ABSTRACT
This chapter refers the varied time spans of exposure to 'modernity' in the limited sense of industrialisation and urbanization such as long in Britain, and short in Albania. It focuses on the major difference between the British and the French paths to modernity, the relation of the British path to the American path and the French path to the Russian, for a while, pursued a programme of state-sponsored secularization. The chapter explores the difference between the French Empire and the British Empire, incidentally treating the newly independent American states as continuing the English colonisation of North America at the expense of the indigenous peoples and of the French and the Spanish empires. There is a big difference between a military power like France, committed to a revolutionary and secularist nationalism and a naval power like Britain, characterised by an evolutionary and gradualist form of political change and by a weak religious establishment confronting massive religious pluralism.
