This collection of essays on early modern Scotland offers 'new perspectives' on aspects of Scottish history from 1560 to 1800. Some essays challenge accepted interpretations; others explore subjects and sources that have previously not attracted the attention of historians; all represent new research on Scottish history from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. They indicate renewed interest in an age crucial to the development of modern Scotland. Contents: Rex Stoicus – George Buchanan, James VI and the Scottish Polity, Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain. Scottish Gaeldom, 1638–1651: The Vernacular Response to the Covenanting Dynamic. The Military and Ministers as Agents of Presbyterian Imperialism in England and Ireland, 1640–1648. Sackcloth for the Sinner or Punishment for the Crime? Church and Secular Courts in Cromwellian Scotland. York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland, 1679–1688. The Polite Academy and the Presbyterians, 1720–1770. Moderates, Managers and Popular Politics in mid-18th century Edinburgh: The Drysdale 'Bustle' of the 1760s. Paradigms and Politics: Manners, Morals and the Rise of Henry Dundas, 1770–1784. Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem. Childhood and Society in 18th Century Scotland. The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Moderate Divines.

This impressive collection of essays is based on a two-year seminar series of the Research centre in Scottish History at the University of Strathclyde. New and original research, as well as historiographical overviews and commentaries, illuminate the study of this formative century in the creation of modern Scotland. Contributors are leading figures in their fields, and the Scottish experience is examined within an international dimension. Topics include Scottish modernisation before the Industrial Revolution, the Union of 1707, Scotland and British expansion, Scottish Jacobitism, the Catholic underground, Scottish national identity, the Scottish Enlightenment, urbanisation, demographic change, Scottish Gaeldom, Highland estate management and tenant emigration, and Scottish radicalism. Contributors: Thomas M. Devine, John R. Young, Michael Fry, Allan I. Macinnes, James F. McMillan, Alexander Murdoch, Richard J. Finlay, Jane Rendall, Bernard Aspinwall, Ian D. Whyte, Robert E. Tyson, T. C. Smout, Andrew Mackillop, Christopher A. Whatley, Elaine W. McFarland.

What use is it to be given authority over men and lands if others do not know about it? Furthermore, what use is that authority if those who know about it do not respect it or recognise its jurisdiction? And what strategies and 'language' -written and spoken, visual and auditory, material, cultural and political - did those in authority throughout the medieval and early modern era use to project and make known their power? These questions have been crucial since regulations for governance entered society and are found at the core of this volume. In order to address these issues from an historical perspective, this collection of essays considers representations of authority made by a cross-section of society within the British Isles. Arranged in thematic sections, the 14 essays in the collection bridge the divide between medieval and early modern to build up understanding of the developments and continuities that can be followed across the centuries in question. Whether crown or noble, government or church, burgh or merchant; all desired power and influence, but their means of representing authority were very different. These essays encompass a myriad of methods demonstrating power and disseminating the image of authority, including: material culture, art, literature, architecture and landscapes, saintly cults, speeches and propaganda, martial posturing and strategic alliances, music, liturgy and ceremonial display. Thus, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates the variable forms in which authority was presented by key individuals and institutions in Scotland and the British Isles. By placing these within the context of the European powers with whom they interacted, this volume also underlines the unique relationships developed between the people and those who exercised authority over them.

After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance."--BOOK JACKET.

During the last twenty years there has been an explosion of new research into the development of Scotland from a small, backward country on the periphery of Europe to one poised to undergo industrialisation in step with England. This book provides an overview of key themes related to social change and economic development in early Modern Scotland aimed at demonstrating how this transformation occurred.

In early modern Scotland, religious and constitutional tensions created by Protestant reform and regal union stimulated the expression and regulation of opinion at large. Karin Bowie explores the rising prominence and changing dynamics of Scottish opinion politics in this tumultuous period. Assessing protestations, petitions, oaths, and oral and written modes of public communication, she addresses major debates on the fitness of the Habermasian model of the public sphere. This study provides a historicised understanding of early modern public opinion, investigating how the crown and its opponents sought to shape opinion at large; the forms and language in which collective opinions were represented; and the difference this made to political outcomes. Focusing on modes of persuasive communication, it reveals the reworking of traditional vehicles into powerful tools for public resistance, allowing contemporaries to recognise collective opinion outside authorised assemblies and encouraging state efforts to control seemingly dangerous opinions.

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.

The English revolution is one of the most intensely-debated events in history; parallel events in Scotland have never attracted the same degree of interest. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution argues for a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century Scottish revolution that goes beyond questions about its radicalism, and reconsiders its place within an overarching 'British' narrative. In this volume, Laura Stewart analyses how interactions between print and manuscript polemic, crowds, and political performances enabled protestors against a Prayer Book to destroy Charles I's Scottish government. Particular attention is given to the way in which debate in Scotland was affected by the emergence of London as a major publishing centre. The subscription of the 1638 National Covenant occurred within this context and further politicized subordinate social groups that included women. Unlike in England, however, public debate was contained. A remodelled constitution revivified the institutions of civil and ecclesiastical governance, enabling Covenanted Scotland to pursue interventionist policies in Ireland and England - albeit at terrible cost to the Scottish people. War transformed the nature of state power in Scotland, but this achievement was contentious and fragile. A key weakness lay in the separation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, which justified for some a strictly conditional understanding of obedience to temporal authority. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution explores challenges to legitimacy of the Covenanted constitution, but qualifies the idea that Scotland was set on a course to destruction as a result. Covenanted government was overthrown by the new model army in 1651, but its ideals persisted. In Scotland as well as England, the language of liberty, true religion, and the public interest had justified resistance to Charles I. The Scottish revolution embedded a distinctive and durable political culture that ultimately proved resistant to assimilation into the nascent British state.

The Act of Union in 1707 brought with it a new 'Great Britain'. How did the English bind the Scottish elites to the new British State, ensuring the stability of this new power in the face of possible Jacobite and international threat? From 1725 a patronage system existed in Britain enabling government ministries to use posts in the East India Company and its shipping to secure political majorities in Scotland and Westminster. Scots went to India as Company servants, ships' crews, soldiers and free-merchants, bringing back exceptional wealth to a land starved of money and providing for commercial and industrial advances throughout Great Britain. The importance of the system of patronage which enabled so many Scots to go to the East has not hitherto been recognised and cannot be overestimated. It bound the Scots with their English neighbours in business, political management and empire, with consequences going far beyond the eighteenth century.