A supporter of the American rebellion and advocate of radical ideas on religion, philosophy, education, law, medicine, and politics, John Jebb (1736-1786) provides an ideal case to examine the nature of radicalism in 18th-century Britain. Jebb began his career as a clergyman and academic at Cambridge in the 1760s and died as a doctor and leading figure among political reformers in Enlightenment London. Profoundly influenced by David Hartley's attempt to combine a Christian theology of universal salvation with a materialist and determinist account of the mind, Jebb's philosophical and...

Synthesizing scholarship on eighteenth-century political, military, economic, social and cultural history, Anthony Page shows how Britain's war with France helped to shape the course of revolutions, and the first age of global imperialism.