In August 1814, the United States army was defeated just outside Washington, D.C., by the world’s greatest military power. President James Madison and his wife had just enough time to flee the White House before the British invaders entered. British troops stopped to feast on the meal still sitting on the Madisons’ dining-room table before setting the White House on fire. The extent of the destruction was massive; finished in wood rather than marble, everything inside the mansion was combustible. Only the outer stone walls would withstand the fire.

Immigration and Contemporary British Theater: Finding a Home on the Stage analyzes how contemporary British theater has responded to post-war immigration to the United Kingdom through its depictions of home and domestic life.
Bridging literary analysis, theater history, and migration studies, the book examines the ways that immigration to the United Kingdom has reshaped British theatrical culture and inspired new conceptions of Britishness and of communal belonging. Furthermore, it examines how immigrant theater artists from widely varying backgrounds (geographical, educational, cultural) have worked within and around existing theatrical institutions in Britain.

Thomas Hurka presents the first full historical study of an important strand in the development of modern moral philosophy. His subject is a series of British ethical theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, who shared key assumptions that made them a unified and distinctive school.

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing book makes a different argument.

British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800

This book examines the status and uses of ethnicity in political debate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the era that immediately preceded the onset of modern racialist and nationalist thinking. Ranging widely across the political cultures of England, Scotland, Ireland and revolutionary America, it also considers European influences and comparisons as well as engaging historically with current debates over nationalism and identity.