Conventionally, ''absolutism'' in early-modern Europe has suggested unfettered autocracy and despotism — the erosion of rights, the centralisation of decision-making, the loss of liberty. Everything, in a word, that was un-British but characteristic of ancien-regime France. Recently historians have questioned such comfortably simplistic views. This lively investigation of ''absolutism'' in action — continent-wide but centred on a detailed comparison of France and England — dissolves the traditional picture to reveal a much more complex reality; and in so doing illuminates the varied ways in which early-modern Europe was governed.