This course provides a sustained introduction to selected topics in the history of the British Isles (including Ireland) in the period since the mid-eighteenth century.
It explores both why Britain rose to be the hegemonic world power of the nineteenth century, and why it lost that status during the course of the twentieth century.
Individual topics will include the emergence of mass democracy, industrial growth and decline, changing gender roles, the impacts of the two world wars, and Britain’s relationship to the wider world (notably, but not confined to, its imperial possessions).
