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The Creation of the Modern World: The British Enlightenment
The Creation of the Modern World The British Enlightenment Author:Roy Porter The first history of the forgotten Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Great Britain. From the author of the critically acclaimed The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award) comes an engagingly written and groundbreaking new work that highlights the long-underestimated British role in delivering the... more » Enlightenment to the modern world. In response to the numerous histories centered on France and Germany, Roy Porter reveals how the monumental transformation of thinking in Great Britain influenced wider developments throughout the world. With its representative government, religious toleration, precocious industrialization, and pioneering individualism, eighteenth-century Britain was at the cutting edge of political, social, and intellectual innovation. Porter examines the influence of such heroic figures as Bacon, Newton, and Locke in shaping the British Enlightenment, as well as the impact of other English essayists and novelists in popularizing modern thought. He persuasively demonstrates how their writings launched the phenomenon of Anglomania that swept the Continent and cast the Enlightenment well beyond Europe's shores. 16 pages of color illustrations.« less