As a proclaimed field of study ‘The History of British Political Thought’ provides cover for a certain degree of ambiguity. Traditionally, of course, within the field of history, ‘British’ has served as a polite synonym for ‘English’. For some English historians, unfortunately, ‘British history’ is no different in substance from English history, the label a politically correct formulation aimed at assuaging the sensitivities of the non-English peoples of the British Isles. In this light, the contours and agenda of British political thought remain largely English, or at best Anglo-British. Elsewhere, especially among pre-modern historians, there has been a more profound attempt to reconceptualize British history. Awoken from their profound anglocentric slumbers by the meta-historical promptings of John Pocock, many medievalists and early-modernists have begun to perceive that Whig historiography was not only teleological, but also limited in its perspectives and interpretations by a narrow, if unconscious, English nationalism. These revisionist historians now recognize that the conventional narrative of English state formation makes little sense without some understanding of the relationships between England and the ‘satellite’ nations of the British world. Their counterparts among the inward-looking and – as often as not – doctrinally nationalist historians of Ireland, Scotland and Wales have also become aware of the intellectual impossibility of autarkic, self-enclosed histories of these countries divorced from the history of Greater England (or from some other supra-national context such as the Atlantic or North Sea world).