ABSTRACT
It is a measure of the comprehensiveness of John Brewer’s e Sinews of Power that despite an intentional emphasis on the enduring English foundations of the eighteenth-century British state, the book nonetheless offered a subtle analysis in respect of Ireland and Scotland. While noting that ‘particularism at the periphery was not eliminated’, interactions with the new-style state were characterised by occasional if often brutal coercion, fiscal subordination, clear financial dependency and eventual incorporation through union. Yet far from emphasising an uncomplicated, one-way imposition of non-negotiable state sovereignty, Brewer envisaged an essentially interactive dynamic. Strong and persistent local demands for greater inclusion and participatory rights also shaped the emergence of the eighteenth-century fiscal-military state. So it was that ‘the desire for a truly British state … emanated as much from the periphery as from the metropolis’.1
