In five paperback volumes, The Oxford History of Britain tells the story of Britain and her peoples over 2000 years, from the coming of the Roman legions in 55 BC to the present day. This volume concentrates on the 18th century and the age of industry. The apparent surface stability, prosperity, and cultural expansiveness, gave way to an explosive tumult of industry, trade, and technology unpredented in the history of the world, and also to the new revolutionary impulses surging in from the American colonies and from republican France. The early 19th century did manage to avoid the revolutionary wave sweeping through other European states. But instead it brought massive dislocations in the social fabric and the notion of the legal community, and a seemingly unbridgeable class division that led Marx to see Britain as being in the forefront of the revolutionary apocalypse.