In most respects, this wide-ranging and absorbing collection of essays lives up to its title. One-quarter of its thirty-three contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000 hold doctorates from the University of Oxford. In their introduction, editors David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland explain the purpose of a handbook: a manual for understanding the period and its historiography, and also a guide to future research. The volume is resolutely modern as well. Tony Blair, the newish prime minister at the close of the two centuries under scrutiny gets three times as many mentions as does William Pitt the younger, who in 1800 was coming to the end of one of the longest tenures of the office. True, the volume struggles to be British, as opposed to English. There is a chapter on devolution and several Scottish historians feature in the line-up. But there are none from Wales, nor from either side of the Irish border (something of a problem as the modern Republic was until 1922 part of the United Kingdom). Britishness itself is given a wide berth: the politics of race and immigration do not feature at all. In other respects, the volume is too British by far. Only one overseas scholar is included. Finally, the focus of the book is political history, rather than politics. Although its organization and even some of its chapter titles bear a resemblance to its stablemate published almost a decade earlier, The Oxford Handbook to British Politics (2009), this new volume takes continuity and change over time as its abiding concern, rather than treating political concepts and institutions as static.

As with all manuals, there are different makes and models to cover, and a lot depends on the identity of the driver. Some of the chapters purr along effortlessly, their authors covering the long journey from the Hanoverian era to contemporary Britain with efficiency and style. Philip Harling on the state, Ben Weinstein on local government, John Charmley on Tories and Conservatives, and Pat Thane on welfare all offer comprehensive overviews of their subject, underpinned by crisp and coherent arguments. Anyone stuck by the side of the road on these themes will be set on their way by such exemplary surveys. Other contributors prove knowledgeable about particular parts of the machine rather than the whole, telling us more about one half of the modern period, rather than about both centuries. Richard Whiting on trades unions, James Mitchell on devolution, and Kevin Morgan on third and fringe parties err too much on the last sixty to seventy years of the twentieth century, while David Brown on the press, Angus Hawkins on political parties, and Henry Miller on petitioning and demonstrating are too stuck in the nineteenth century. In a few instances, older versions of the manual are deemed sufficient. Andrew Blick on the prime minister and cabinet and James Thompson on democracy reprise arguments they have made elsewhere, whereas Simon C. Smith on imperial policy rolls back the years to invoke Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in his account of absent-minded British imperialism. No room here, not even on the back seat, for the “new” imperial history.

For the most part however, the collection offers breadth and expertise, especially on topics which form part of the “hidden wiring”—to borrow Peter Hennessy's useful description—of modern British political history, but which are often overlooked. Thus, Philip Salmon's balanced treatment of Commons and Lords in his chapter on Parliament, Hugh Pemberton's concise depiction of the Civil Service and Laura Beers's deft analysis of political communication all add new dimensions to the conventional narrative of party politics. Conversely, Jim Tomlinson on the economy and Simon Ball on war work politics back into their chapters—particularly the history of the machinery of government—in so doing registering the significant contribution of Martin Daunton and David Edgerton to our understanding of the state, something of an enigma in older histories of modern Britain. In only a couple of instances, does the manual format disappoint, leaving the user stalled on the spot. Andrzej Olechnowicz's chapter on the monarchy is more about monarchism than the institution of the Crown, foregrounding the “banal nationalism” thesis of the social psychologist Michael Billig rather than providing an exposition of the rich secondary literature on the subject that has emerged in the last thirty years. There is also too narrow a focus in Lawrence Black's chapter on the Labour Party, which is so preoccupied with assessing the impact of “blue Labour” (the conservative strand of the modern movement), that it manages to leave out four of the six Labour Party leaders who actually became prime minister (Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan).

Despite its Oxford exterior, the engine of this volume comes from a different manufacturer: Cambridge. Lifting the hood reveals the extent to which the book is inspired by the work of two Cambridge historians, Maurice Cowling and Gareth Stedman Jones. Cowling, who died in 2005, is lauded for introducing a new rigor to the study of party ideology and parliament, or “high politics” as he termed it. Stedman Jones is credited with moving historians, particularly of the Labour party and the left, away from an obsession with class, over to the study of political language and ideas. The “Cambridge school” even merits its own entry in the index (although confusingly this includes the work of Quentin Skinner and other historians of political thought). Oxford is there too, but it is the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic “Oxford movement” to which that entry refers, rather than a rival brand of scholarship. Two of the opening chapters—David Craig on political ideas and language and Steven Fielding on high politics—attempt a fusion of Cowling, Stedman Jones, and Skinner. Other chapters show homage to Cowling's method, explicitly in the case of Robert Crowcroft's chapter, “The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime.” Cowling's Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (1980) haunts Simon Green's chapter on religion, a mercurial essay that, in one of the few references to multiculturalism in the entire volume, ticks off British Muslims for being the last bastion of the established church. For his part, Stedman Jones features prominently in his own right in Malcolm Chase's chapter on popular politics, and indirectly through the influence of Jon Lawrence, another Cambridge historian, whose work on electoral culture informs Luke Blaxill's chapter on elections and Jeremy Nuttall's chapter on ideology, as well propping up other contributions here and there. The editorial touch is light, but the impression left is clear: the “new political history” set out in this Oxford handbook, comes from the other ancient English university.

Of course, there are other brands of the “new political history” out there, not to mention older versions of political history that can take the reader from A to B just as well as the Cambridge version. For example, amongst earlier work, Peter Clarke's brilliant trilogy—Lancashire and the New Liberalism (1971), Liberals and Social Democrats (1981), and The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924–36 (1988)—remains unrivalled in its treatment of party politics, ideology, and political realignment. Ross McKibbin's influential series of studies of Labour and working-class culture also has much to say about the modernization of British politics. Clarke is cited in this volume, McKibbin has more of a walk-on part, but neither merit the same billing as Cowling or Stedman Jones. Perhaps the strangest omission of all is the work of Patrick Joyce, whose two most recent books, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (2003) and The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (2013), strove to reinterpret modern British history through the notion of “governmentality,” an approach influenced by Michel Foucault's late writings. Other historians have taken a similarly innovative approach to describing Britain's political modernity in this way: to name just a few, Tom Crook on public health and the secret ballot (the latter with Malcolm Crook); Edward Higgs on the census; and, most prominently of all, James Vernon in his ongoing work on cultures of exclusion and inclusion in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century. This particular model of British political modernity may run better on the freeways of North America, but any handbook aimed at the general user surely needs to note all the variants on the original.

One final observation. Handbooks, even history ones, run the risk of becoming swiftly outdated. Alert to this problem, the editors of this volume say that it has been assembled with “one eye on the contemporary politics of the real world” (3). A chapter titled “In Defence of Contemporary History” by Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies underlines such a claim for relevance. And the Brexit referendum of 2016 even squeezes into view in some of the chapters, notably in Geoffrey Hicks's intelligent discussion of Britain and Europe. Now, two general elections and three prime ministers later, 2016 already seems a long time ago. The editors must of course be excused for not keeping pace with this remarkable unfolding of events. But in one important respect, this volume is curiously ignorant of contemporary politics: as an academic discipline. Of late, political scientists have been mining the last two centuries of British history in order to put the present into a clearer perspective. New longitudinal data on women in Parliament and in the cabinet, on political corruption, MPs’ backgrounds, legislative outcomes, and much else, has stimulated the sharpest historical turn in political science for many years. In 2014, the Harvard scholar Arthur Spirling (now at New York University), set out an ambitious agenda for analyzing “British political development” since the early nineteenth century (“British Political Development: A Research Agenda,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 [2014]: 435–37). It is a disappointing feature of this volume that historians do not pay as much attention to current political science, as political scientists are now showing towards history. The constitutional crisis over Brexit and its outcome looks set to encourage a fresh wave of political history. More than one set of hands, and handbooks, will be required for the task.