There has been an explosion of interest in the Glorious Revolution in recent years. Long regarded as the lesser of England's revolutions of the seventeenth century, for much of the twentieth century it suffered from a relative historiographical neglect, albeit that those few studies we did possess included important works of an impressively high scholarly standard. There was a brief resurgence of interest in the Glorious Revolution at the time of the tercentenary celebrations in 1988-9, which saw a wave of fresh publications and the first serious attempt to integrate Scottish, Irish, and European perspectives into an episode that had hitherto typically been studied in an exclusively English context. But it has been in the twenty-first century that the study of the Glorious Revolution has really taken off, witnessing a spate of publications by a younger generation of scholars, most of whom were too young to have participated in the tercentenary events of the late 1980s.

It was out of an attempt further to promote this burgeoning field of historical enquiry on the later-Stuart era, and to bring to the attention of a broader audience (non-specialists as well as specialists, and in particular students coming to this period of history for the first time) some of the excellent work that was now being done in this area, that the two of us first conceived of putting together this volume some years ago.