In Connecting Centre and Locality, editors Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey propose a new direction for research on early modern England, focusing on communication between center and locality and drawing on several current lines of research. Moving beyond the well-studied role of news books and pamphlets, they suggest that individuals, institutions, and genres also contributed to political communication between center and locality. Political communication is viewed as two-way traffic between center and locales. They indicate that intermediaries of different kinds might execute, alter, or even ignore directions coming from the center.

Kyle and Peacey's introduction laying out the new research program is followed by ten high-quality essays by a group of highly respected scholars. Most of the essays investigate a specific instance of communication between center and locality. The essays span two centuries, each focusing on a different period and a different kind of political communications from center to locality and locality back to center. Lindsay O'Neill, for example, explores how personal letters were first utilized to teach the young earl of Huntington how to better understand news and then how the mature Huntington made use of this education in communication with others. Jennifer Wells show how ill-suited central directives relating to land development in Ireland were modified over time. Despite the wishes of the developers, they learned they must rely on information from local Catholic Irish workers who had local knowledge of agriculture and land practices. The essay by Kyle on the politics of Lent suggests that proclamations and the response to them can reveal a good deal about how commands from the center were received, implemented, or altered. Noah Millstone's contribution suggests how the commands and directives of Laudian bishops were implemented despite local opposition. Similarly, Dan Beaver investigates chartered companies and town corporations that accepted, ignored, or altered their founding documents. Ann Hughes concentrates on the differences between center and locale in military accounts in the civil war era, while Thomas Cogswell explores communication between the lord admiral, the duke of Buckingham, and Parliament concerning the narrow seas between 1625 and 1627. Several essays thus emphasize how commands from the center were treated by the locales that received them. David Como's essay is somewhat different: his examination of local petitions reveals that Levellers and Leveller ideas were not as concentrated in London as previously thought.

The essay that does most to suggest future possibilities for the center-local communication framework is that by Peacey, investigating a variety of agents, attorneys, stewards and others who might play an intermediary role in the communication process. Peacey opens up the possibility of identifying different kinds of individual and collective agents who provided and processed information from center to locality and back. Juries, for example, might be treated as participating in that process when directives or laws emanating from the center might be evaded by their pious perjuries to prevent the death penalty. Alternatively, they sometimes ignored the skeptical inclinations of judges in witchcraft cases and inflicted the death penalty. It would also be interesting to consider how resistance to ship money might fit into the center-locality framework.

Rachel Weil suggests the limitations of thinking entirely in terms of a single centers of authority and local subordinates. Her study of Jacobite news and propaganda that emanated from Newgate Prison, a tiny location in a geographical sense, might be viewed as a center that disseminated news and information outward to a number of different locations. The notion of center thus becomes less defined. Weil's approach might be extended to the role of such nonpolitical groups such as the Royal Society, which collected and distributed scientific information to both English and European locations.

Both the introduction outlining a new direction for communication research and the essays are successful in opening up new research relating to political communication. Despite the narrow space and time perspectives of most individual essays, they are collectively successful in showing what can be done with the center-local line of research. And, if developed further, we will learn more about the means by which statutes, laws, proclamations, clerical orders, and other types of commands or instruction emanating from a center were or were not implemented. Viewing news, information, and command as a two-way process rather than one of simple command and obedience will also shed light on the degree to which England was actually centrally governed.