The Isles

Alastair Bellany is Professor of History at Rutgers University. He has written extensively on the political culture of seventeenth-century England, and is currently working on the impact of climatic variability and unseasonable weather in Britain and Ireland during the Little Ice Age, c.1580-1720.

• AcknowledgementsPreface1: The Isles in Prehistory: From the Paleolithic to the Late Bronze Age2: Britannia, c.400 BCE - 410 CE3: The Making of the Christian Isles, c.300 - 750 CE4: The Isles in the Viking Afe, c.750 - 10355: After the Conquest I: England, c.1066 - 1272 6: After the Conquest II: The Norman-Angevin Remaking of the Isles, c.1066 - 12607: The First English Empire and its Limits: Conquest, Political Culture, and Resistance, c. 1200 - 13208: Climate Change, Plague, and Social Transformation: The Crises of the Fourteenth Century9: Kingship and the Power in the Isles, c.1320 - 1500 10: The Isles in the Age of Reformations, c.1450 - 1600 11: The Century of Revolutions, c.1603 - 1720 12: The Global Isles? Commerce, Colonialism, and Empire, c.1600 - 1750BibliographyIndex

A book of great scope and ambition, The Isles is also a judicious and nuanced one: it takes seriously the mutually constitutive aspects of the long, entangled history of the peoples of Britain and Ireland while not losing sight of points of difference and conflict. The environment, too, is an active player in Bellany's telling, and he is equally comfortable explicating climate data as he is a government proclamation or popular ballad. Innovatively conceived, elegantly written, and welcoming to a broad range of readers, The Isles is a tremendous achievement." - Brendan Kane, University of Connecticut