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Union of England and Scotland 1707: Darien; succession crisis; trading issues; nature of the treaty. Church establishment in both countries. Union of Great Britain and Ireland 1800–1: United Irishmen 1798; French wars; trading issues; Pitt's plan and George III's veto.

The context of the problem. Doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty defined by A. V. Dicey. But Dicey did not believe in it when he really disapproved of something Parliament had done. The Scottish problem: 1707 was a treaty not a takeover. Public lawyers' and political scientists' approaches are contrasted.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Anglo-Scottish Union in Scottish literature, and will set out the central objective of the volume, which is to effect a rapprochement between a new British-oriented Scottish historiography and an essentialist–nationalist tradition of Scottish literary criticism. The Union has rarely surfaced directly in Scottish literature, a consequence of the inarticulate ‘banal unionism’ which has until recently reigned in Scottish political culture. Nevertheless, the chapter examines the few cases where the Union has surfaced in imaginative literature, most obviously in Burns, in Scott and in MacDiarmid. It also assesses other phenomena—religious as well political—which have pushed the matter of Union into the literary background. James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a novel set around the Union of 1707, but where the grand themes of Calvinism push the Union itself off-stage, is a classic example.

This chapter recommends a reversion from the 1707 Union of Parliaments to the 1603 Union of Crowns (though not of governments). Its argument is originally submitted to the joint attention of the Royal Society and the British Academy on a date very close to 5 November 2003. James succeeded in preserving peace in the islands during his long reign — long in England itself, longer yet in Scotland. In Westminster as well as Edinburgh and elsewhere, real power has come to be invested in parliaments, and thus in the governments that command parliamentary majorities through the dominance of political parties. The UK system works so long as party ties make more or less unquestioned the loyalty of the head of a devolved Scottish government to the head of the United Kingdom government. Generally, the present contribution is offered primarily as a scholarly, not a political one. It is enough if it has sketched grounds for taking seriously the question what ‘new unions for old’ might mean.

In 1695, a new edition of Camden's Britannia was published. Although there was little additional information on the Picts' Wall, antiquarian interest in the monument increased significantly during the early decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter explores the new interpretations of the Wall that developed during the first half of the eighteenth century, up to the Jacobite uprising of 1745–6. It examines the conceptual role of the Wall with regard to the unity and disunity of England and Scotland, the results of the Act of Union of 1707, and the concomitant revival of interest. George Smith's particular interest in the Roman fort at Castlesteads (Cumbria), exemplifies a new approach to the Wall's remains.

This chapter looks at the fictions of the Union. At the culmination of her influential essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, originally prefixed to her multi-volume anthology The British Novelists (1810), Anna Laetitia Barbauld makes an arresting claim for the nation-building potential of the novel genre. Where Jane Austen focuses on generalities and universals, Barbauld emphasizes instead the public function of novels, and of the canon enshrined in her anthology. She does so a century after the British nation had been formally inaugurated by the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, and just a decade after union with Ireland had taken effect. Her clear message is that in creating and sustaining a sense of overarching united nationhood, the ‘systems’ binding these composite entities—the principles and mechanisms underlying these unions—might be less efficacious than works of fiction, with their vivid and compelling dramatizations of shared interests, affiliations, and histories.

This chapter explores the MacCormick case, a Scottish constitutional landmark inquest. John MacCormick, an accomplished solicitor and partner of a law firm based in Glasgow, claimed that the British Parliament breached the basic law of the Treaty of Union of 1707 when they passed the Royal Titles Act 1953. He argued that the passage of the Act demonstrated the excessive power of the Parliament. The Court of Session however still dismissed the case based on the jury's ruling that parliamentary sovereignty was a basic principle of the Scottish constitutional law. The case gained considerable attention not only due to its commitment to the Scottish indigeneity, but also due to the controversial dissenting opinion of Lord Cooper, the Lord President of the Court of Session.

This chapter considers the literary representation of union by way of three case studies: Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Story of the Injured Lady’ (written 1707, published 1746), Thomas Finn’s ‘The Painter Cut’ (1810), and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771). Their polemical energy notwithstanding, the allegories of Swift and Finn also display tensions and articulate contradictions typifying the eighteenth century’s figurations of union. These complications may be explained in part as defences against possible prosecution, but they also imply mixed feelings about nationalist commitment, and an awareness of the conceptual or practical incoherence of unitary national identity. Smollett takes such tendencies to their extreme in his masterpiece Humphry Clinker, which juxtaposes multiple conflicting perspectives on union, and plays ironically on the anti-union rhetoric of Fletcher of Saltoun. He fashions the novel, a generation before Scott, as a genre uniquely equipped to address national identity in all its mobility and multiplicity.

This chapter reports the Scottish National Party (SNP)'s understanding of ‘Britain’. Scotland's incorporation within the UK starts from the 1707 Treaty of Union and the Union of Crowns in 1603. It was noted even before the SNP's electoral victory that inter-governmental communication between London and the Scotland could have been better. Relations between the Scottish government and the UK experienced some stress during 2009. In the aftermath of secession, Scotland would also retain other connections to the UK. Until Scotland reaches independence, the issue of inter-governmental relations remains contentious. The SNP government has respected the ground rules in its conduct of relations with London. SNP would be unlikely to tolerate the apparent flaws in inter-governmental communication and co-operation. Scotland would remain part of a monarchical and social union within Britain.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts. By the late twentieth century Scottish GDP per capita was approximately the same as the UK average. Given Scotland's relative backwardness compared with England in 1700, the evolution of the Scottish economy since then may be regarded as a success story, although there have been periods of crisis and decline, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. It is tempting to ascribe that success to the Union of 1707, and certainly the Union has served Scotland well in terms of wider markets from the eighteenth century and in terms of regional policy and net public-sector transfer payments for much of the twentieth century. However, the Scottish response to the opportunities offered by wider markets was vital, and in the nineteenth century the impact of the Union was relatively neutral as Scottish exports achieved market penetration on a world scale.

The matter of Jacobitism and the cause of the Stuarts are at the heart of the modern Scottish literary canon, from the songs of Burns via the novels of Scott to the era of Aytoun and Stevenson. Political Jacobitism between 1707 and 1745–6 was the primary vehicle for Scottish independence and anti-unionist sentiment. However, after the collapse of the Jacobite movement at Culloden, later generations of sentimental Jacobite writers, while continuing to be entranced by the romance of Stuart dynasticism, stood for a more pragmatic strain of political acceptance. Sentimental Jacobite writers did not challenge the Union per se, though they tended to subscribe to the view that it was—and should be—a partnership of equals. Scotland, they argued, was not a province of England, no mere Scotland-shire. Nevertheless, much of Scotland’s Jacobite, or more properly neo-Jacobite, literary canon embodied a sotto voice acceptance of the Union.