John Oliphant – författare

A new series of bespoke, full-coverage resources developed for the AQA 2015 A/AS Level History. Written for the AQA A/AS Level History specifications for first teaching from 2015, this print Student Book provides full coverage of the Russia in the Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment, 1682-1796 Breadth component. Completely matched to the new AQA specification, this full-colour Student Book provides valuable background information to contextualise the period of study. Supporting students in developing their critical thinking, research and written communication skills, it also encourages them to make links between different time periods, topics and historical themes.

In November 1758 Brigadier General John Forbes's army expelled the French army from Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio River. Over seven months Forbes had co-ordinated three obstructive and competitive colonies, managed Indian diplomacy, and cut a road through over a hundred miles of mountain and forest. This is the first full biography of Forbes, which traces his rise from surgeon in the Scots Greys to distinguished service in War of the Austrian Succession before his 1757 posting to North America. John Oliphant puts Forbes' life and career in the wider context of the social and military world of the 18th century and offers important insights into the Seven Years' War in North America.

How and with what prospect of success do empires manage their distant lands? In times of relative calm and security these questions hardly arise: in the early eighteenth-century British governments treated their colonies, and their frontiers, with ‘salutary neglect’.By 1748, matters were dramatically different in North America. Settler intrusion into Native American lands, apparently unfettered by provincial governments and encouraged by speculators, alongside perceived French advances, threatened to engulf the whole region in a disastrous war. Quarrelsome colonies proved unable to co-operate in self-defence, forcing ministers to centralise control of Indian and military policy. This programme, undertaken with inadequate resources and in the face of conflicting priorities, undermined colonial autonomy and provoked resistance and resentment.When London attempted to draw a continuous peacetime boundary between settled areas and Indian lands, the resentment became a major cause of the American Revolution. In Britain’s Wilderness Frontier, historian John Oliphant tells the story of how it all fell apart.

The First British Empire is an authoritative, highly readable and substantial account of the origins, growth and transformation of the British Empire from its European beginnings until the aftermath of the American Revolution.Taking a regional and chronological approach, and highlighting the dual drivers of profit and power, it shows that the early empire was a mechanism not for dominance but for survival. From the naval war against Spain to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the wars against Napoleon, with a population perhaps one third that of France, England needed an oceanic empire to offset its European weakness. Expansion from mainland North America to the Caribbean and West Africa to the Indian sub-continent is seen in terms of the needs of the metropole, the narrower perspectives of settler societies, and the experiences of the colonised, the collaborators and the enslaved.Drawing on recent research, it demonstrates the fragility of British power in India, that the loss of North America was neither inevitable nor complete, and that the first Australian colony was a strategic investment rather than a dumping ground for convicts. Above all, it shows that the long, painful and often haphazard rise of this ‘first’ empire history is an essential key to modern British and world history.