International pressures, Brexit and the resurgence of nationalism have created new divides in the regions of the United Kingdom. Brendan O’Leary examines the impact of Conservative policy in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, focusing on how prime ministers have handled campaigns and support for Scottish independence, the ruling coalitions in Wales, and also the new post-Brexit framework and demographic pressures in Northern Ireland. The chapter ends with a dire overall evaluation of the condition of the union as a result of Conservative policy.

The second chapter traces the post-patristic career of theosis in the Byzantine world from its role in the promotion of Chalcedonian Christology in the sixth century through to the definition (at the Constantinopolitan Council of 1351) of theosis as participation in the uncreated energies. A postscript explains why the Byzantine tradition was taken up in modern times not by the Greeks but by the Russians.

Chapter 6 scrutinizes how the corporate structures set up by Texaco shaped social dynamics and daily life in the oil fields. Texaco’s facilities constituted fenced-off and almost independent spatial enclaves in the rainforest that ensured an unobstructed resource extraction based on imported labor and a “masculine” work ethic. The discriminatory hierarchies established within the oil industry shaped the experiences of the Ecuadorean and international oilmen. The workers’ position within the hierarchy of power also predisposed their relationship with nature: While the executive level was able to keep as much physical and emotional distance as possible, most oilmen were exposed to the hardships brought on by working in a tropical environment. While state institutions showed little presence in the region, national policies and military forces protected the oil companies’ interests, subdued protests by oilmen and the public, and contributed to solidify the new social order. This chapter explores for the first time the oilmen’s experiences from their own perspective, offering insights into the social dimension of the metamorphosis of the Amazon.

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

Unions take a variety of forms and it is not always clear what species of legal entity one is dealing with. They need not require a unitary State and may exist along a spectrum of State connectivity, from an affiliation of separate States, through to their complete fusion. This chapter examines other Unions – either past, for example Austria-Hungary, or present, such as the USA and EU. The UK Union itself only dates from 1707, is voluntary in nature, and (unlike some Constitutions) there is no legislation prohibiting secession by one part of the UK, nor any constitutional provision asserting and mandating constitutional integrity. This chapter argues it is preferable to understand the UK as a ‘Union State’ – that is, a State where the centre does not directly control every part of the territory – rather than unitary in nature, because there are different constitutional arrangements in different parts of the UK. Unions tend to do better if more elastic and less constraining. But current understandings of UK parliamentary sovereignty make such elasticity very difficult for the UK Union. The doctrine of unlimited sovereignty places an almost insurmountable barrier to resolution of issues threatening the Union today, particularly those of devolution.

Chapter 5 challenges accounts of the ‘Union’ debate of 1603–1608 as a story of English constitutionalist resistance to James’s absolutist Union. Edmund Plowden’s Treatise (1567) used the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ to locate sovereignty in the ‘body politic’ of the English common law. He transformed the old Galfridian notion of English overlordship into an allegory of Scotland’s jurisdictional sub-nationality, Scotland’s body politic kneeling before England’s. The problem created by James’s accession was how, after Plowden, to deny Scots the rights of English naturalisation. How to justify excluding Scots from free trade with England and from the common law liberties of Englishmen? Sir Henry Savile and Sir Henry Spelman drew ingeniously on myths of King Edgar’s (943–975) thalassocratic rule over the British islands to argue simultaneously that Scots were aliens and (lest that suggest that a Scottish accession had brought England geopolitical advantages to be recompensed) that this alien nation’s coastlines had nevertheless always been under English sea-sovereignty. England’s trade expanded while Scots, though subject to English foreign policy, were excluded as aliens from participation.

The statute known as the Act of Settlement1 was enacted in 1701. As its name suggests, it amended or ‘settled’ the royal succession – the second such amendment in little over a decade. In 1689 the Bill of Rights2 had not only declared Prince William of Orange and his wife Princess Mary to be King William III and Queen Mary II of England, it had also vested the royal succession firstly in the survivor of them, then in Mary’s descendants, next in her younger sister Princess Anne and her descendants, and finally in the descendants of William. At the time this had seemed adequate, but circumstances had proven otherwise. William and Mary were childless, he remained a widower after her death in 1694, and none of Princess Anne’s children thrived. When the last of these died in July 1700 at the age of eleven, it appeared that the childless William III would be succeeded by the childless Anne. The Act of Settlement therefore determined that following the deaths of William and Anne, respectively, and in the absence of descendants, the Crown would pass to Princess Sophia, a granddaughter of King James I of England through her mother, Princess Elizabeth Stuart.

Scottish constitutional history has become a subject of much interest in recent decades. Since the Union came into force in May 1707, Scotland has been one component of a complex and dynamic state. The Union itself has been described as an ‘enigma’ that defies easy or conventional definitions.1 Britain is simultaneously ‘unitary’, in the sense that sovereign power, to this day, rests with the ‘crown-in-parliament’ at Westminster, and ‘pluralistic’, because the Treaty continues to guarantee Scotland (more than Wales and Northern Ireland) considerable autonomy in civil affairs.2 In this respect, the establishment of a Scottish parliament in 1999 is simply the belated democratisation of what has always been a distinct ‘national’ politics. It has also (re)kindled debates on Scotland’s possible constitutional futures and this has included reflection on Scotland’s pre-Union heritage. These debates were aided by the creation of an accessible online edition of the records of the Scottish parliament to 1707.3 The renewed interest in Scottish parliamentary history has complemented endeavours in the field of political thought, where attention has focused on the centrality of kingship to Renaissance and early modern discourses. Certain questions have been thrown into sharper relief as a consequence of these inter-related developments. How did abstracted conceptualisations of the political community inform the ways in which people engaged with its governing and representative institutions? How were the boundaries of legitimate political action negotiated and renegotiated over time? To what principles were political actors expected to conform and what happened when those principles were challenged?

The concept of nation in the United Kingdom is famously ambiguous. It has no juridical value but is a central element in constitutional debates. It can refer to either the whole state or to one of its component parts, England, Scotland, Wales and a part of Ireland. The name of the state, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lacks a corresponding adjective; as Richard Rose remarks, ‘No one speaks of the “Ukes” as a nation’.1

This chapter examines the potential impact of Brexit on the future of the Union, providing a snapshot of public opinion and attitudes as the full implications of the UK’s departure start to become clear. In the first section, an overview of devolution in the UK is provided. In the second section, data on public opinion are provided from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as consideration of attitudes to the Union in England and to Irish unification in Ireland. In the third section, the case of Northern Ireland is examined in more depth. In conclusion, it is argued that the future of the Union depends upon a combination of factors: the UK government’s policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; the economic impact of Brexit; demographic change in Northern Ireland; and attitudes in Ireland to unification.

This chapter focuses on challenges to the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom, from the period of the breakaway of the Irish Free State through to the contemporary campaigns for Scottish independence and for a united Ireland. The centrifugal forces prompted by the Brexit referendum are explored, together with the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and other contemporary crises. The fundamental complexities of nation-state formations within a multinational kingdom are considered. The fundamental question posed is whether the United Kingdom, as a conceptual, constitutional and cultural unit, can survive the pressures currently being brought to bear on it.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

As we turn to the acute problem of poverty in Ireland and the dominant figure of Daniel O’Connell, the emphasis remains in the public domain. A series of substantial reports, presented in the form of open letters to the editor of The Times, was commissioned by John Thadeus Delane himself. These open letters generated much heat in Irish newspapers, inspired a brilliant parody in Punch and led to the use of a forged private letter by O’Connell’s son, John, in the propaganda war between the Repeal Association and the British establishment. As in the House of Commons, personal honour was at stake when each side challenged the other with regard to accurate reporting. It was Thomas Campbell Foster’s account of ‘The Condition of the People of Ireland’ in The Times that had the greatest impact on the British reading public and that permanently tarnished Daniel O’Connell’s name.

Federation was promoted as an ideal before and between the two world wars, in both colonial independence movements and internationalist thought. It also became a term for promoting reforms to imperial governance, referring sometimes to greater political and economic integration and at other times to devolution or self-rule. Writers around the world responded to these developments directly, in specific political and constitutional discussions, and through indirect engagement with federalism’s rhetorical, conceptual, historical, and affective structures. Modernists such as Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner exemplify the range of white metropolitan writers’ playful, earnest, and creative engagements with federal themes during the interwar period. Paradigmatic of a so-called ‘federal moment’ amidst global decolonisation movements during the post-war period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children illustrates federalism’s contested status as both a legacy of colonial rule and a potential mechanism for imagining postcolonial futures.

Chapter 3 pairs the expansion of liberal and religious solutions to working-class problems with increasing labor radicalism in Cuba. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Catholic church and Cuban government created institutions to help domestic servants and to institutionalize education in domestic sciences for young women. The 1910s were also marked by phenomena that challenged these charity and education-based initiatives: rapidly increasing Caribbean migration to Cuba, growing labor unrest, and the feminist movement. These contradictory trends all found expression in the experiences of and discourse surrounding domestic workers. During the revolutionary upheaval of 1933, domestic workers acted in solidarity with other workers, helping to occupy mills and demanding increased formal attention to their labor. This chapter also considers the politics of the archives and how domestic workers were written out of stories of labor resistance at the very moment such resistance occurred.