| Summary: | The United Kingdom has been weakening: this book helps to explain why. It seeks to illuminate the UK in the light of the historical experience of similar union states elsewhere. It examines the UK in a sustained comparative perspective across the long 19th century and beyond. The UK was not in fact the only self-styled 'united kingdom' of the time: the book argues that Britain exported the idea of union through the advocacy or encouragement of other multinational united kingdoms at the beginning of the 19th century. It brings together the histories of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England and explores the links between them and Sweden-Norway, the United Netherlands, Austria-Hungary, and the United Canadas--and many other polities across the globe. The work is similarly distinctive in its thematic range: it looks at the institutions and agencies affecting the condition of union--from monarchy, aristocracy, and religion through to class, money, and violence. The book offers new overarching arguments and taxonomies concerning the origins, survival, and fall of all union states. And in doing so it sheds fresh light on the particular history, condition, and fate of the UK.
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