ABSTRACT
England underwent multiple political and social transitions in the early modern period, some unique to the British Isles, others common to Europe as a whole. British monarchs shifted from the Tudors to the Stuarts, experimented with a very different political system in the mid-seventeenth century, came back to the Stuarts, and moved on to the Hanoverians. Expanding colonial interests gradually led to the recreation of the small island kingdom as the British Empire at the turn of the eighteenth century. Growing populations and shrinking land stocks brought thousands more people to urban areas for the first time, while the early stages of the Industrial Revolution changed both material production and the lives of its workers. Both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment transformed the ways in which many people understood the world around them. Over time, these transitions gradually shaped and changed English law, only to then be accepted or rejected in the laws created by the various British North American colonies.
