Defoe and the Rhetoric of the Union:

The Union of 1707 and “an Invisible Hand”

Abstract

This paper aims to grasp the political and socio-economic background of the Union of 1707 and the characteristics of Daniel Defoeʼs social thought through an examination of his major historical work, The History of the Union of Great Britain （1709）. 　 On the eve of the Union, Defoe served as an English spy among Scottish people and wit-nessed a surge of their anti-English passions firsthand. The works by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the most influential contemporary Scot-tish republican writer, embodied these antipa-thies in a very sophisticated manner. Defoe paid close attention to both the republican thought and its vocabulary typically expressed in Fletch-erʼs texts and managed to combine them with the rhetoric of divine providence. This was an intel-lectual activity for the creation of a historical narrative in which the distressed Scottish people could finally find relief. Defoeʼs History of the Union asserted that the conflicts between England and Scotland had been transmuted into peacemaking factors by the leading of providence. Some contemporary affairs were considered as examples: the founda-tion of the Company of Scotland Trading to Af-rica and the Indies, Massacre of Glencoe, Act of Settlement in England, Act of Security in Scot-land, Alien Act in England, and execution of Captain Green after seizing of the ship Worces-ter in Scotland. 　 While recounting these affairs, the present paper focuses on the nature of the rhetoric to which Defoe appeals. His appeal to “an Invisible Hand” represents a concealing design, that is, to appease the complex feelings held by those liv-ing in North Britain. His History of the Union seems to have been written to persuade them rather than to preserve historical facts them-selves. JEL classification numbers: B 11, B 31, N 40.