http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2478416223

Pre-Hansard parliamentary reports, 1102-1803

"For the historian, this collection provides an excellent insight into the history of Parliament and British politics. With excellence in both breadth and depth, the content here assembled provides some of the most significant resources available in British political history. To have coverage of the central political body in English, and British, history from the twelfth century through to the early nineteenth century is of great worth and significance to the student, researcher and historian. We see in these records events which shaped the politics of the British Isles and the lives of the various British peoples. The diaries of Anchitell Grey, as recorded in his Debates of the House of Commons from the year 1667 to the year 1694, are one of the key resources for any discussion on the Exclusion Crisis and Revolution of the late 1680s, while the records of John Almon and William 'Memory' Woodfall provide some of the strongest collections of Parliamentary records for the latter eighteenth century. To have these, and many more, collected into one place will allow the researcher and student an unparalleled access, and insight, to the political history of the British Isles. Throughout the period covered here, we can see a wide range of history unfold. The breadth of detailed coverage allows us to see the first steps towards the creation of Parliament through Magna Carta, the expansion of the Parliamentary body to include Wales (and, briefly, Ireland and Scotland during Cromwell's Commonwealth), the development of Parliamentary supremacy after the Civil Wars and Restoration of the monarchy, the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain after the Act of Union (1707), the slow - but influential - birth of the concept of Cabinet government and the development of the role of Prime Minister under Robert Walpole (who governed from the 1720s to the 1740s), the creation and collapse of the first British Empire in North America, the British reaction to the French Revolution, and an age of great thinkers (including Thomas Hobbes, Jonathan Swift, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and more). These volumes are exclusively derived from the Wakefield One Library."--Collection metadata page.

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