E.H. Carter and RAF Mears, A History of Britain. The Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution 1714-1832, Stacey International, 2010, hardback, 259pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781906768249

This volume is the fifth volume of a ten-part publishing programme dealing with British history from the Celts to the twenty-first century scheduled for completion in the spring of 2012. It is based on a textbook originally published in the inter-war years by a former Chief Inspector of Schools and a history master at Warwick School, which has been edited and updated by David Evans former Head of History at Eton College. The era of its original conception before the onset of Britain's post-war industrial decline and withdrawal from empire provides an unusually upbeat perspective from which to view Britain's achievements as ‘the world's first great manufacturing power' and Wellesley's establishment of a Pax Britannica in India which inaugurated ‘a new empire for Britain in the East'. Notwithstanding the book's title, the point of departure for this particular volume is defined by the Protestant succession of the Hanoverian George I and not by any attempt to locate the onset of industrialisation in a particular decade in contrast to the work of historians like Asa Briggs and Eric Evans who have focused on the significance of the 1780s as the context for dramatic economic and social change.

Carter and Mears conclude their volume with the Great Reform Act of 1832 whose significance as a turning point is also still debated by historians. The worry is that this particular chronological narrative is rather too self-professedly ‘straightforward' even for ‘today's young setting out to study history seriously' not to mention ‘adults - or parents - in need of a refresher course', who also form part of its target audience.