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.