The 1707 Union which united Scotland and England has been understood in a number of ways, ranging from the Whig paradigm of inevitable progress, as an exercise in geopolitical security, a crisis in Scottish concepts of national sovereignty and as a mutually beneficial realignment of Anglo-Scottish relations for the purposes of imperial expansion. This volume seeks to complement these perspectives by situating the Union in the broad context of European state formation, and by exploring comparable political economic and cultural efforts at unification elsewhere on the Continent. It concludes by suggesting that in many ways the British Union was a very 'European' event which was built upon processes of amalgamation and international rivalry, as well as intellectual and cultural developments common to the Continent as a whole.