Alvin Jackson

Distinguished Edinburgh academic explores how and why union states ebbed and flowed over the long nineteenth century and beyond, in an original comparative analysis. United Kingdoms sets the experience of Britain and Ireland in its European context, to make the union state something more than one island’s story.

About United Kingdoms

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, established from 1801, was not the only united kingdom of its time. Indeed, it was by dint of this commonality that the idea of union flourished, in Britain and Ireland, as in other multinational union states. Synthesising the histories of Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland, with experiences from Sweden-Norway, the united Netherlands, Austria-Hungary, and elsewhere, Professor Jackson provides an impressive and innovative study.

Beyond this tour across space, United Kingdoms takes readers across the social hierarchy which sustained the union state: from the powerful elites of monarchy and aristocracy, and the upper ecclesiastical echelons, to the classes below, which exercised their own agency in class conflict and violent revolutions. This richly researched analysis, in Jackson’s distinctively engaging style, offers fresh insights to the nature of union states, their survival, and their collapse - all timely reflections in the political context of today.

To understand more about the united kingdom generally, and this United Kingdom specifically, join us for what is sure to be a fascinating discussion at the bookshop, with the inimitable Professor Alvin Jackson.

About Alvin Jackson

Alvin Jackson is Sir Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, where he has organised a Special Subject on multinational union states in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe, as well as survey courses in modern Irish history. An Oxford graduate, Jackson taught at University College Dublin, before his promotion to Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. Professor Jackson is among the foremost scholars in his field, with earlier publications including Ireland, 1798-1998 (second edition, 2010), The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707-2007 (2012), and, as editor, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (2014). He recently wrote and presented the successful three-part BBC series on The Prime Ministers.