This volume of scholarly essays explores the ideas of union and empire current at the time of the Union between Scotland and England in 1707. It demonstrates for the first time the wider significance of the Union in Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. It is a major contribution to the growing interest in "British" history, but should also be of considerable interest to all students of political and economic unions, a subject of increasing importance and obvious relevance in contemporary Britain, Europe and North America.

This is the first complete modern edition of the political works of Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), one of the most acute observers of the European political order of his time and an important forerunner of the Scottish Enlightenment. Famous for his opposition to the Union with England in 1707, he viewed the problems of his own country in the light of a much broader knowledge of European affairs. His writings illustrate the long influence of Machiavelli on European political thought, and illuminates the major themes of the Enlightenment.

Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. Robertson pays particular attention to the greatest...