As voters in Scotland go to the polls to choose whether to remain in the United Kingdom, Georgia State University historian Jacob Selwood – an expert on British history – is available to speak on the history of how Scotland and England became united under one crown in 1707.

Associate Professor Selwood researches and teaches the history of the early modern British world. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2003 under the supervision of Cynthia Herrup. His first book, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Ashgate, 2010), was a comparative study of Londoners' reactions to a diverse range of immigrants and their English-born children, together with the implications of these responses for our understanding of early modern English national identity.

He explains:

“The roots of union lie even further back than 1707. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, James VI of Scotland became James I of England. While the crowns were united, the kingdoms remained separate, even going to war with each other in the late 1630s,” he said.

“By the late seventeenth century many Scots, particularly in the prosperous lowlands, wanted access to English markets and to England's empire,” he continued. “Scotland's own failed attempt to colonize the Darien peninsula in Panama in the 1690s made it clear that Scotland could not compete with England on the imperial stage.

“This, combined with an English desire to ensure the rule of Protestant monarchs, led to the creation of the kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 (which then became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801),” Selwood said. “The great irony is that in some ways union highlighted Scottish distinctiveness: Edinburgh, not London, became Britain's intellectual center in the eighteenth century.”

“Scotland retained its own legal system and church as well, of course, as a culture distinct from England's,” he said. “While many English at the time of union assumed that Scotland would simply become known as 'North Britain', we see today that those assumptions were premature.”

He is currently researching the history of English Surinam in the seventeenth century, with a particular focus on colonial subjecthood, English identity and the status of the colony's Jewish population before and after the colony's loss to the Dutch.

For more about Selwood, visit http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwhis/5563.html