From the acclaimed author of Britains War Machine and The Shock of the Old, a bold reassessment of Britains twentieth century.

It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union in this way.

David Edgertons major new history breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal...