1707 - The Birth of Britain

In this episode, we go back to the early 1700s to the moment Britain, as the world came to know it, was created on paper.
Before 1707 there was no “United Kingdom”, but two rival kingdoms sharing a monarch and a very uneasy island.

You’ll hear the story of the Darien scheme – Scotland’s disastrous attempt to build a colony in Central America – and how its collapse wiped out a huge slice of the country’s wealth and pushed many leaders towards a deal with England.
We then step inside the Scottish Parliament as it tears itself apart over the Articles of Union, amid protests, petitions, and accusations of being “bought and sold for English gold”.

Finally, we look at how this contested treaty survived its first tests and began to turn into something bigger: the kingdom of Great Britain.