This collection of essays by distinguished scholars from Britain and North America constitutes a major contribution to the process of remapping the history of early modern British political thought. Based on a seminar held at the Folger Institute's Center for the History of British Political Thought, it takes the union of the Anglo-Scottish crowns in 1603 as its principal focus and examines the background to and consequences of the creation of a British monarchy from a distinctively Scottish viewpoint.

In the process, it provides a pioneering study of Scottish political thought from the Reformation of 1560 to the Covenanting Revolution of the 1640s, shedding new light on the Scots participation in the invention of Britain and on the collapse of multiple kingship in the mid-seventeenth century.