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James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) was republished posthumously in 1700, along with his other treatises, by the Irish-born radical thinker John Toland. He inserted in this edition, however, a non-original treatise by John Hall related to the history of the Scottish dynasty. While the reason for its inclusion has not been illumined in current literature, a close examination of its content and Toland’s editorship engaged in it more specifically reveals that it was selected primarily for its anti-Stuart drift. If more aptly contextualized in 1700, however, anti-Stuartism was, for Toland, translatable into anti-Unionism. An awareness of this hidden thrust of the 1700 edition helps to rethink the original edition of Oceana beyond its usual association with the seventeenth-century English republican debate; it was rather a precursor of anti-unionist discourse as Harrington attempted to set forth a work of national historiography after the regal union of England and Scotland had been severed with the head of Charles Stuart in 1649. The breadth and scope of the historical narrative he constructed in Oceana substantiate this view. In it, Harrington laid out the strongest anti-unionist argument; Toland must have found its illocutionary forces particularly useful for the purpose of preventing Anglo-Scottish unionism from garnering popular support in the changed circumstances of Restoration England. By re-contextualizing the two texts—original and edited—within the longer-term framework of early modern English history, the present article seeks to explain how and why questions about English nationhood played a vital role in the formation of both texts and in the attraction of Harrington for Toland.
