Description: John Brewer provides a new framework for understanding Britain's emergence in the eighteenth century as a major international power. Warfare and taxes reshaped the English economy, but at the heart of these dramatic changes lay a tension between the nation's aspirations to be a major power and fear of the domestic consequences: the loss of liberty.
Brief description: John Brewer is Director of the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and Director of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Review Quotes: What Brewer does is to link the work of other historians with his own research into the workings of the bureaucratic machine, and to draw some wider conclusions about the nature of British society in general.--Jonathan Clark "Sunday Times"