Colin Kidd

North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms *

The identity of eighteenth-century North Britons needs to be disaggregated: there were significant variations in North British attitudes to the Anglo-Scottish relationship in areas such as politics, economics, language, religion and manners. In the first-order spheres of politics and economics North Britons generally subscribed to an Anglo-British identity and tended to welcome anglicization of Scotlands feudal institutions and laws as an acceleration along the pathway of modernization. Although this crucial aspect of North British identity became widespread only from the 1730s its roots can be traced back to the sophisticated debates which had preceded Scottish agreement to incorporating Union. This adherence to an Anglo-British form of patriotism was a common feature of political discourse in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. North British patriotism also shared another prominent characteristic with Anglo-Irish and American identities. The aspiration to share English liberties to the full, when thwarted, could trigger anglophobic responses, as occurred in America in the 1760s and 70s, and in the Irish constitutional revolution of 1780–2. Among North Britons, a coherent Anglo-British ideology of improvement co-existed with a traditional Scottish chauvinism, which was normally dormant, but whose occasional eruptions tended to be provoked by perceived exclusions of North Britons from the liberties of Englishmen .

RACE, EMPIRE, AND THE LIMITS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH NATIONHOOD

Scotlands Unionist culture has already become a world we have lost, investigation of which is hampered by the misleading notion of a ‘Celtic fringe’. Nineteenth-century Lowland Scots were not classified as Celts; indeed they vociferously projected a Teutonic racial identity. Several Scots went so far as to claim not only that the Saxon Scots of the Lowlands were superior to the Celts of the Highlands, but that the people of the Lowlands came from a more purely Anglian stock than the population of southern England. For some Scots the glory of Scottish identity resided in the boast that Lowlanders were more authentically ‘English’ than the English themselves. Moreover, Scottish historians reinterpreted the nations medieval War of Independence – otherwise a cynosure of patriotism – as an unfortunate civil war within the Saxon race. Curiously, racialism – which was far from monolithic – worked at times both to support and to subvert Scottish involvement in empire. The late nineteenth century also saw the formulation of Scottish proposals for an Anglo-Saxon racial empire including the United States; while Teutonic racialism inflected the nascent Scottish home rule movement as well as the Udal League in Orkney and Shetland.

Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate Interpretation of History

The theological reticence of the Moderates in the eighteenth-century Scottish Kirk sits oddly with their contribution to other spheres of literature, notably historical writing. A faultline runs through the historiography of Moderatism, dividing those historians who believe the Moderates remained committed Calvinists from those who endorse the view of contemporary critics within the Kirk that the Moderates favoured Arminianism, or worse. An appreciation of the Moderate preference for history over theology may go some way towards resolving this conundrum. Moderate accounts of religious history ran in parallel with the historical sociology of stadial progress which emerged in the Scottish Enlightenment. Moderate historians recognised that human interpretation of the divine also followed a developmental pattern. Thus, although the Moderates continued to uphold subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, their writings indicate that an historical sensitivity to theological change replaced what they perceived to be an inevitably time-bound commitment to dogma.

The Phillipsonian Enlightenment

A founding editor of Modern Intellectual History ( MIH ), an acclaimed biographer of Adam Smith and a prolific essayist on all aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment, from its origins to its aftermath, Nicholas Phillipson needs little introduction to the readers of this journal. However, Phillipsons recent retirement from his editorial duties on MIH provides a suitable moment to celebrate one of the pioneers in our field. When the current editors set out to commission a historiographical overview of Phillipsons oeuvre and career, I was honoured to be asked and delighted to accept.

THE WARREN COMMISSION AND THE DONS: AN ANGLO-AMERICAN MICROHISTORY

Distortion in intellectual history is not a direct function of distance from the present. The recent past can create its own problems of perspective. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a case in point. Is the controversy surrounding the assassination a worthy subject for an intellectual historian? After all, there is now little serious debate as to what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Mainstream historians regard the case as closed, an issue settled by the exhaustive and fair-minded deliberations of the Warren Commission, whose report, issued in the autumn of 1964, concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a sad and unsettled individual from a dysfunctional background, had killed the president. However, as we know, the topic remains, almost half a century later, a matter of huge fascination, but only outside the gates of the academy. The study of Kennedys assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense. Indeed, this disjunction between the obsessions of amateur historians, known as buffs, and the reluctance of academic historians to lose caste by exploring subjects such as the Kennedy assassination which the wider public—but only the wider public—seems to find worthy of further research and explanation is, as Professor W. D. Rubinstein notes, an interesting sociological and historiographical phenomenon in its own right. Writing in 1994, Max Holland, the journalist and intelligence historian, noted that the history of the Kennedy era was “bifurcated”. For academic historian writing on the Kennedy presidency the assassination is “treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all”, while “very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians.”

Global Turns: Other States, Other Civilizations

Although Ideological Origins was published before globalization had entered the historical lexicon, Bernard Bailyn recovered the global perspectives of eighteenth-century Britons, who were keenly aware of parallels with ancient Rome, alert to the character of contemporary empires across Eurasia, and anxious about the recent Europe-wide decline of limited monarchies into despotisms.

The Uses and Abuses of the Scottish Enlightenment in Modern Conservatism

For over a century and a half after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke was acknowledged as the guiding inspiration of conservative political thought in the Anglophone world. However, Burke’s defense of the organic, the prescriptive and the traditional began to seem inappropriate for conservatives attempting both to limit the power of the leviathan state over the individual and to grapple with the social and technical complexities of modern capitalist economies. As a result, Burkean ideas have been supplanted as the historical precursors of modern conservatism by the political economy fashioned in the Scottish Enlightenment by David Hume, Adam Smith and their contemporaries. This chapter explores the appropriation of the Scottish Enlightenment by modern conservatives (and their allies among the ranks of old-fashioned free-market liberals). The focus is largely on political and intellectual developments in Britain, but the chapter also looks at the ideological salience of the Scottish Enlightenment in the United States, among groups ranging from public choice theorists to Southern secessionists.

The Fergusson affair: Calvinism and dissimulation in the Scottish Enlightenment

To what extent did the Scottish Enlightenment involve a rejection of Calvinism? The question has come into focus in recent decades as scholars began to appreciate that the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment existed within the Church of Scotland, a church founded on the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647. When the Presbyterian brand of Scots churchmanship was re-established in 1690 at the Revolution, the Calvinist Westminster Confession became its subordinate standard. If the Scottish Enlightenment – unlike the French, say – did not take the form of an adversary culture outside the church establishment, then how far did its champions compromise with prevailing religious norms? It is, of course, hard to believe that the remarkable achievements of eighteenth-century Scots in the fields of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, history and political economy, and aesthetics and belles-lettres, were products of a culture thirled to traditional Calvinist norms; and for that reason nobody within the academic world had until recently bothered even to ask the question. Surely, the matter of the Scottish Enlightenment departed significantly from Calvinist doctrine, to the point of offering – at the very least – an implicit rebuke to its stale and oppressive dogmas? Yet it seems the Scottish Enlightenment and, more particularly, the Moderate party within the Kirk which upheld its values, were awkwardly entangled with Calvinist orthodoxy. The legislation of 1690 binding the Kirk to a Calvinist confession was copperfastened by the Union of 1707. The Act for securing the Church of Scotland, which accompanied the Union, guaranteed that professors, principals, regents and masters or others bearing office in Scotland’s universities or burgh and parochial schools were required to subscribe the Westminster Confession. The terms of clerical subscription became tighter in 1711, when, by an Act of the General Assembly, probationer ministers were obliged to own “the whole doctrine” contained within the Westminster Confession prior to licensing, and ministers were asked at their ordination whether they sincerely owned and believed “the whole doctrine contained in the Confession of Faith,” and to confirm that that they did “acknowledge the same as the confession of [their] faith.” By the same Act of Assembly ministers were also required to disown explicitly various other doctrines inconsistent with the Westminster Confession, including – specifically – Arian, Socinian and Arminian beliefs. It is hard for us to believe that the intellectual giants of the Scottish Enlightenment did not find themselves suffocated by such restrictions on their beliefs. Yet eighteenth-century Scots ministers and professors seem not to have chafed against the constrictions of this theological straitjacket. Whereas other parts of the Calvinist world, such as Switzerland and, closer to home, Ulster, witnessed clerical campaigns against

God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945: Claude Rawson; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, £25.00, ISBN 0 19 818425 5

of tenure. As we know, neither of these Acts preserved the Anglo–Irish Union, Mill’s main aim. Nor it is clear that he correctly diagnosed the economic and moral results of his land reform proposals. No one who has the courage (including the arrogance that often accompanies it) to take the political and moral lead, as Mill manifestly did on Irish questions towards the end of his life, is guaranteed to receive the posthumous prizes for doing so. Indeed, we should be suspicious of any work of intellectual history that sets out, some one-hundred-and-thirty years after his death, to confer or deny such prizes. But it has to be said that Mill’s prominence as a liberal icon provides a permanent invitation to such exercises from the left and right of the current political spectrum, with all its recent post-modern and post-colonialist extensions. Daunting though it is in its final 33-volume guise, the Toronto edition provides both the ammunition for and the ultimate challenge to such one-eyed readings. Alongside the work of Zastoupil and others on Mill and India, Kinzer’s use of the Toronto edition to reveal what the Irish prism tells us about his subject provides a scholarly benchmark that others will now have to follow.