For Lucian, the imaginative republic of history entailed freedom from subjection, in time and space. All history entails the imagination of experience – of a country – other than our own. A book devoted to the recovery and contextualisation of seventeenth–century English perspectives might usefully begin with an acknowledgement of this author's own.

This study is, first, one product of slightly over a decade spent at the University of Cambridge. My greatest debt in this context is to John Morrill, who has enabled me not only to agree with his conception of our subject, but also to disagree. I am indebted to, and have never taken for granted, the preparedness of Cambridge to take in and reward foreigners, even for asking questions about the story English people tell themselves about their past. Meanwhile it was not in Cambridge that I became a historian. This was the result of an earlier education, incorporating several subjects, at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Many of the key influences there – Miles Fairburn, Peter Munz, Lucie Halberstam and Colin Davis – were foreigners in my own country, well accustomed to the imagination of otherness. To them, for better or worse, and despite subsequent training to the contrary, I owe much of my tendency to think generally. My greatest debt in this context is to Colin Davis, who first showed me what history is, while at the same time introducing me to that of seventeenth-century England.