Andrew Fletcher has been known since his own lifetime as "The Patriot" because of his determined resistance to the parliamentary Union of Scotland and England in 1707. More recently he has won a new reputation for the boldness, lucidity and originality of his political thought, in which he advocated parliamentary democracy, Scottish independence and European co-operation. This biography of Fletcher describes the events which led to the Union, and offers a critical analysis of his essays and speeches which takes account of recent scholarship on the subject.

This book is the first complete modern edition of Andrew Fletcher's (1653-1716) political works.

Andrew Fletcher has been known since his own lifetime as ""The Patriot"" because of his determined resistance to the parliamentary Union of Scotland and England in 1707. More recently he has won a new reputation for the boldness, lucidity and originality of his political thought, in which he advocated parliamentary democracy, Scottish independence and European co-operation. This biography of Fletcher describes the events which led to the Union, and offers a critical analysis of his essays and speeches which takes account of recent scholarship on the subject.

Alvin Jackson examines the two Unions - the Anglo-Scots Union of 1707 and the British-Irish of 1801 - comparing their background, birth, and survival. In sustaining a comparison between the Unions, he illuminates the long history and current state of the United Kingdom.

This pioneering book seeks to transcend the limitations of separate English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh histories by taking the archipelago made up of the islands of Britain and Ireland as a single unit of study. There has been little attempt hitherto to study the history of the 'Atlantic archipelago' as a coherent entity, even for the period during which there was a single ruler of both Great Britain and Ireland. This book begins with the onset of the intellectual, religious, political, cultural and dynastic developments that were to bring teh Scottish house of Stewart to the thrones of England (incorporating the ancient principality of Wales), Ireland, (a kingdom created in 1541 as a dependency of the English Crown) and to full control of Scotland itself and of its islands. This is then a story of the creation of a British state system if not a British state. but the book is also a study of how the peoples of the archipelago interacted - as a result of internal migration, military conquest, protestant and Tridentine CAtholic evangelism - and how they were changed as a result. Ten distinguished historians representing the seperate peoples of the islands of Britain and Ireland, and teaching histort in Britain, Ireland and the USA, offer provocative and challenging new approaches to how and why we need to develop the history of each component of the archipelago in the context of the whole and to make 'the British Problem' central to that study.

The study of eighteenth century history has been transformed by the writings of John Brewer, and most recently, with The Sinews of Power, he challenged the central concepts of British history. Brewer argues that the power of the British state increased dramatically when it was forced to pay the costs of war in defence of her growing empire. In An Imperial State at War, edited by Lawrence Stone (himself no stranger to controversy), the leading historians of the eighteenth century put the Brewer thesis under the spotlight. Like the Sinews of Power itself, this is a major advance in the study of Britain's first empire.