The birth of a consumer society : the commercialization of eighteenth-century England

Neil McKendrick is one of the best-known historians in 18supth/sup-century studies. He was the Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He has published widely in 18th-century studies, notably on Josiah Wedgwood. John Brewer is the Eli and Eyde Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Science at the California Institute of Technology. He show more is the author of The Sinews of Power, War Money and the English State (1989), and Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the 18supth/sup Century (1996; re-issued 2013) which won the Wolfson History Prize. Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb, FBA was known for his books on British 18lh century history. In 1962 he was appointed Reader in Modern History at Cambridge and then became Professor of Modern English History in 1966. He was Master of Christ's College from 1978-82. show less

British-born and educated historian John Plumb received his B.A. in 1933 from the University of London and his Ph.D. three years later from Cambridge University. After eight years as a research fellow at Cambridge, he became a member of the faculty and in 1966 professor of modern English history. During the same period and in the 1970s, he was a show more visiting professor in the United States at Columbia and at New York University. Plumb is the definitive authority on England's first prime minister, Robert Walpole, about whom he wrote a two-volume biography. Plumb presents a balanced study of the era of Whig supremacy and the earlier Hanoverian period, 1714--60. In addition to authoring books, Plumb has edited a number of multivolume works and has published numerous articles and book reviews. Says Crane Brinton, "Plumb writes firmly and well in the British academic tradition of his master, G. M. Trevelyan" (N.Y. Herald Tribune). (Bowker Author Biography) show less