ABSTRACT
History is a forest of a million trees. Wild beasts run through it, vines hide its branches, strange birds sing in its upper reaches, and wildflowers burst out in its clearings. It is coherent, interdependent, lawful … and complicated! We can explain its particular features, discover recurrent causal mechanisms in its evolution, and provide overall accounts of its changes. But woe to the ecologist or historian who seeks to catalog, reconstruct, vivisect, and explain every niche, every creature, every change of a particular forest; madness lies that way. British history from the 1750s to the 1830s offers about as thick a grove as any other three-quarters of a century in any single country, and therefore defies reduction to simple explanations. Yet it deserves careful exploration: the British thicket matters both because of what happened within it and because of its influence on other parts of the great historical woodland. Within Great Britain, durable mass national politics came into being, perhaps for the first time anywhere in the world, as capital-concentrated industrialization proceeded, proletarianization accelerated, and a war-making state expanded its powers. Outside, pursuit of a world-spanning series of wars, construction of a great empire, penetration of distant markets with cheap manufactured goods, and export of British political models altered the lives of whole peoples in Europe, North America, and elsewhere.
