Roy Porter

The Creation of the Modern World

The first history of the forgotten Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Great Britain.

From the author of the critically acclaimed history of medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award), comes an engagingly written and groundbreaking new work that highlights the long-underestimated British role in delivering the Enlightenment to the modern world. In response to the numerous histories centered on France and Germany, Roy Porter makes an overwhelming case here for considering Britain the true home of modernity. He reveals how this country, driven by exuberance, diversity, and power of invention, influenced wider developments on the nearby continent of Europe and throughout the rest of the world.

With its representative government, religious tolerance, precocious industrialization, and pioneering individualism, eighteenth-century Britain was at the cutting edge of political, social, and intellectual innovation. Porter examines the influence of such heroic figures as Bacon, Newton, and Locke in shaping the British Enlightenment, as well as the impact of other English essayists and novelists in popularizing modern thought. He persuasively demonstrates how their writings launched the wild phenomenon of Anglomania that swept the Continent and cast the Enlightenment well beyond Europe's shores.