Collections of essays, especially those emerging from conferences or scholarly symposia, are tricky beasts. Among individual contributions, one normally finds vast differentials in quality and wide thematic divergences. In the case of the volume under review, which emerged from a series of presentations and a symposium held at the University of Edinburgh in early 2002, neither of these common shortcomings is apparent. The volume consists of nine carefully rendered and illuminating essays and all of these essays share core thematic concerns.

Among the most evident of these, the title of the volume notwithstanding, are the cultural relations between and among British provinces, particularly Scotland and the mainland North American colonies/the United States. This is not, to be sure, an especially novel theme and the individual essays do not greatly alter our overall understanding of it. But they do offer valuable refinements of some old chestnuts.

For example, it has long been known that John Witherspoon, the Scot who became president of Princeton University (then the College of New Jersey) in 1768, also came to be among America's most important proponents of Scottish common-sense philosophy. What is less well known, and what Daniel Walker Howe's superb essay makes clear, is that Witherspoon's moral philosophy was rooted in a clearly defined Scottish ecclesiastical dispute, one that pitted popular evangelicals against elite moderates. Witherspoon sits squarely among the former, but in America his views find their way into the curriculum of one of the nation's elite institutions. It hardly seems intuitive that an apostle of the American Enlightenment such as James Madison, architect of the American Constitution and a pupil of Witherspoon's, would have any connection to Calvinism, moderate or otherwise. And yet Howe's essay makes it clear that Madison absorbed a rational Calvinism not just through Princeton's theological orientation but through the moral philosophy that lay at the center of its curriculum.

Similarly, David Hume is generally not thought of as a great cosmopolitan. His life seems very tightly bound to the Scottish province in which he lived and worked. And his best-known writings offer little explicit connection to any wider imperial or transatlantic world. But in “David Hume and the Seagods of the Atlantic” Emma Rothschild demonstrates that even this quintessential provincial lived in a world inundated with information and experience shaped by a much larger imperial frame. And that information and experience (some of which, as for so many of Hume's fellow Scots, was derived from government employment) elicited from Hume a profound ambivalence about empire. Whatever commercial advantages the latter yielded, he observed most trenchantly in his Political Discourses, were ultimately undone by the wars it generated – a point he no doubt would have reiterated had he lived to see the course of the American War.

In sum, although the title of this collection suggests greater aspirations, the contributions lie primarily in refining our understanding of the connections between two British provinces which happen to be separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The editors of the collection might argue that that separation was not a matter of happenstance. But there is little in this collection to suggest the kind of Atlantic history that has so profoundly challenged both our spatial and political understanding of the early modern Western world. Political and economic power, as addressed in these essays, remains largely a matter for elites functioning within the confines and according to the dictates of well-defined nation states.