David Worthington

Introducing the New Coastal History: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond

This chapter both outlines the foundations of the New Coastal History and scopes out new routes within this cross-disciplinary space. It brings in insular and non-insular research as well as historiographical evidence before sharpening the focus to adjacent, proximate coasts—the pasts of a range of straits, sounds, channels, gulfs, bays, estuaries, firths and fjords being covered—highlighting that such environments have been ‘hubs’ as well as ‘chokepoints’. The next section explores how waterborne communications have knitted together such communities as much as lack of landed contiguity has sometimes separated them. The final section outlines the volume’s genesis on a littoral in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and introduces the contributions that follow.

‘Unfinished work and damaged materials’: historians and the Scots in the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania (1569–1795)

Abstract The burgeoning of a historiography of the Scots in Poland–Lithuania has been hindered by either the unavailability to scholars of, or their unwillingness to tackle, secondary sources in the relevant foreign languages. Despite this ethnic group having comprised, at one time, the largest representation of the Scottish diaspora in a foreign state, this article demonstrates that, since Poland–Lithuania’s partition, historiographical coverage has been compartmentalised along linguistic and national lines. The article is tripartite, outlining work in the German, Polish and English languages, albeit highlighting the detrimental effects caused, until recently, by the frequent isolation of these, and other linguistic traditions of historiographical significance, from one another.