Reason of State
Law, Prerogative and Empire
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:20th Jul '15
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£30.99(9781107461741)
An original work on the important idea of reason of state and British and imperial history and constitutional theory.
For those interested in the relationship between politics, power and constitutions, this book examines the idea of prerogative power and reason of state by looking at the theoretical debates surrounding the development of the British constitution and the British Empire, singling out the East India Company as a focal point.This historically embedded treatment of theoretical debates about prerogative and reason of state spans over four centuries of constitutional development. Commencing with the English Civil War and the constitutional theories of Hobbes and the Republicans, it moves through eighteenth-century arguments over jealousy of trade and commercial reason of state to early imperial concerns and the nineteenth-century debate on the legislative empire, to martial law and twentieth-century articulations of the state at the end of empire. It concludes with reflections on the contemporary post-imperial security state. The book synthesises a wealth of theoretical and empirical literature that allows a link to be made between the development of constitutional ideas and global realpolitik. It exposes the relationship between internal and external pressures and designs in the making of the modern constitutional polity and explores the relationship between law, politics and economics in a way that remains rare in constitutional scholarship.
ISBN: 9781107089891
Dimensions: 236mm x 158mm x 25mm
Weight: 600g
316 pages