The Kingdom of Great Britain, officially known as Great Britain, was a sovereign state in Western Europe from 1707 to the end of 1800. The state was created by the 1706 Treaty of Union and ratified by the Acts of Union 1707, which united the kingdoms of England and Scotland to form a single kingdom encompassing the whole island of Great Britain and its outlying islands, with the exception of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The unitary state was governed by a single parliament at the Palace of Westminster, but distinct legal systems—English law and Scots law—remained in use.
Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, 5th Earl Russell,, was a British historian and politician. His parents were the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and his third wife Patricia Russell. He was also a great-grandson of the 19th-century British Whig Prime Minister Lord John Russell. He succeeded to the earldom on the death of his half-brother, John Russell, on 16 December 1987. Both sons were named after their father's great friend Joseph Conrad, who was also the 4th Earl's godfather.
Early modern Britain is the history of the island of Great Britain roughly corresponding to the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Major historical events in early modern British history include numerous wars, especially with France, along with the English Renaissance, the English Reformation and Scottish Reformation, the English Civil War, the Restoration of Charles II, the Glorious Revolution, the Treaty of Union, the Scottish Enlightenment and the formation and the collapse of the First British Empire.
David L. Smith is a noted historian at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He specializes in Early Modern British history, particularly political, constitutional, legal and religious history within the Stuart period. He is the author or co-author of eight books, and the editor or co-editor of seven others, and he has also published more than seventy essays and articles.
Sir John Harold Clapham, CBE, FBA was a British economic historian.
John Stephen Morrill is a British Roman Catholic Priest, historian and academic who specialises in the political, religious, social, and cultural history of early-modern Britain from 1500 to 1750, especially the English Civil War. He is best known for his scholarship on early modern politics and his unique county studies approach which he developed at Cambridge. Morrill was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and became a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 1975.
Paul Alexander Slack FBA is a British historian. He is a former principal of Linacre College, Oxford, pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and professor of early modern social history in the University of Oxford.
Sir Roderick Castle Floud FBA is a British economic historian and a leader in the field of anthropometric history. He has been provost of the London Guildhall University, vice-chancellor and president of the London Metropolitan University, acting dean of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and provost of Gresham College (2008–2014). He is the son of Bernard Floud MP.
Robert Brady (1627–1700) was an English academic and historical writer supporting the royalist position in the reigns of Charles II of England and James II of England. He was also a physician.
Peter Mathias, was a British economic historian and the former Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford. His research focused on the history of industry, business, and technology, both in Britain and Europe. He is most well known for his publication of The First Industrial Nation: an Economic History of Britain 1700–1914 (1969), which discussed not only the multiple factors that made industrialisation possible, but also how it was sustained.
Alastair Blair Worden, FBA, usually cited as Blair Worden, is a historian, among the leading authorities on the period of the English Civil War and on relations between literature and history more generally in the early modern period.
The Stuart period of British history lasted from 1603 to 1714 during the dynasty of the House of Stuart. The period was plagued by internal and religious strife, and a large-scale civil war which resulted in the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The Interregnum, largely under the control of Oliver Cromwell, is included here for continuity, even though the Stuarts were in exile. The Cromwell regime collapsed and Charles II had very wide support for his taking of the throne in 1660. His brother James II was overthrown in 1689 in the Glorious Revolution. He was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary II and her Dutch husband William III. Mary's sister Anne was the last of the line. For the next half century James II and his son James Francis Edward Stuart and grandson Charles Edward Stuart claimed that they were the true Stuart kings, but they were in exile and their attempts to return with French aid were defeated. The period ended with the death of Queen Anne and the accession of King George I from the German House of Hanover.
James Russell Raven LittD FBA FSA is a British scholar specialising in the history of the book. His published works include The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000), What is the History of the Book? (2018) and The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (2020). As of 2024, he was Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Essex, a Life Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a Professor in the Humanities at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Thomas Brerewood, was a 'Gentleman Entrepreneur & Fraudster'. He was involved with the "Pitkin Affair" of 1705, a bankruptcy fraud committed with his business partner Thomas Pitkin that was surpassed in scale only by the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Brerewood was eventually pardoned and was able to rebuild his fortune. From 1741, to his death on December 22, 1746, Brerewood held office as the clerk of Baltimore County.
Alexandra Marie Walsham is an English-Australian academic historian. She specialises in early modern Britain and in the impact of the Protestant and Catholic reformations. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and is currently a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is co-editor of Past & Present and vice-president of the Royal Historical Society.
Keith David Malcolm Snell, FRAI, is an Anglo-Welsh academic historian who holds a personal chair as Professor of Rural and Cultural History at the University of Leicester. He was born in Tanganyika, and brought up in rural Wales and many tropical African countries, notably Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, Ghana, and Nigeria.
Sean Joseph Connolly, is an Irish historian, initially specialising in the social history of Irish Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but more recently on post-Reformation and early modern Ireland and modern Belfast. From 1996 to 2017, he was professor of Irish history at Queen's University Belfast, and has been emeritus professor there since 2017. After completing his undergraduate degree at University College, Dublin, and his doctorate at the University of Ulster, Connolly worked as an archivist at Public Record Office of Ireland from 1977 to 1980, before spending a year lecturing in history at St Patrick's College, Dublin; he returned to the University of Ulster in 1981 as a lecturer and became a reader there in 1990. Connolly was also Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society from 2014 to 2016, and was twice editor of the journal Irish Economic and Social History.
Alexandra Shepard is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow. In 2018 Shepard was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition for her work in gender history and the social history of early modern Britain. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Keith Edwin Wrightson, is a British historian who specialises in early modern England.
Malcolm John Gaskill FRHistS is an English academic historian and writer on crime, magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, and the supernatural. Gaskill was a professor in the history department of the University of East Anglia from 2011 until 2020, when he retired from teaching to give more time to writing.