While Britain was losing an empire it was finding itself. Award-winning historian Simon Schama completes his monumental three-volume history of Britain, which accompanies the acclaimed television epic. In The Fate of Empire, Schama illuminates the period of British history from 1770 to 2000 through a variety of historical themes and key British characters. Britain never had the kind of revolution experienced by France in 1789, but it did come close. In the mid-1770s the country was intoxicated by a great surge of political energy. Re-discovering Englands wildernesses, the intellectuals of the Romantic generation also discovered the plight of the common man, turning Nature into a revolutionary force. This power of the cult of nature enabled two things - to make man see and explore Britain in a way unimaginable a generation before, and to pit democrat cosmopolitans against patriots. From the politics of wildness, A History of Britain moves to the Victorian era and its question of how to create a better world in the face of upheaval. As the Victorian era began, the massive advance of technology and industrialisation was rapidly reshaping both the landscape and the social structure of the whole country. To a much greater extent than ever before women would take a centre stage role in shaping society. From political campaigners like Harriet Stuart Mill to writers like Elizabeth Gaskell whose novels highlighted the plight of the industrial working class and Mary Seacole, the heroine and nurse of the Crimea War, Victorias sisters would from now on ensure that it was no longer purely a mans world. (...)