The Conclusion discusses the unsuccessful attempt by James VI and I’s government to create the “Imperial Crowne” of “Great Brittaine” out of the kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1604–08. It examines union treatises by Thomas Craig, John Hayward, and David Hume of Godscroft that struggled to reconcile sovereignty discourse’s stress on historical narrative, legalistic precedent, and jurisdictional independence with a proposed merger of equals. Indeed, in the Atlantic Archipelago only the combination of crises that resulted in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms created the circumstances for revolutionary political thought about sovereignty that dispensed with arguments from a historical sequence of precedents. In this way, the conclusion reflects on the enduring effects that conceiving sovereignty in terms of the recognition of superiority had on premodern writers despite a long series of attempts in England and Scotland to envisage political relations differently.

The constitutional union between England and Scotland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and is central to our understanding of the nature of the British state today. It was a union long in the making, unveiling itself in two significant moments one century apart: the union of crowns in 1603 and of parliaments in 1707. These moments of union, which were indeed constitutional rather than merely political in nature, both signalled and helped to maintain over the following centuries, albeit in subtle ways, plural patterns of nationhood beneath the veneer of unitary statehood. The United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland, that troubled relic of the Acts of Union with Ireland of 1801, has in recent times been called plurinational;1 but this is no more than a recognition of the plural national fact that has characterised the social nature of the state from its inception, albeit that the political salience of its multinational character has only in recent times come to the fore.