The making of the United Kingdom in 1707 is still a matter of significant political and historical controversy. Allan Macinnes here offers a major interpretation that sets the Act of Union within a broad European and colonial context and provides a comprehensive picture of its transatlantic and transoceanic ramifications that ranged from the balance of power to the balance of trade. He reexamines English motivations from a colonial as well as a military perspective and assesses the imperial significance of the creation of the United Kingdom. He also explores afresh the commitment of some determined Scots to secure Union for political, religious and opportunist reasons and shows that rather than an act of statesmanship, the resultant Treaty of Union was the outcome of politically inept negotiations by the Scots. Union and Empire will be a major contribution to the history of Britain, empire and early modern state formation.
The primary purpose of this article is to examine the strength in depth of Jacobitism within Scotland and to reappraise its national impact. Notwith-standing disparaging Whig polemicists and their apologists in Anglo-British historiography, there was undoubted political substance to the appeal of Jacobitism in Scotland that stretched over seven decades. But the search for this substance raises a series of questions. Was Jacobitism anything more than an occasional interruption in the body politic? Can it be viewed as a patriotic agenda that engaged Scots politically and culturally as well as militarily and subversively? Above all, was Jacobitism a sustained political movement or merely an episodic cause in Scotland? Accordingly, the distinctiveness of Scottish Jacobitism is explored through fresh archival research and extensive polemical material prior to determining whether this distinctiveness found expression more as a movement than as a cause. The focus of debate is shifted away from the Stuart courts in exile, from dynastic identification, and from espionage and diplomacy towards Jacobite communities at home and abroad, towards patriotic identification with Scotland and towards issuesof po litical economy. In the process, a political culture of Scottish Jacobitism can be sustained in terms of its confessional and intellectual development, its organizational structure and its commercial and social networking. Nevertheless, the argument favouring a movement over a cause remains finely balanced but is shaded by the distinctive capacity of Scottish as against English or Irish Jacobitism to form alternative governments, nationally and locally in the course of major risings. More than an episodic cause, Jacobitism's persistence provoked a counter movement in Scotland, that of antiJacobitism, a wholly worthwhile area of study that has yet to be examined systematically and with intellectual rigour. It is hoped that this article will provoke such an examination.
During the mid-seventeenth century, the Stuart dynasty faced revolution in their three kingdoms - Scotland, Ireland and England - which was marked by constitutional defiance, civil war, regecide, republicanism and the eventual restoration of monarchy. Opposition in all three kingdoms to the Stuarts as an imperial dynasty drew upon and shaped different perceptions of Britain. Allan Macinnes’ wider contextualising of a British revolution - which challenges the anglocentric dominance of British History – takes account of apocalyptic visions, baronial politics and commercial networks, as well as confessional allegiances, representative images and written texts. This comprehensive survey is essential reading for all those studying this period of political crisis, which ultimately contributed to the definition of both the national interest of England and the national survival of Scotland and Ireland.
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