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Accessing Empire: Scotland, Europe, Britain, and the Asia Trade, 1695–c. 1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Andrew Mackillop
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Extract

The close, reciprocal relationship between overseas expansion and domestic state formation in early modern Western Europe has long been understood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Portugal, the Netherlands, and England used the resources arising from their Atlantic colonies and Asia trades to defend themselves against their respective Spanish and French enemies. Creating and sustaining a territorial or trading empire, therefore, enabled polities not only to survive but also to enhance their standing with-i n the hierarchy of European states. The proposition that success overseas facilitated state development at home points however to the opposite logic, that where kingdoms failed as colonial powers they might well suffer from inhibited state formation. Indeed, if the example of England demonstrated how empire augmented a kingdom's power, then the experience of its neigh-bour, Scotland, seemed to reveal one possible outcome for a country unable to access colonial expansion. In 1707 Scotland negotiated away its political sovereignty and entered into an incorporating union with England. The new British framework enabled the Scots to access English markets (both domestic and colonial) previously closed to them. This does not mean that the 1707 union was simply an exchange of Scottish sovereignty for involvement in England's economy. Pressing political concerns, not least the Hanoverian succession played an equal if not more important role in the making of the British union. The question of political causation notwithstanding, the prevailing historiography of 1707 still places Scotland in a dichotomous framework of declining continental markets on the one hand and the lure of more expansive trade with England' domestic and overseas outlets on the other.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , November 2005 , pp. 7 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2005

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