The modern era, to quote the nationalist theorist Anthony D. Smith, is ‘not a blank slate’, but rather resembles ‘a palimpsest on which are recorded experiences and identities of different epochs and a variety of ethnic formations’. Earlier epochs influence – and are in turn modified by – later eras, ‘to produce the composite type of collective cultural unit which we call “the nation”’ (Smith 1995: 59–60).

From the moment the 1707 political union between Scotland and England was agreed, a palimpsest union was born, incorporating the earlier Anglo-Welsh union and which was later overlaid with the 1801 union of ‘Great Britain’ and Ireland. The resulting nation, or nation-state, was viewed differently from Edinburgh, Cardiff and Dublin (later Belfast). For Scotland, the foundational document was the Treaty of Union; for Dublin/Belfast, it was an Act of Union agreed in 1800 and enacted the following year.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this palimpsest union was imagined as ‘Britain’ or ‘Great Britain’ and its ‘official’ nationalism became known as ‘unionism’. But within that nationalism there existed other, competing stories, memories of former epochs in which Ireland, Scotland and Wales had possessed their own degree of sovereignty. The unions of 1707 or 1801, for example, had not erased two of those alternative narratives; as Dicey and Rait wrote of the former, ‘the sacrifice of Scottish independence’ did not mean the ‘loss of Scottish Nationalism’.

Thereafter this ‘official’ nationalism in Scotland, Wales and later Northern Ireland (or ‘Ulster’) took a number of forms, operating in concert – rather than in conflict – with a broader British nationalism and imperial ‘patriotism’. In Scotland it was both defensive (epitomised by Sir Walter Scott and his defence of banknotes) and proactive (demanding administrative reform); in Wales it was initially more cultural and religious than political; and in Northern Ireland it took the form of a localised defence of Britishness. The aim of these ‘nationalist unionists’ was both the preservation of autonomous traces from earlier epochs and the creation of new civic institutions.