On the other hand, following the retreat from Empire, this argument has been given a new twist. If Scotland is Celtic and England Saxon (dubious as these propositions may be), then the nationalist assertion that there is no strong reason for the two peoples to be yoked together in a political union may appear stronger, even though the Scottish National Party insists that theirs is "a civic, not ethnic, nationalism". Indeed, they can agreeably have it both ways, for it is the idea that Scots are ethnically and historically distinct from English which lies at the heart of the nationalist appeal to the emotions, even while political argument may focus on the utility of independence.

For many 18th-century Scots, the Union meant modernisation, an opportunity for instance to be rid of the remnants of feudalism, notably private feudal jurisdictions, and bring all Scots within the body of the British Constitution. Scots law retained its independence, though appeals in civil cases now went to the House of Lords in London, but the principles that the law should be administered in the same way throughout the country, that public prosecutions should be brought by the Crown, and that landowners and clan chiefs should no longer act as judges in their own courts (and often in their own interest) were innovations designed to bring Scotland into conformity with English practice.

Modernisation also required that there be a common language throughout the united kingdoms. David Hume might — jocularly — complain of "the barbarians who dwell on the banks of the Thames" but, though he continued to speak a broad Scots in conversation with his friends in Edinburgh, he strove to rid his written work of "Scotticisms". He was not alone in this ambition. The age now termed "the Scottish Enlightenment" was then regarded as a time of "improvement", and language was one of the things to be improved. Speaking and writing "correct" English — that is, English according to the southern model — was thought not only expedient but desirable.

Pre-Union Scotland had been a poor country, distracted for a century and a half by arguments over religion and the civil strife that ensued. The Union brought internal peace, broken only by three short-lived and unsuccessful Jacobite Risings. Eighteenth-century Scotland experienced an awakening: improvement and enlightenment. Few questioned the Union, certainly not the most prominent intellectuals: David Hume, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, Adam Smith. The hand of government was light, political argument muted. So as Sir Walter Scott observed, this neglect allowed Scotland, under the guardianship of her own institutions, notably the law and the universities, "to win her silent way to wealth and prosperity." A backward country, or one whose leading men had come to think of it as backward, became one of the leaders of the first Industrial Revolution and a partner in the great business of Empire.