He is a major exponent of military, diplomatic and cartographic history and has been important in helping the British to look at their past, as well as in representing British history to foreign audiences.
- His books include Modern British History (Palgrave, 2000),
- The Politics of James Bond (Praeger, 2001),
- America as a Military Power 1775-1882 (Praeger, 2002),
- The World in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 2002),
- Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004),
- The English Seaborne Empire, Yale, 2004,
- World War Two: A Military History (Routledge, 2003),
- Great Military Leaders and their Campaigns (Oct. 2008),
- Maps of War: Mapping conflict through the centuries (Conway, October 11, 2016),
- The Holocaust: History and Memory (Indiana University Press, August 14, 2016),
- Air Power: A Global History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, March 10, 2016),
- War in Europe: 1450 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, February 11, 2016),
- Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, August 3, 2016).
- The Society of Military History recognized Jeremy Black’s work in April 2008, presenting him with the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement.
Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute and JeremyBlack.com
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