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Featuring contributions from leading scholars of history, law and politics, this path-breaking two-volume work traces the development of the United Kingdom's constitution from Anglo-Saxon times and explores its role in the creation, exercise and control of public power. Chapters in Volume One, entitled 'Exploring the Constitution', approach the constitution and its history from various scholarly perspectives, and provide historically sensitive discussions of constitutional actors and institutions, and of political traditions and transformations of the constitution. Together, the two volumes form the first, wide-ranging history of the constitution to be published for decades. By their cross-disciplinary approach, taking account of the latest legal, political and historical scholarship on the constitution, they fill a large gap in the literature of the constitution, and in political thought and British history.
'Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham have gathered together an outstanding group of authors, and they have produced a work of the highest quality … the present work is genuinely a constitutional history of the entire United Kingdom and its constituent parts … Unlike previous constitutional histories … this work is jointly authored by historians, lawyers and political scientists. This is of enormous value in making sense of our constitution, as it is based not only on legal documents, or on political understandings and practices, but on a combination of law, politics and practice which encompasses more than one academic discipline.'
The Right Honourable The Lord Reed of Allermuir - President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
'A formidable and valuable assemblage of essays … the first new and capacious treatment in some fifty years of UK constitutional history … the result is an important work of reference'
Dame Linda Colley - New York Review of Books
'The editors 'steer away from stale orthodoxies and insular complacency, interrogating instead Whig assumptions about English exceptionalism … The most significant departure from the old orthodoxy here is the editors’ remapping of this most stubbornly Anglocentric of fields. They have commissioned essays on a plurality of jurisdictions and legislatures, not just Scottish, Irish and Welsh, but also the wider empire and Commonwealth.’
Colin Kidd - London Review of Books
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