The year 2014 witnessed the anniversaries of two important, yet very different events in the multifaceted and complex history of Anglo-German relations: the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and the accession of the House of Hanover to the British throne in 1714. While the Hanoverian Succession was the topic of numerous German exhibitions, conferences, and publications, in Britain it was completely overshadowed by commemoration of the First World War. Edited by Brent Sirota and Allan Macinnes, The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and Its Empire is one of the few books published in the United Kingdom to shed new light on the personal union linking Britain and the electorate of Brunswick-Luneburg, as it was officially known.

The focus of the volume is on politics (and this means mainly British politics—the “empire” of the title is analyzed in just one contribution), both the high politics of government, diplomats, and members of Parliament, and the popular politics of patriotism and party organization in towns and counties. This gives the book an unusual degree of coherence for a collection of essays, but it also limits its significance.

Daniel Szechi examines how the Whig response to Scottish constitutional complaints around 1714 brought about the alienation of many of George I's subjects from the new dynasty and contributed to the allure of Jacobitism. This was not least a consequence of what Szechi somewhat casually calls the transformation of Britain into a “one-party state” like “Vladimir Putin's Russia” (23), which George I supported to allow his own unconstitutional involvement of the Royal Navy in the Baltic to further his interests as elector of Hanover.

In their respective chapters, Christopher Dudley and James Caudle interpret the Hanoverian accession as part of an ongoing discussion of the meaning of the 1688 revolution. Highlighting continuities in voting patterns over three elections, Dudley argues that the continuity the Whigs offered in their 1715 landslide win was deemed safer than the more shaky arguments of the divided Tory coalition

Caudle points out that political sermons—the true mass media in early eighteenth-century politics—interpreted the arrival of George I as a “Hanoverian Revolution” analogous to the Glorious Revolution; in the eyes of many Anglicans and most Dissenters, it secured the rights and liberties that had seemed endangered again in the last years of Anne's reign.

In one of the most fascinating chapters, Abigail Swingen demonstrates how closely financial interest and party politics were entwined, and what central role the Hanoverian succession played in the three financial crises of 1709, 1715, and 1720. Interlinking a nuanced reading of pamphlets and books with an in-depth analysis of public credit, interest rates, and South Sea Company shares, she argues that in the early eighteenth century, Britain's financial revolution remained contested due to its perceived ideological links to the Hanoverian Succession, though this did not always correspond to straight party political lines.

Partly contradicting this, Megan Lindsay Cherry argues that the strict divisions between Tories and Whigs shaped both colonial policy and the ways the Hanoverian Succession influenced it. Pointing out that there was no such thing as a “British imperial policy,” she highlights that the Whigs envisaged a particular role for the colonies in the Atlantic economy as both producers of raw goods and a market for finished products. Most of the Tory projects, in contrast, were abandoned after their fall from power in 1714. For the North American colonies, party divisions both before and after 1714 were much more important than was the arrival of a new dynasty.

In a wide-ranging survey, Macinnes surveys the impact of the Hanoverian Succession on Scotland where dynastic loyalties, the persistence of Episcopalianism, and the formulation of Scottish patriotism contributed to the particular initial strength of Jacobitism as well as mismanagement, and a lack of understanding, of Scottish affairs in London. Kept out of most Scottish offices in Scotland, Episcopalians and Jacobites established themselves successfully in the Atlantic trade, which tied them ever closer to the imperial project, and thus, ironically, to the unloved Union. By the 1730s, the new Patriot Party rendered Jacobitism even less attractive.

The new political category of “patriotism” is further explored by Steve Pincus and Amy Watson, who argue that from the 1720s on, the Patriot movement managed to build up a well-structured party organization beyond the established party-political gulf between Whigs and Tories and even reach beyond its urban English core into Scotland and the North American colonies.

Robert Frost, the leading historian of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, provides an expert comparison of the way the German houses of Hanover and Wettin managed their Anglo-Hanoverian and Polish-Saxonian unions until 1760. In particular the similarities between the 1701 Act of Settlement and the Pacification Sejm of 1699 are striking, as both banned the new kings from bringing foreign troops into their new countries, banned foreigners from holding office, and made stipulations on the faith of the new king. Laying out the conditions under which two German electors were chosen to head the only two parliamentary unions Europe knew before 1800, this chapter could well have stood at the beginning of the volume.

This volume certainly is a welcome addition to research on British politics between the 1690s and 1720s: in often highly nuanced interpretations of political tracts, religious debates, and economic discussions, it becomes clear to what degree the Act of Settlement and the Hanoverian Succession were entwined with practically all major developments from 1701 on, but as Sirota and Macinnes shy away from an overall assessment, it remains unclear how important it really was. The Hanoverian Succession disappears from sight all too often. This is particularly so in the chapters by Sirota on the struggle about the Established Church and Esther Mijers on Huguenot networks in the post-1680s Netherlands. It may well be that the Hanoverian Succession did not matter that much after all, but the volume's focus on Parliament and finance, elections and popular politics, and the almost exclusive use of British sources may also play a role. In contrast, the Hanoverian electors and kings themselves, their dynastic ties, courts, and politics are not discussed systematically. Here, recent research by Clarissa Campbell Orr, Andrew Thompson, and others (in addition to Tim Blanning's work on the electorate) has gone further, signifying a paradigmatic shift in research on Anglo-German relations in the eighteenth century. While historians long saw only the impact Britain had on Germany—a one way road (“Anglophilia”)—historians have come to reassess the dynamic interaction between Britain and German states, and the Personal Union is now seen as an interactive space of communication and multilayered exchanges in both directions. In its focus on the “impact” of the Hanoverian Succession on British politics, this volume, in comparison, can look rather old-fashioned.