Christopher A. Whatley

‘To Solemnize His Majesty's Birthday’: New Perspectives on Loyalism in George II's Britain

The importance of loyalism or loyal feelings in George IIs Scotland has too often been passed over or ignored by historians, leading, in some important recent studies of Scottish Jacobitism, to a distorted view of patterns of political allegiance in Scotland in this period. This article explores a crucial focus and manifestation of loyal sentiment in Scotland during this period: celebration of the monarchs birthday. The special nature of this occasion is underlined through comparison with political calendars in England and Wales, and an extended analysis is offered of the various and changing political meanings which these celebrations possessed in Scotland. In late 1745, with Jacobite forces occupying or close to many Scottish burghs, so widely understood were the rituals and practices of this day that it offered loyal Scots, from a cross-section of urban society, a perfect opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance to their Hanoverian king and their repugnance for the Stuart cause. Another important conclusion is that, contrary to what has been asserted by several historians, royal days remained a very important and vital part of the political calendar in many parts of Britain throughout George IIs reign. This provides further evidence of the deep roots of enthusiasm for Protestant patriotic monarchy in eighteenth-century Britain. It was a complex of emotions which was often frustrated and only sporadically glimpsed under George II, but which was, nevertheless, as the popular response to the accession of George III was to show very clearly, widely influential in shaping perceptions of the British nation and polity.

‘The fettering bonds of brotherhood’: Combination and labour relations in the scottish coal‐mining industry c. 1690–1775

(1987). ‘The fettering bonds of brotherhood’: Combination and labour relations in the scottish coal‐mining industry c. 1690–1775. Social History: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 139-154.

Transatlantic Reception and Commemoration of the ‘Poet of the Scotch’, Robert Burns

Complementing Westover’s reflections on America’s domestication of Walter Scott, Christopher Whatley turns to another beloved Scottish writer, Robert Burns, tracing the manufacture and circulation of Burns-related artifacts as well as the meanings and customs that attached to them. The literary memorial industry of the nineteenth century played a significant role in shaping the popular canon of Anglophone literature, so it was no surprise that the 1859 centenary of Burns’s birth provided a major occasion for the commemoration and commodification of a British author in Scotland, the USA, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Focusing especially on statues (part of the period’s broader ‘statue madness’), this essay tracks artifacts’ changing significance as they moved across the globe over the course of the 1800s and early 1900s.

The Thread of Migration: A Scottish-French Linen and Jute Works and its Workers in France, c. 1845–c. 1870

After 1815, European manufacturers in several sectors sought to reap the benefits of British technical superiority through the acquisition of British machinery and workers who could operate it. France was one of the beneficiaries of this transfer process. Along with iron, engineering, and tulle making, another British industry that established a French presence was linen and jute textile manufacturing. The authors present the results of joint research carried out in Scotland and France, focusing on a spinning mill established by a Dundee-Paris partnership in Ailly-sur-Somme in 1845. Much of the technical, managerial, and worker input came from Dundee, then becoming Britain’s – and for a time, the world’s – leading coarse textile manufacturing centre: ‘Juteopolis’. But the flow of expertise was not always unidirectional and there was cultural interchange too, in a process that by the 1870s had resulted in Ailly becoming one of the most important industrial establishments in France.