A Polite and Commercial People

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This book, the first volume of the `New Oxford History of England' to appear, offers the most authoritative, comprehensive general history of England between the accession of George II and the loss of America. Though conventionally seen as static and politically stable, the eighteenth century was an age of extraordinary vitality and variety, of contrasts and change. Beneath the serene surface of aristocratic government, stately manners, and Georgian elegance, lay a less orderly world of treasonable plots, riotous mobs, and Hogarthian vulgarity. While rapid commercial growth and burgeoning bourgeois pretensions gave rise to the positive achievements of military success and imperial expansion, cultural confidence and polite manners, tensions and contradictions simmered and threatened. Paul Langford reveals the true character of the age, and demonstrates that eighteenth-century society was both strengthened and stretched by the changes to which it was subjected.