How was the United Kingdom formed? How - and to what extent - were Scotland, Ireland and Wales incorporated into a unified British polity? These were the themes of the highly successful 63rd Anglo-American Conference of Historians, 1994, on The Formation of the United Kingdom . This book now presents a collection of studies based on that conference, in which a team drawn from the most distinguished historians of Britain and Ireland explores the whole span of British/United Kingdom history. Traditional chronological frontiers are broken down as medievalists, early modernists and modernists all address such key issues as expansion and contraction, political tensions and conflicting historiographies. This highly illuminating collection of original essays forms an ideal introduction to the most up-to-date thinking about the problems of British history and identities.