This volume of essays explores the intellectual context of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. Challenging the received view of the Union as a simple political job, it argues instead that the Union was a landmark in the history of political thought. It investigates the ideas of union, universal monarchy and empire current in Europe and Britain before 1707, focuses on the issues of sovereignty at the centre of the Union debate itself and concludes by studying the aftermath of the debate in eighteenth-century discussions of Britain's relations to Ireland and the North American Colonies. Underlining the vitality of Scottish intellectual life before the Enlightenment, the volume also gives unprecedented attention to the English view of the Union, to its European setting and to its consequences for the subsequent understanding of the British Empire.