Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern

What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern?

In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined ...