18th Century

The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated....

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

The untold story of a heroic band of Caribbean pirates whose defiance of imperial rule inspired revolt in colonial outposts across the world....

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company....

Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights....

George Washington, the first president of the United States, is much more than a monument on Mount Rushmore. Who was Washington, the general, president, and husband? Find out....

In 1768 Captain James Cook and his crew set out on a small British naval vessel in search of a missing continent....

The captivating biography of the French aristocrat who balanced the demands of her society with passionate affairs of the heart and a brilliant life of the mind.

Scandal! Intrigue! Cossacks! Here the world’s most engaging royal historian chronicles the world’s most fascinating imperial dynasty: the Romanovs, whose three-hundred-year reign was remarkable for its shocking violence, spectacular excess, and unimaginable venality....

Between the years of 1762 and 1763, James Boswell kept a journal of his time in London. During his time, he met the renowned writer, moralist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, with whom Boswell would form a close relationship....

In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society....

Robert K. Massie returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure German princess who became Catherine the Great. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into empress of Russia by sheer determination....

Everyone from young adults to grandparents will be fascinated by the answers uncovered in James West Davidson's vividly told A Little History of the United States....

Historian Rory Muir weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men of good family but small fortune, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society....

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

On November 29, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the British ship Zong commanded his crew to throw overboard one-third of his cargo: a shipment of Africans bound for slavery in America....

The growth of piracy led to a major surge in attacks in the Caribbean and along North America’s Atlantic seaboard. With the fragile maritime economy of the Americas threatened with collapse, major ports were threatened and trade brought to a standstill, the British government finally declared war.

A new look which fundamentally overturns our understanding of this famously "out of touch" queen....

How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture....

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessor, Restoration London, this book is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of the everyday life of our ancestors....

For over three and a half years, from 1779 to 1783, the tiny territory of Gibraltar was besieged and blockaded, on land and at sea, by the overwhelming forces of Spain and France....

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania....

This biography brings Sarah Churchill's own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life and casts a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history and literature....

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe....