This volume reviews the way in which, over the centuries, the evolving human presence in Britain has shaped the British landscape and how, in turn, the British landscape has moulded the development of British communities. From the beginnings of human settlement Britain has represented a final frontier for successive waves of colonists, each bringing its own set of cultural adaptations and its own ethos into the landscape. Over time both landscape and culture have matured from raw frontier to settled centre, moulded by the advent of agriculture, towns, and industry, and by streams of migration both within Britain and from outside. The chapters in this book - by archaeologists, historians, and geographers - present an interdisciplinary and accessible account of that long process. Together they trace the various phases of the story, showing how much of it has only recently been unearthed, and how much remains to be discovered.

In this introduction to his large-scale work The Peopling of British North America, Bernard Bailyn identifies central themes in a formative passage of our history: the transatlantic transfer of people from the Old World to the North American continent that formed the basis of American society. Voyagers to the West, which covers the British migration in the years just before the American Revolution and is the first major volume in the Peopling project, is also available from Vintage Books.

History has long maintained that the Anglo-Saxon overtaking of the Iron Age Celts was the origin of the British people. Celtic Britain reconstructs the peopling of Britain — through a study of genetics, climatology, archaeology, language, culture, and history — and overturns that myth and others. The Anglo-Saxons, who supposedly conquered the Celts, contributed only five to ten percent of the British gene pool. The "Atlantic Celts," long believed to have migrated to Britain from Central Europe around 300 BC during the Iron Age, can be linked genetically to the people of Basque country. And linguistic evidence suggests that, besides Celtic languages, a Germanic-type language similar to Norse was also spoken in Britain long before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Oppenheimer explaines the surprising roots of the present-day cultural identities of the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh.

Published to accompany a Museum of London exhibition from November 1993 to May 1994, this book sets out to show that London has had a cosmopolitan population from its very beginnings.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Saloutos Prize of the Immigration History Society Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning book uses an emigration roster that lists every person officially known to have left Britain for America from December 1773 to March 1776 to reconstruct the lives and motives of those who emigrated to the New World. "Voyagers to the West is a superb book...It should be equally admired by and equally attractive to the general reader as to the professional historian."--R.C. Simmons, Journal of American Studies

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize A compelling, fresh account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. The immigrants were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland, and they moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures. They represented a spectrum of religious attachments. In the early years, their stories are not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize situations and recapture lost worlds. It was a thoroughly brutal encounter—not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves, as they sought to control and prosper in the new configurations of life that were emerging around them.