The Oxford History of Britain by Kenneth O. Morgan

Just finished reading this for the second time.  A thorough overview of English history from the Roman period down to the early 21st century.

Morgan does a great job of breaking down an incredibly complex history into manageable buckets that allowed me to better process the overall history.  Each chapter is written by a vertical expert in the period of which they cover, Morgan editing the pieces to tell the sweeping history.

The main buckets of which I speak: The Roman Period (55BC to 440AD), The Anglo Saxon Period (440AD to 1066), Early Middle Ages (1066 to 1290), Later Middle Ages (1290 to 1485), The Tudor Period (1485 to 1603), The Stuarts, the 18th century…

The book covers so much ground that I won’t attempt a detailed review.  As I mentioned in my entry on Oliver Cromwell, however, I think that I need to balance this type of broad history book with biographies and more finite histories to really understand the world around me.

One criticism, albeit mild, is that I feel the latter portion of the book, perhaps from The Stuarts onward stopped telling history, assuming the reader already knew it.  The writing switched from history to observation from that point forward.  There were extensive sections on various political leaders, for example, for which there was literally no mention of their position in the government or any other biographical detail.  The author(s) instead mention key positions or actions by such a leader without any context.

As a reader not from Great Britain, one trying to understand its history, this inconsistency in the book was frustrating.  I greatly enjoyed the book up to that point, not so much afterward.

Anyhow, the book served its purpose and I feel much more in touch with the scope of English (and to a lesser extent Scottish, Irish and Welsh) history.

Onward!