ABSTRACT
Defoe is usually thought of as a London dissenter, most at home in the City and the streets around Newgate prison, though his imagination famously ranged as far as the South Seas. Various scholars have touched on Defoe's presence in Edinburgh during the session of the Scottish Parliament that agreed to the union, but the significance of his stay has been drastically underrated. Once the 1707 Treaty of Union was in prospect, he looked to Scotland as a place where liberty could flourish, a Protestant succession be secured, and the bases of empire develop. As a unionist by conviction, committed to the growth of Anglo-Scottish ties and the development of a British identity, it was natural for Defoe to be perturbed by the popular unrest, which did not stop in 1707. It was true, as he pointed out in the preface to his History, that the thwarted Jacobite invasion of Scotland in 1708 did not prompt a rebellion against union.
