A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707

Abstract

This volume of essays explores for the first time the intellectual context of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. Challenging the received view of the Union as a simple political job, it argues instead that the Union was a landmark in the history of political thought. The opening contributions investigate the ideas of union, universal monarchy and empire current in Europe and Britain before 1707. There follow chapters devoted to intellectual and religious developments in Scotland between the Restoration and the Union, before attention is focused on the issues of sovereignty at the centre of the Union debate itself. The volume concludes by studying the aftermath of the debate in eighteenth-century discussions of Britain's relations to Ireland and the North American colonies

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 176 citations exist upstream.