Andrew Mackillop

THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS FROM CULLODEN TO WATERLOO

This article highlights the present lacuna in the study of politics and political culture in the Scottish Highlands between the battles of Culloden and Waterloo. It argues that this neglect is symptomatic of the contentious historiography that surrounds the Highland Clearances. Yet politics remained a crucial factor shaping landlord attitudes to improvements and their estates in general. Moreover, in contrast to their well-known failure to manage the regions economic and social development, Highland landlords exhibited a sophisticated understanding of how British politics had been reconfigured by the emergence of the British ‘fiscal-military’ state. The regions elites constructed a distinctive and effective political strategy that sought to place the Highlands in a mutually supportive relationship with the British state. Scottish Highland political culture thus offers a useful corrective to recent debates on the ‘fiscal-military’ state that stress either the centres overwhelming power or the ability of local elites to resist that power. Although the Highlands is remembered primarily for its hostile relationship with the political centre, the region in fact constituted a prime example of the process of mutual accommodation that underpinned the domestic authority of the eighteenth-century British state.

Confrontation, Negotiation and Accommodation: Garrisoning the Burghs in Post-Union Scotland

This article challenges the assumption that garrisons in post-union Scotland were confronted with an “uninflammable” and easily controlled urban population. The emphasis is instead placed on the distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century Scottish society, characterized as it was by a combination of dispersed settlement and the fastest growing urban sector within the British-Irish Isles. These factors severely complicated and challenged the army’s ability to consistently and effectively control Scotland’s villages, towns and cities. Yet confrontation was not the only mode of interaction between local garrisons and the civic world of the burghs. The article argues that excessive concentration upon large scale urban tumults, such as the Malt Tax or Porteous Riots, has detracted from the subtle and sophisticated social and cultural practices which not only regulated relations between both groups but that increasingly eroded the boundaries and definitions of what constituted a “soldier” and a “civilian” in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Riots and reform : burgh authority, the languages of civic reform and the Aberdeen riot of 1785

This article explores the understudied riots which occurred in Aberdeen in mid-October 1785. It charts the climate of politicization that characterized the burgh’s civic life in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and before the outbreak of the equivalent process in France. In doing so, it challenges interpretations of the socially exclusive nature of the Scottish reform movement, the dynamics of continuity and change between this phenomenon and later political ‘radicalism’ and the role of Aberdeen as a ‘provincial’ metropolis in the Age of Revolution.

History in the UK National Curriculum: A Discussion

ABSTRACT In response to recent discussions in the UK about the history national curriculum in schools, Cultural and Social History invited several historians to comment on the issues. Their responses to our questions have been interleaved and lightly edited.

Introduction : Communities, Courts and Scottish Towns

This short essay sets the context for the special section on communities, courts and Scottish towns. Scottish burgh records generally, and Aberdeens UNESCO recognized collection in particular, are considered in light of their legal character. The changing features of pre-modern political society between the fifteenth century and the early nineteenth century are introduced as a shared problem for investigation, and an ancien regime framework is examined as a comparative tool in this field. A vital concern of these articles is with the construction and sometimes contested use of vocabularies of law and authority, privileges and liberties, and ideas of urban ‘community’. Courts at the municipal level, and in the world beyond the burgh, are appreciated as legal and governmental fora . The ambition of this special section is to prompt European comparisons, and encourage greater dialogue with and consideration of Scottish urban records in future research.

A North Europe World of Tea: Scotland and the Tea Trade, c.1690–c.1790

At first glance, Scotland may not seem an obvious context for exploring the trends and tensions which characterized the importation, distribution and consumption of tea in eighteenth- century Europe. As a small, relatively underdeveloped kingdom on the outer edge of the North Sea world, Scotland had little direct experience of Asia, and indeed had liquidated its own short- lived East India Company as a precondition of union with England in 1707. 1 Yet it is Scotland’s marginality to the early phase of Europe’s direct contact with Asia from c.1500 to c.1700, when juxtaposed with the country’s sudden inclusion thereafter within the monopoly market of the United English East India Company (EIC), which makes its interaction with Asian products so potentially illuminating. Scotland experienced the centuries of the Eurasia trades as one of extremes, moving from relative insulation from Asian commodities as late as around 1700 to a position where, by the 1770s, many commentators felt that Scottish society risked being fatally undermined by a welter of influences from the East. 2 All European countries experienced their version of this angst over the supposedly corrupting and enervating characteristics of Asian luxury, as well as the shift toward ideas of ‘new’ luxury which imbued commodities and their consumption with a range of virtuous, civilizing, modern and beneficial attributes. 3 As is well known, tea was among the most obvious of the many exotic goods sweeping across Europe, driving innovative forms of elite and mass consumption while transforming imitative production methods, social practices and cultural expectations. 4 In most respects, Scotland followed rather than set these European trends. It experienced its own increasing levels of legal trade and consumption in tea, a parallel smuggling economy of noticeable size and efficiency, and an intense debate that sought to realign older, moralistic concepts of

Text Analysis of Aberdeen Burgh Records 1530-1531

The paper outlines a text analytic project in progress on a corpus of entries in the historical burgh and council registers from Aberdeen, Scotland. Some preliminary output of the analysis is described. The registers run in a near-unbroken sequence form 1398 to the present day; the early volumes are a UNESCO UK listed cultural artefact. The study focusses on a set of transcribed pages from 1530-1531 originally hand written in a mixture of Latin and Middle Scots. We apply a text analytic tool to the corpus, providing deep semantic annotation and making the text amenable to linking to web-resources.