Scottish Historical Review Monographs – serie

This collection brings together a series of papers that in May 2007 were presented at a Royal Society of Edinburgh conference organised to mark the 300th anniversary of the Union of 1707. One of the guiding objectives of the RSE event was to showcase the work of younger historians, and to present new work that would provide fresh insights on this defining moment in Scotland's (and the United Kingdom's) history. The seven chapters range widely, in content and coverage, from a detailed study of how the Church of Scotland viewed union and how concerns about the Kirk influenced the voting behaviour in the Scottish Parliament, through to the often overlooked broader European context in which the British parliamentary union - only one form of new state formation in the early modern period - was forged. The global War of the Spanish Succession, it is cogently argued, influenced both the timing and shape of the British union. Also examined are elite thinking and public opinion on fundamental questions such as Scottish nationhood and the place and powers of monarchs, as well as burning issues of the time such as the Company of Scotland, and trade. Other topics include an investigation of the particular intellectual characteristics of the Scots, a product of the pre-Union educational system, which it is argued enabled professionals and entrepreneurs in Scotland to meet the challenges posed by the 1707 settlement. As one of the contributors argues, union offered the Scots only partial openings within the empire.

This work offers a unique contribution to gender and Scottish history breaking new ground on several fronts: there is no history of inter-war women in Scotland, very little labour or popular political history and virtually nothing published on women, the home and family. This book is a history of women in the period which integrates class and gender history as well as linking the public and private spheres. Using a gendered approach to history it transforms and shifts our knowledge of the Scottish past, unearthing the previously unexplored role which women played in inter-war socialist politics, the General Strike and popular political protest. It re-evaluates these areas and demonstrates the ways in which gender shaped the experience of class and class struggle. Importantly, the book also explores the links between the public and private spheres and addresses the concept of masculinity as well as femininity and pays particular reference to domestic violence. The strength of the book is the ways in which it illuminates the complex interconnections of culture and economic and social structure. Although the research is based on Scottish evidence, it also uses material to address key debates in gender history and labour history which have wider relevance and will appeal to gender historians, labour historians and social and cultural historians as well as social scientists.

Henry Scott, the third Duke of Buccleuch (1746-1812), presided over the management of one of the largest landed estates in Britain during a time of dramatic agrarian, social and political change. Tutored and advised by the philosopher Adam Smith, the Duke was also an important patron of the Scottish Enlightenment, lauded by the Edinburgh literati the as an exemplar of patriotic nobility and civic virtue, while his alliance with Henry Dundas dominated Scottish politics for almost forty years. Combining the approaches of intellectual, economic and landscape history, this book examines the life and career of the third Duke, focusing in particular on his relationship with Adam Smith and the improvement of his extensive Scottish estates. By examining the influence of one of the eighteenth century’s foremost philosophers of improvement upon the career of one Scotland’s largest landowners, this book explores the various influences - intellectual, economic, moral and political - which helped shape Scotland’s distinctive agricultural revolution. In its exploration of the cultural as well as the economic roots of improvement and in its assessment of previously unappreciated aspect of Adam Smith’s career, this book will appeal to both specialist scholars and general readers interested in the Scottish Enlightenment, estate management and the culture of improvement in eighteenth-century Scotland.

A comparative analysis of maritime law and its administration in five northern European towns.This volume is an important addition to the history of Scotland and European law, utilising innovative research and methodologies to highlight Scotland's position in medieval Europe as a sophisticated legal player. It places Scotland in a wider historical framework for the time and reveals the extent of its maritime connections and influence.It has often been assumed that there was a common maritime law in northern Europe, shared between skippers and merchants who conducted their business along the North Sea and Baltic littoral. This study examines this assumption by studying the dissemination of law compilations across this region, and by comparing the contents of these and the judgments passed by urban courts in cases of shipwreck, jettison and ship collision.Medieval maritime law has never before been the subject of a major study in the English language. The practice of maritime law has, up until now, largely been ignored. This book is the first to offer a comparison of maritime laws and court proceedings. It is also unique in that it provides a truly comparative history, covering a large geographical area stretching from Aberdeen on the North Sea coast to Reval (present-day Tallinn) in the innermost regions of the Baltic.

A new departure in Scottish and Irish migration studiesThe Scottish diasporic communities closest to home—those which are part of what we sometimes term the ‘near Diaspora’—are those we know least about. Whilst an interest in the overseas Scottish diaspora has grown in recent years, Scots who chose to settle in other parts of the United Kingdom have been largely neglected. This book addresses this imbalance.Scots travelled freely around the industrial centres of northern Britain throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Belfast was one of the most important ports of call for thousands of Scots. The Scots played key roles in shaping Belfast society in the modern period: they were essential to its industrial development; they were at the centre of many cultural, philanthropic and religious initiatives and were welcomed by the host community accordingly.Yet despite their obvious significance, in staunchly Protestant, Unionist, and at times insular and ill at ease Belfast, individual Scots could be viewed with suspicion by their hosts, dismissed as ‘strangers’ and cast in the role of interfering outsiders.Key FeaturesThe only book-length scholarly study of the Scots in modern Ireland.Brings to light the fundamental importance of Scottish migration to Belfast society during the nineteenth century.Advances our knowledge and understanding of Scotland’s ‘near diaspora.’Highlights areas of tension in Ulster-Scottish relations during the Home Rule era.Puts forward a new agenda for a better understanding of British in-migration to Ireland in the modern period.

Can anything new be said about the Declaration of Arbroath? This volume says there can.In 1977 Grant Simpson published a seminal article in the Scottish Historical Review: which asked if 'anything conceivably new can be said about a document so well known in Scotland as the Declaration of Arbroath?' The contributors to this volume demonstrate that there can. The text of the Declaration, written in 1320, followed closely an Irish prototype and was structured in the fashion that was expected at the papal court, where the letter was sent. It drew heavily on political ideologies and legal concepts with which English and continental intellectuals were familiar. And it was brought to papal attention through diplomatic means and practices which were commonly understood across Europe. Although the Declaration disappeared from political discourse in the centuries which immediately followed its dispatch, its rediscovery from the later seventeenth century is traced in hitherto unprecedented depth. Its relevance was not just to Scotland. The question of whether it influenced the American Declaration of Independence has oft been mooted but is here closely investigated. Today the Declaration remains a controversial document, inspirational to many, misappropriated by others, and even feared by some.Sharper focus on context; new textual analysis; unsurpassed investigation of the afterlife of the declaration in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This book examines the climatic and economic origins of the last national famine to occur in Scotland, the nature and extent of the crisis which ensued, and what the impact of the famine was upon the population in demographic, economic and social terms. Current published knowledge about the causes, extent, and impact of the famine in Scotland is limited and many conclusions have been speculative in the absence of extensive research. Despite the critical importance of this crisis, one of the four disasters of the 1690s, which are widely acknowledged to have contributed to the economic arguments in favour of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, the topic has been largely neglected and even underplayed by historians. This is the first full study of the famine, providing a unique scholarly examination of the causes, course, characteristics and consequences of the crisis. A comprehensive study of agricultural, climatic, economic, social and demographic issues, the book seeks to establish answers to the fundamental question concerning the event. How serious was it? Using detailed statistical and qualitative analysis, it discusses the regional factors that defined the famine, the impact on the population, and the interconnected causes of this traumatic event.

Presents major new research on gender in the Scottish EnlightenmentWhat role did gender play in the Scottish Enlightenment? Combining intellectual and cultural history, this book explores how men and women experienced the Scottish Enlightenment. It examines Scotland in a European context, investigating ideologies of gender and cultural practices among the urban elites of Scotland in the 18th century.The book provides an in-depth analysis of men's construction and performance of masculinity in intellectual clubs, taverns and through the violent ritual of the duel. Women are important actors in this story, and the book presents an analysis of women's contribution to Scottish Enlightenment culture, and it asks why there were no Scottish bluestockings.

This work offers a unique contribution to gender and Scottish history breaking new ground on several fronts: there is no history of inter-war women in Scotland, very little labour or popular political history and virtually nothing published on women, the home and family. This book is a history of women in the period which integrates class and gender history as well as linking the public and private spheres. Using a gendered approach to history it transforms and shifts our knowledge of the Scottish past, unearthing the previously unexplored role which women played in inter-war socialist politics, the General Strike and popular political protest. It re-evaluates these areas and demonstrates the ways in which gender shaped the experience of class and class struggle. Importantly, the book also explores the links between the public and private spheres and addresses the concept of masculinity as well as femininity and pays particular reference to domestic violence. The strength of the book is the ways in which it illuminates the complex interconnections of culture and economic and social structure. Although the research is based on Scottish evidence, it also uses material to address key debates in gender history and labour history which have wider relevance and will appeal to gender historians, labour historians and social and cultural historians as well as social scientists.

This book focuses on the leading figures in radical politics in Ireland and Scottish highlands and explores the links between them. It deals with topics that have been at the centre of recent discussions on the Highland land question, the politics of the Irish community in Scotland, and the development of the labour movement in Scotland. The author argues that the Irish activists in the Scottish Highlands and in urban Scotland should be seen as adherents to notions of social and economic reform, such as land nationalisation, and not as Irish nationalists or Home Rulers. This leads him to make radical reassessments of the contributions of individuals such as John Ferguson, Michael Davitt and Edward McHugh. Andrew Newby looks closely at the political activities and ambitions of the Crofter MPs showing them to be a widely influential but diverse group: he reveals, for example, the extensive links between Angus Sutherland, the most radical of the Highland MPs, and John Ferguson’s groupings of Irish political activists of urban Scotland. This is a balanced and vivid account of a turbulent period of modern Scottish history.

This book probes the deep-rooted links between the land, the people and the religious culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the nineteenth century. The responses of the clergy to the social crisis which enveloped the region have often been characterised as a mixture of callous indifference, cowering deference or fatalistic passivity. Allan MacColl’s pioneering research challenges such stereotypical representations of Highland ministers head-on. Land, Faith and the Crofting Community is the first full-scale examination of Christian social teaching in the nineteenth-century Gaidhealtachd and addresses a major gap in the historical understanding of Gaelic society. Seeking to lay bare the existing myths by a wide-ranging analysis of all the denominational, theological and social factors at play, this study boldly overturns the received scholarly and popular interpretations. A ground-breaking work, it explores a substantial but under-utilised field of evidence and questions whether or not Highland Christians – both clergy and laity – were committed to land reform as an engine of social improvement and conciliation. The Christian contribution to the development of a distinctively Highland identity – which found expression during the Crofters’ War of the 1880s – is delineated, while wider links between theology and social philosophy are examined from beyond the perspective of the Highlands.

A comparative analysis of maritime law and its administration in five northern European towns.This volume is an important addition to the history of Scotland and European law, utilising innovative research and methodologies to highlight Scotland's position in medieval Europe as a sophisticated legal player. It places Scotland in a wider historical framework for the time and reveals the extent of its maritime connections and influence.It has often been assumed that there was a common maritime law in northern Europe, shared between skippers and merchants who conducted their business along the North Sea and Baltic littoral. This study examines this assumption by studying the dissemination of law compilations across this region, and by comparing the contents of these and the judgments passed by urban courts in cases of shipwreck, jettison and ship collision.Medieval maritime law has never before been the subject of a major study in the English language. The practice of maritime law has, up until now, largely been ignored. This book is the first to offer a comparison of maritime laws and court proceedings. It is also unique in that it provides a truly comparative history, covering a large geographical area stretching from Aberdeen on the North Sea coast to Reval (present-day Tallinn) in the innermost regions of the Baltic.

For the British government’s supporters in Scotland in the 1790s, one thing was paramount: they were fighting French principles in any shape or form they might take. Whether this meant defeating the influence of French revolutionary ideas in Scotland, or defeating the military menace of the French republic, they were determined to stand firm in their support of the British state.This book charts the Scottish contribution to, both the war effort of the 1790s, and the British government’s struggles to defeat political radicalism at home; lasting from the first outbreak of political disturbances in Scotland in 1792, until the French revolutionary war came to an end in 1802. In this, the Scots made their very distinct mark in terms of recruitment for armed service, demonstrations of loyalty, and prosecutions against political radicals in the law courts but, perhaps less so, in terms of their financial contributions . The government of Scotland was further integrated into the British state in a structural sense over the course of the decade, yet retained many distinctly Scottish features none the less and – on the whole – the 1790s comes across as a time when the Scots found little difficulty in seeing themselves as both British and Scottish.

The Scots accounted for around a quarter of all UK-born immigrants to New Zealand between 1861 and 1945, but have only been accorded scant attention in New Zealand histories, specialist immigration histories and Scottish Diaspora Studies. This is all the more peculiar because the flow of Scots to New Zealand, although relatively unimportant to Scotland, constituted a sizable element to the country’s much smaller population. Seen as adaptable, integrating relatively more quickly than other ethnic migrant groups in New Zealand, the Scots’ presence was obscured by a fixation on the romanticised shortbread tin façade of Scottish identity overseas. Uncovering Scottish ethnicity from the verges of nostalgia, this study documents the notable imprint Scots left on New Zealand. The book examines Scottish immigrant community life, culture and identity between 1850 and 1930, and: *explores informal and formal networks, associational life and transferred cultural practices to capture how Scottish immigrants negotiated their ethnicity, but also how that ethnicity fed into wider social structures in New Zealand; *argues that Scottish ethnicity in New Zealand functioned more as a positive mechanism for integration into the new society than as a protective and defensive source of reassurance and comfort; and*contends that Scots contributed disproportionately to the making of New Zealand society.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of WWI, the Sutherland Estate was the largest landed estate in western Europe; at 1.1 million acres, the ducal family owned almost the entire county of Sutherland as well as a further 30,000 acres in England. The estate was owned by the dukes of Sutherland, who were among the richest patrician landowners of the period; from the early nineteenth century, however, the family were shadowed by their reputation as great clearance landlords, something that would come back to haunt them throughout the coming decades. This book:*studies the workings of the estate management and policy formation in the face of challenges from their crofting tenants, the land reform lobby and government agencies; *asks whether the ducal family experienced a ‘decline and fall’ as argued for the British aristocracy generally in the period;*examines a crucial period of Highland history from the neglected perspective of an estate, using estate papers, newspapers, crofter sources, and government records.The Sutherland estate was the largest and most infamous clearance estate in Britain and this book will appeal to history scholars and general readers interested in estate management and the decline of the aristocracy.

Henry Scott, the third Duke of Buccleuch (1746-1812), presided over the management of one of the largest landed estates in Britain during a time of dramatic agrarian, social and political change. Tutored and advised by the philosopher Adam Smith, the Duke was also an important patron of the Scottish Enlightenment, lauded by the Edinburgh literati the as an exemplar of patriotic nobility and civic virtue, while his alliance with Henry Dundas dominated Scottish politics for almost forty years. Combining the approaches of intellectual, economic and landscape history, this book examines the life and career of the third Duke, focusing in particular on his relationship with Adam Smith and the improvement of his extensive Scottish estates. By examining the influence of one of the eighteenth century’s foremost philosophers of improvement upon the career of one Scotland’s largest landowners, this book explores the various influences - intellectual, economic, moral and political - which helped shape Scotland’s distinctive agricultural revolution. In its exploration of the cultural as well as the economic roots of improvement and in its assessment of previously unappreciated aspect of Adam Smith’s career, this book will appeal to both specialist scholars and general readers interested in the Scottish Enlightenment, estate management and the culture of improvement in eighteenth-century Scotland.

For the British government’s supporters in Scotland in the 1790s, one thing was paramount: they were fighting French principles in any shape or form they might take. Whether this meant defeating the influence of French revolutionary ideas in Scotland, or defeating the military menace of the French republic, they were determined to stand firm in their support of the British state.This book charts the Scottish contribution to, both the war effort of the 1790s, and the British government’s struggles to defeat political radicalism at home; lasting from the first outbreak of political disturbances in Scotland in 1792, until the French revolutionary war came to an end in 1802. In this, the Scots made their very distinct mark in terms of recruitment for armed service, demonstrations of loyalty, and prosecutions against political radicals in the law courts but, perhaps less so, in terms of their financial contributions . The government of Scotland was further integrated into the British state in a structural sense over the course of the decade, yet retained many distinctly Scottish features none the less and – on the whole – the 1790s comes across as a time when the Scots found little difficulty in seeing themselves as both British and Scottish.