Julian Barbour's The Discovery of Dynamics goes into great detail on absolute vs. relative pre-Einstein. His The End of Time reviews the ideas at a more popular level and continues the story into the 20th C.
Do you have the paperback? If so, is it well-constructed? I'm interested, but with so many pages I'm wary of the format. I'd usually buy something like this in hardcover but the paperback's not cheap and the hardcover's far more expensive, and seemingly out of print.
I'm afraid I don't know -- I read a pdf, and a library hardback for the latter book. That one shouldn't be hard to find from a U.S. library, and would tell you whether you want to delve into the former. (Which I found really interesting, though it's maybe too ready to valorize Ptolemy just because we know so little about his predecessors.)
