Forging the State: European State Formation and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707

Editors: Dr Andrew Mackillop (Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen) and Dr Micheál O'siochru (Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin)

ISBN: 9781845860486

Format: Paperback/224pp

Price: £30.00

Publication Month: September 2008

This book highlights the continental background to the formation of the United Kingdom. The 1707 Union was only one example of a more generalised process of European state formation and national realignment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The book provides a number of case studies of other contemporaneous attempts at union, ranging from Poland-Lithuania, Aragon and Castile, Ireland and Austria-Hungary. When negotiating its amalgamation with England, Scotland could draw upon a wide variety of constitutional, political and economic variants of union. While Scots received much of their legal, intellectual and political traditions from northern Protestant Europe, this book argues that southern, central and Catholic Europe also provided influential examples of state formation and union.

The final two chapters highlight the medieval origins of the debate on Scottish union with England, as well as the profound impact of the 1707 treaty at the local level.

Foreword - Professor Allan Macinnes
Debating Unions: the available conceptual resources in Europe in 1700 - Dr John Robertson
Confused Sovereignty: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and union as process, 1500-1795 - Professor Robert Frost
Religion and the Habsburg interest in seventeenth-century Hungary - Dr Tadgh O'Hannrachain
The Austracists and the war of the Spanish succession - Dr Jon Arrieta Alberdi
Anglo-Scottish relations and the origins of the Union - Dr David Ditchburn
The Act of Union: Aberdeen's Colleges and the issue of the Union - Dr Mary Prior
Kingdom, Crown and Parliament: Patriot myth and the origins of the Irish Union - Professor Sean Connolly
Epilogue - Professor Christopher Whatley

An Index is included.

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