8 February 2015 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Erskine May. May is the most famous of the fifty holders of the office of Clerk of the House of Commons. His continued renown arises from his Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, first published in 1844 and with its 25th edition currently in preparation. It is known throughout those parts of the world that model their constitutional arrangements on Westminster as the 'Bible of Parliamentary Procedure'. This volume celebrates both the man and his book. Bringing together current and former Clerks in the House of Commons and outside experts, the contributors analyse May's profound contribution to the shaping of the modern House of Commons, as it made the transition from the pre-Reform Act House to the modern core of the UK's constitutional democracy in his lifetime. This is perhaps best symbolised by its enforced transition between 1834 and 1851 from a mediaeval slum to the World Heritage Palace of Westminster, which is the most iconic building in the UK. The book also considers the wider context of parliamentary law and procedure, both before and after May's time. It constitutes the first sustained analysis of the development of parliamentary procedure in over half a century, attempting to situate the reforms in the way the central institution of our democracy conducts itself in the political contexts which drove those changes.

Time and Politics is the first cultural and transnational history of modern procedural reform in the Westminster parliamentary system. The study centres on the nineteenth-century emergence of a desire to modernise and make more efficient the procedural rules of parliamentary law-making. Contrary to existing interpretations, which see this as a product of transformations in political structure and practice, this volume demonstrates how the evolution of Parliament's rules was structured by transformations within the wider culture of time. Ryan Vieira argues that the spread of an increasingly rigorous time discipline in concert with a growing consciousness of being modern worked to progressively erode the legitimacy of the historically developed rules of parliamentary debate and law-making, while simultaneously implanting new ways of judging the effectiveness of parliamentary institutions. By the 1880s, this process had transformed efficiency into the ultimate criteria of parliamentary effectiveness. Using the conceptual framework of the British world, Time and Politics demonstrates how this new understanding of parliamentary effectiveness was exported to the colonies of settlement through a series of communicative networks and provided colonial parliamentarians with the ability to imagine the inefficiencies of their own legislatures as part of a larger transnational problem. In making these arguments, this volume lays the groundwork for a new type of parliamentary history.