Written by Simon Schama
Format: MP3
Unabridged

"Great Britain? What was that?" asks Simon Schama at the start of this, the second of his three-volume journey into Britain's past. The answer unravels in The Wars of the British -- a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and strata of British life, faith, and thought during the eventful years from 1603 to 1776.For nearly two centuries, battles would rage at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe and America. Most of the wars would be wars of faith -- waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction -- between Republicans and Royalists, Catholics and Protestants, colonialists and natives. And many of the battles would be fought on fields far from home.

The Wars of the British is a story of revolution and reaction, of progress and catastrophe. It is a story brought vividly, sometimes disturbingly, to light by Schama's evocative narrative, filled with the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people. Here are the great and gifted -- Oliver Cromwell and Christopher Wren, Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson. But here, too, are the lesser known, though no less extraordinary, such as Olaudah Equiano, an African enslaved from childhood, who learned to write and wrote an unforgettable tale.