A deeply researched, analytically rich, and vivid account of England's early maritime empire Drawing on a wealth of understudied sources, historian Eleanor Hubbard explores the labor conflicts behind the rise of the English maritime empire. Freewheeling Elizabethan privateering attracted thousands of young men to the sea, where they acquired valuable skills and a reputation for ruthlessness. Peace in 1603 forced these predatory seamen to adapt to a radically changed world, one in which they were expected to risk their lives for merchants' gain, not plunder. Merchant trading companies expected sailors to relinquish their unruly ways and to help convince overseas rulers and trading partners that the English were a courteous and trustworthy "nation." Some sailors rebelled, becoming pirates and renegades; others demanded and often received concessions and shares in new trading opportunities. Treated gently by a state that was anxious to promote seafaring in order to man the navy, these determined sailors helped to keep the sea a viable and attractive trade for Englishmen.

Named a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive, The English and Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.

History of the English People in eight volumes is a work of social history, dealing with the origin and development of the British nation, focusing on the events that played a big role in the formation of the nation. Starting from the early middle ages, the work goes from early origins of the waves of migration of the people who became the Britons and ends up in the Empire period of the late 19th century._x000D_ Volume I – Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 _x000D_ Volume II – The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 _x000D_ Volume III – The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 _x000D_ Volume IV – The Reformation, 1540-1593_x000D_ Volume V – Puritan England, 1603-1660 _x000D_ Volume VI – Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 _x000D_ Volume VII – The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 _x000D_ Volume VIII – Modern England, 1760-1815_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_