Freedom's Own Island - A History of Britain and the British People - Volume Two - The British Oceanic Expansion

This volume begins with one of the last great battles of the Middle Ages - the victory of Henry V's tiny army over the French at Agincourt. It ends almost exactly four hundred years later, on a field bit very far away, when another outnumbered British force won an equally famous victory at Waterloo. The period between the two saw Britain grow from a minor power on the fringes of European civilization into the most influential nation in the world. The formation and expansion of the British nation which allowed that transformation to take place is the story of this second volume of Bryant's remarkable distillation of her history...