Britannia is not the whole world, yet it is the first large frame through which much of the opening movement becomes legible. The realm gathers together many of the pressures, habits, ambitions, and contradictions that define the recovered age: crown confidence and local brittleness, metropolitan pride and provincial endurance, managed routes and burdened margins, visible piety and practical compromise. To understand Britannia in broad outline is therefore to understand why so much of the world appears the way it does when seen from a northern Christian capital.
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