Max M. Edling

Reader in Early American History, King’s College London

Max Edling is an expert on the American founding and state-building in the early United States.
He holds Ph.Ds in History from the University of Cambridge and in Political Science from
Stockholm University. Before his move to King’s College London, Edling taught at Uppsala
University, where he was awarded the Docent degree in History in 2012. He has held visiting
appointments at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the École
des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

Edling is the author of two books: A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S.
Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003) and A Hercules in the Cradle: War,
Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (2014), which won the American Society for Legal
History’s John Phillip Reid Book Award. In his current work, Edling has returned to the founding,
the subject of his first book, to apply a ‘unionist’ or ‘internationalist’ perspective to explain the
genesis of the Constitution. He is also studying the American federal union as a ‘composite’ state
similar to the empires of early modern Europe in order to develop a greater sensitivity to the
jurisdictional or spatial complexities of the early United States.

At SCAS, Edling intends to continue his research into the origins and nature of the early American
polity.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.