This introduction to the special issue provides an exploration of the scholarly analysis of Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom: An Interpretation. It first addresses the principal theoretical concerns and the historical interpretation that Bulpitt pursued in Territory and Power. It discusses the main lines of criticism that have been laid against the book and how in turn these have been rebutted. The article then assesses how the contributions made in this special issue provide fresh reflection on the book's contribution to the study of UK and comparative politics before suggesting how Territory and Power could shape the agenda of future research.

This article addresses the relative neglect of Territory and Power in informing the study of general state political development, both as a theoretical approach and in its application to the UK. It locates Territory and Power as a distinct contribution to two major schools of comparative research. The first section argues that Territory and Power provided an approach that was part of the intellectual turn during the 1980s to bring the state back into the analysis of politics. The second part argues that Territory and Power should be seen also as a contribution to the intellectual turn since the 1980s towards temporal analysis of political development. On these bases future researchers may find Territory and Power more accessible as a work that they can incorporate in their own research.

This article assesses Bulpitt's treatment of the centre or central state. It begins by reviewing Bulpitt's argument that the UK centre elite developed a detached style of territorial management and recognized the limits to the state's power. The argument is that the elite at the centre sought to avoid the costs of intervention in the periphery so it could retain its autonomy over decisions affecting the economy and international affairs. The article then assesses Bulpitt's claims against extant evidence from the study of UK politics. It concludes that, in spite of Bulpitt's failure to appreciate the interest of the centre in the detail of local administration, the account holds up surprisingly well and could be adopted as a comparative framework for analysing how central elites seek to keep their grip on power by managing territorial politics successfully.

Jim Bulpitt understood the UK as an eminently political creation, emphasizing the role of elites in managing diversity. He can be criticized for underplaying the ideology of union, for dismissing Labour unionism and for an excessively central and Tory perspective. His insights, however, remain useful in analysing the current collapse of unionism, if not of the Union itself. His key concept of central autonomy explains why current neo-unionist efforts to forge Britishness are unlikely to succeed, since they imply a stronger territorial articulation of the state itself.

This article addresses Jim Bulpitt's innovative approach to conceptualizing the relationship between the external realm and domestic politics in Territory and Power in the United Kingdom. The first part draws out the argument that Bulpitt made about the relationship between the external world and domestic politics to explain the historical development of the UK's territorial politics. In doing so, it fleshes out Bulpitt's own account. It also adds empirical detail and integrates arguments from his later work on the Thatcher governments into his analysis of where the UK's territorial politics went after the early 1980s. Second, the article demonstrates how Bulpitt's analytical framework about the external–domestic political relationship can help us make sense of another state's territorial politics at a crucial historical moment, namely Weimar Germany and the Bavarian problem between 1919 and 1924.

This article examines Jim Bulpitt's seminal work on UK territorial politics within the American context. We approach territorial politics by examining the ebbs and flows of American urban policy during the period 1964 to 2008. In doing so, our analysis explores changes in presidential approaches towards urban policy, and thus center–periphery relations, based on the outcomes of electoral politics. We find that conditions specific to the USA cause American territorial politics to be continually fluid, often erratic and highly differentiated by party affiliation.

The article offers an interpretive approach to understanding Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom. The first two parts interpret Bulpitt's text by locating it respectively in its historical and contemporaneous contexts. It argues that Territory and Power belongs in a broader movement to rethink the state in a way that accommodates the rise of new behavioural topics. Territory and Power also defends modernist empiricist approaches to institutions and other mid-level topics against the positivism and general theories of behaviouralism. The final part points to an interpretive approach to the state as an alternative to the behaviouralism and institutionalism that lurk behind Bulpitt's ideas. A thoroughly interpretive approach would decentre territory and power, revealing them to be contingent and shifting products of struggles over meanings.