The field of research and teaching known as the history of British political thought has been one of the most fertile areas in anglophone historical scholarship of the last half-century. Its practitioners can be found in universities across the English-speaking world and increasingly beyond it as well. Their writings have provided prescriptions of method as well as models of practice for students of political thought working in other languages and on other political traditions, even those which were founded on different philosophical principles and which have developed along quite distinct historical trajectories. Over the past fifty years, students of British political thought have mapped its contours from the late fifteenth century to the early nineteenth century. In this enterprise, the term ‘British’ has been construed ever more broadly, to encompass the political reflections of any of the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland, of the migrants who left those islands, and of their descendants who settled around the globe. The history of British political thought is therefore becoming an enterprise almost as expansive in its subject-matter as it has been in its international impact.

For the last twenty years, the study of this history has been associated particularly with the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The Center was founded by J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon Schochet in 1985.