Of the many books on the Union of 1707 that were released in the year of its three hundredth anniversary, Karin Bowie's study of Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union stands out as unique. Based on Bowie's doctoral thesis at the University of Glasgow (completed in 2004) and clearly reflecting many hours of painstaking research, readers will not find a general guide to the chronology, legislation, major players, and key themes of the Union debates here. Instead, Bowie focuses explicitly on the dynamics of the public sphere in Scotland in the years leading up to the Union, examining the influence of public opinion on the passage of the Act of Union in the greatest detail yet undertaken by any historian. Bowie therefore presupposes a certain degree of familiarity with the key issues involved, and generalist readers would do well to research the broader context elsewhere before taking up this book.

Refreshingly for a topic so often treated parochially, introspectively, and with more than a little attention to its implications for modern nationalists, Bowie sets out to relate the turbulent passage of the Union in Scotland to a much wider problem in early modern historiography—that of the public sphere. She explores how the Country Party in Scotland sought to influence the political agenda by encouraging the public expression of oppositional opinion in three key arenas. These will be entirely familiar to students of the early modern public sphere elsewhere in Britain and continental Europe: petitions, print media (including pamphlets, engravings, tracts, and periodicals), and collective resistance (crowds, demonstrations, marches, and bonfires). She also addresses the governmental response, demonstrating how the Court Party's use of the public sphere developed markedly as the crisis developed in 1706–7. Originally standing aloof from engaging in the public sphere in accordance with traditional notions of good governance, ministers came to fear the threat posed by oppositional opinion and increasingly accepted the need to court Scottish public opinion.

As a result, Bowie presents a thought-provoking new perspective on the Union debates that challenges commonplace assumptions about one of the defining events in British history. From the Darien crisis onward, Bowie shows that public debate and the mobilization of popular opinion shaped events and made a significant contribution to the final text of the Union treaty. Far from being a “political job,” engineered behind closed doors by Scotland's corrupt parliamentarians, therefore, Bowie insists that the Union was influenced by collective protests rooted in real grievances and deeply held ideological commitments. These succeeded in reinforcing oppositional opinion expressed in pamphlets, petitions, and speeches and delivered very real concessions and compromises—most significantly, the Act for the Security of the Protestant Religion (1707), which, by safeguarding the future of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, represented the government's most effective strategy to win over the hearts and minds of most ordinary Scots.

Although Bowie is at her best analyzing little-known archival and printed sources on either side of the debate, the main problem I have with her thesis is that she does little to assess how widely those texts were read—and hence, how popular they really were. Only in the case of Defoe's A Short Letter to the Glasgow-Men (1706) does she present evidence relating to the distribution of the pamphlets she discusses, in this instance, Defoe's own report that he had “printed 2,500 copies … for distribution in areas of resistance in and around Glasgow, Lanark, Hamilton, Dumfries and Stirling” (109). Although she often alludes elsewhere to there being a “significant readership” (76) for such texts, particularly on the oppositional side, her evidence for such assertions is scanty in the extreme—usually amounting to citation of such texts in other printed contributions to the debate. She makes no attempt to outline how such pamphlets were printed (and in what numbers), how widely they were distributed through Scottish towns, and whether consumers always had to purchase them to read them (or whether, for example, they were available in coffee houses and inns or lent out by local lairds and professionals). Perhaps most important, she ignores entirely the experience of the ordinary reader—how and why individuals read these pamphlets and with what level of critical competence. This is a problem because she makes so much of widespread public engagement with union discourse, especially after the reading of the treaty in October—so that by November, it was reported that “none of any Intelligence or Conversation are ignorant of the great and weighty Affair of the Union now before the Parliament” (quoted on 92). This thorny methodological problem notwithstanding, Bowie's Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union makes a brave and highly original contribution to two important debates, and it will be of interest to anyone working on either the early modern public sphere or the 1707 Union itself.