Kitchen, The British Empire And Commonwealth - A Short History; Rubinstein, Britain's Century - A Political And Social History 1815-1905

Abstract

The number of textbooks dealing with British history can intimidate even the seasoned teacher and scholar. So imagine my dilemma when I inherited the British history courses from a retired colleague after not having taught the subject for some twelve years. Because my research field is modem British history, although I also teach undergraduate courses in modern Europe, I quickly discovered that the texts I used when I last taught the field, and even those of my colleague, no longer were satisfactory in the light of recent research and changes in the field. So my formal review of these two texts (by chance offered to me for review by the book review editor) coincided with a wider search for text adoptions in England since 1689, a 3000-level course at my university. So I have some immediate experience in assessing how these two books measure up to their competition.