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This book considers the politics of patronage appointments at the universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St Andrews. The book explores the ways in which 388 men secured posts in three Scottish universities between 1690 and 1806; from the purge following the Revolution of 1688 to the end of Henry Dundas's political career. Most professors were political appointees vetted and supported by political factions and their leaders. This study explores the improving agenda of political patrons and of those they served and relates this to the Scottish Enlightenment. The book argues that what was happening in Scotland was also occurring in other parts of Europe where, in relatively autonomous localities, elite patrons also shaped things as they wished them to be. The role of patronage in the Enlightenment is essential to any understanding of its origins and course. This book is based on much archival study and adds substantially to what is known about the Scottish professorial during the period.

This is the first modern book-length study of the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the sometime University of Edinburgh student who in 1697 earned the unfortunate distinction of being the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain. Taking a micro-historical approach, the book uses the Aikenhead case to open a window into the world of Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain in its transition from the confessional era of the Reformation and the covenants, which placed high emphasis on the defence of orthodox belief, to the polite, literary world of the Enlightenment, of which Edinburgh would become a major centre. The book traces the roots of the Aikenhead case in seventeenth-century Scotland and the law of blasphemy which was evolving in response to the new intellectual currents of biblical criticism and deism. The author analyzes Aikenhead's trial and the Scottish government's decision to uphold the sentence of hanging. Finally, he details the debate engendered by the execution, carried out in a public sphere of print media encompassing both Scotland and England. Aikenhead's case became a media event which highlighted the intellectual and cultural divisions within Britain at the end of the seventeenth century.

Masons, carpenters and glaziers were all needed to build a house, but in many cities such trades had separate companies. In Edinburgh, however, they banded together in a single incorporation to seek control of the labour market and defend their privileged position. Such issues were often contested by unfree competitors, municipal regulators and powerful customers. Therefore unity was needed to defend their position and privileges, but with ten unequal arts vying for control of the composite corporate body, how was such unity to be secured? The Edinburgh Incorporation of Mary’s Chapel looked to the models of the family and the household.

The rise of the Scottish national movement has been accompanied by the emergence of distinct constitutional ideas, claims and arguments, which may affect constitutional design in any future independent Scotland. Drawing on the fields of constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, and Scottish studies, this book examines the historical trajectory of the constitutional question in Scotland and analyses the influences and constraints on the constitutional imagination of the Scottish national movement, in terms of both the national and international contexts. It identifies an emerging Scottish nationalist constitutional tradition that is distinct from British constitutional orthodoxies but nevertheless corresponds to broad global trends in constitutional thought and design. Much of the book is devoted to the detailed exposition and comparative analysis of the draft constitution for an independent Scotland published by the SNP in 2002. The 2014 draft interim Constitution presented by the Scottish Government is also examined, and the two texts are contrasted to show the changing nature of the SNP’s constitutional policy: from liberal-procedural constitutionalism in pursuit of a more inclusive polity, to a more populist and majoritarian constitutionalism.

This book is an ethnographic study of devolution and politics in Scotland, as well as of party-political activism more generally. It explores how Conservative Party activists who had opposed devolution and the movement for a Scottish Parliament during the 1990s attempted to mobilise politically following their annihilation at the 1997 General Election. The book draws on fieldwork conducted in Dumfries and Galloway – a former stronghold for the Scottish Tories – to describe how senior Conservatives worked from the assumption that they had endured their own ‘crisis’ in representation. The material consequences of this crisis included losses of financial and other resources, legitimacy and local knowledge for the Scottish Conservatives. The book ethnographically describes the processes, practices and relationships that Tory Party activists sought to enact during the 2003 Scottish and local government elections. Its central argument is that, having asserted that the difficulties they faced constituted problems of knowledge, Conservative activists cast to the geographical and institutional margins of Scotland became ‘banal’ activists. Believing themselves to be lacking in the data and information necessary for successful mobilisation during Parliamentary elections, local Tory Party strategists attempted to address their knowledge ‘crisis’ by burying themselves in paperwork and petty bureaucracy. Such practices have often escaped scholarly attention because they appear everyday and mundane, and are therefore less noticeable. Bringing them into view analytically has important implications for socio-cultural anthropologists, sociologists and other scholars interested in ‘new’ ethnographic objects, including activism, bureaucracy, democracy, elections and modern knowledge practices.

This book traces the evolution of Dundee from wealthy Renaissance port — and second city of Scotland — to the point where it became an international centre of textile manufacturing and trade. It shows how, despite being at the heart of key events in Scottish history, Dundee has remained invisible behind its later Victorian mask. To allow the true nature of the city to come to light, it examines Dundee thoroughly in a rich mixture of urban, economic, political, social, medical, cultural, imperial, maritime, and architectural histories. It contains over one hundred specially selected illustrations, many of which have never been seen before. These are integral to the story it tells and are used to explain and illuminate Dundee's history. The book sets out to re-establish Dundee's rightful place in European history and to offer Scots a different perspective on their national history.

This book provides a new ‘global’ history of the Scottish city of Dundee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the question ‘How did the people of Dundee respond to the challenge of being the most economically globalised city in the world in the years before the First World War?’ It shows how the answer to this question is complicated by the fact that Dundee's jute industry was in competition with the jute industry of Calcutta. It describes how Dundee, dubbed, Juteopolis, had to cope not only with low-wage competition from abroad, but also with the political reality that, for decision-makers in London, the fate of the British Empire in India was far more important than the economic well-being of a small Scottish city. It shows how these issues were understood by ordinary Dundonians, as well as how they were understood by politicians and policy-makers. By combining economic, political, and social history, the book highlights the significance of empire for British policy-making and shows how the challenges historically posed by globalisation can be best analysed.

This book presents a provocative and timely reconsideration of modern Scottish literature in the light of ecological thought. The book demonstrates how successive generations of Scottish writers have both reflected on and contributed to the development of international ecological theory and philosophy. Provocative re-readings of works by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, Nan Shepherd, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and George Mackay Brown demonstrate the significance of ecological thought across the spectrum of Scottish literary culture. This book traces the influence of ecology as a scientific, philosophical, and political concept in the work of these and other writers and in doing so presents an original outlook on Scottish literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In this age of environmental crisis, the book reveals a heritage of ecological thought which should be recognised as of vital relevance both to Scottish literary culture and to the wider field of green studies.

The Edinburgh Festival – and the Fringe that it inspired – has been the hub for numerous ‘culture wars ’ since its inception in 1947. This book is the first major study of the origins and development of this leading annual arts extravaganza, examining a moving stage of debate on such issues as the place of culture in society, the practice and significance of the arts, censorship, the role of organised religion, and the meanings of morality. From the beginning, the Edinburgh Festival sought to use culture to bolster European civilisation. For this it was considered for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. Culture was seen by churches as a ‘weapon of enlightenment’, by the labour movement as a ‘weapon in the struggle’, and by the new generation of artistic entrepreneurs coming to the fore in the 1960s as a means of challenge and provocation. High-profile controversies resulted, such as the nudity trial of 1963 and the scandal over a play about bestiality in 1967. These ideas – conservative and liberal, elite and diverse, traditional and avant-garde – have all clashed every August in Edinburgh, making the festivals an effective lens for exploring major changes in culture and society in post-war Britain.

This book examines how participation in the British Empire shaped constructions of Scottish national identity. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of 19th-century and early 20th-century Scottish society through its original use of a wide range of primary sources, and covers new ground in its assessment of the impact of empire at home. The author shows how, in the course of the 19th century, Scots acquired knowledge of empire and voiced opinions on imperial administration and on imperialism itself through philanthropic and religious, learned and scientific, and imperial propagandist activities. She explores the role that the foreign mission movement of the leading Presbyterian churches played in creating a vision of empire. And, focusing on Edinburgh as a case study, she discusses the social basis of support for the movement, including the increasingly prominent role played by women. Through analysing writings by and about missionaries in the missionary and secular press, this book asks how the foreign mission movement came to be a source of national pride, and provides new insights into the shaping of Scottish national identity and its relationship to the concept of Britishness.

It was long believed that evolutionary theories received an almost universally cold reception in British natural history circles in the first half of the nineteenth century. But recently serious doubt has been cast on this assumption. This book will be the first major study of what was the most important centre or pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought in the British Isles. It shows that Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s was witness to a veritable ferment of radical new ideas on the natural world, including speculation on the origin and evolution of life, at just the time when Charles Darwin was studying medicine in the city. Those who were students in Edinburgh at the time could have hardly avoided coming into contact with these new ideas, espoused as they were by many of professors, fellow students and acquaintances in Edinburgh. This book sheds new light on the genesis and development of one of the most important scientific theories in the history of western thought.

This book examines the climatic and economic origins of the last national famine to occur in Scotland, the nature and extent of the crisis which ensued and what the impact of the famine was upon the population in demographic, economic and social terms. Current published knowledge about the causes, extent and impact of the famine in Scotland is limited and many conclusions have been speculative in the absence of extensive research. Despite the critical importance of this crisis, one of the four disasters of the 1690s, which are widely acknowledged to have contributed to the economic arguments in favour of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, the topic has been largely neglected and even underplayed by historians. This book studies the famine, providing a unique scholarly examination of the causes, course, characteristics and consequences of the crisis. A comprehensive study of agricultural, climatic, economic, social and demographic issues, the book seeks to establish answers to the fundamental question concerning the event. How serious was it? Using detailed statistical and qualitative analysis, it discusses the regional factors that defined the famine, the impact on the population, and the interconnected causes of this traumatic event.

This book commemorates the five-hundredth anniversary of The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Founded in 1505 it has survived, with difficulty at times, to become one of the leading surgical corporations in Britain. The original Charter, or Seal of Cause, set out guidelines for the operation of the Incorporation of Barbers and Surgeons, in particular the requirement to study anatomy and the need for examination at the end of apprenticeship in order to ensure that master surgeons were as well trained as they could be at that time. These same guidelines still influence the aims and objectives of the Royal College of Surgeons, though manifest in very different ways in an age of technology and government regulation of surgical training. The book charts the progress of the institution through five hundred years of change, both in the College itself and in the external local, national, and international contexts. The Incorporation began with very local horizons; it now has a global outlook, with some 17,000 Fellows and Members worldwide, and this history aims to explain and account for the many influences that shaped the College into what it is today.

An historically and critically sound — and contemporary — evaluation of tartan and tartanry based on proper contextualisation and coherent analysis, this critical study of one of the more controversial aspects of recent debates on Scottish culture draws together contributions from leading researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, resulting in a highly accessible yet authoritative volume. This book, like tartan, weaves together two strands. The first, like a warp, considers the significance of tartan in Scottish history and culture during the last four centuries, including tartan's role in the development of diaspora identities in North America. The second, like a weft, considers the place of tartan and rise of tartanry in the national and international representations of Scottishness, including heritage, historical myth-making, popular culture, music hall, literature, film, comedy, rock and pop music, sport, and ‘high’ culture. This book offers fresh insight into and new perspectives on key cultural phenomena, from the iconic role of the Scottish regiments to the role of tartan in rock music. It argues that tartan may be fun, but it also plays a wide range of fascinating, important, and valuable roles in Scottish and international culture.

This book charts the course of Scottish Critical Theory since the 1960s. It provocatively argues that ‘French’ critical-theoretical ideas have developed in tandem with Scottish writing during this period. Its themes can be read as a breakdown in Scottish Enlightenment thinking after empire — precisely the process which permitted the rise of ‘theory’. The book places within a wider theoretical context writers such as Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, James Kelman, Alexander Trocchi, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner, and Irvine Welsh, as well as more recent work by Alan Riach and Pat Kane, who can be seen to take the ‘post-Enlightenment’ narrative forward. In doing so, it draws on the work of the Scottish thinkers John Macmurray and R.D. Laing as well as the continental philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio.

This book offers a unique contribution to gender and Scottish history breaking new ground on several fronts: there is no history of inter-war women in Scotland, very little labour or popular political history, and virtually nothing published on women, the home, and family. This book is a history of women in the period that integrates class and gender history as well as linking the public and private spheres. Using a gendered approach to history it transforms and shifts our knowledge of the Scottish past, unearthing the previously unexplored role that women played in inter-war socialist politics, the General Strike, and popular political protest. It re-evaluates these areas and demonstrates the ways in which gender shaped the experience of class and class struggle. Importantly, the book also explores the links between the public and private spheres and addresses the concept of masculinity as well as femininity and pays particular reference to domestic violence. The books illuminates the complex interconnections of culture and economic and social structure. Although the research is based on Scottish evidence, the book also uses material to address key debates in gender history and labour history that have wider relevance and will appeal to gender historians, labour historians, and social and cultural historians as well as social scientists.

This edited collection provides a comparative overview of the nineteenth-century emergence of military Scottishness and explores how the construction and performance of Scottish military identity has evolved in different Commonwealth countries over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It looks at the ways in which diasporic Scottish volunteer regiments sought to draw upon, align themselves with or redefine the assertions of martial identity which Highland regiments represented. This volume considers the functioning and meaning of military Scottishness in Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand and South Africa from the late Victorian period to the present day, with a particular focus on the First World War. It examines how the identity of the Scottish diaspora was often articulated and expressed through the formation of military units which adhered to outwardly Scottish regimental forms. It also illuminates the associational culture and social networking which operated behind local regiments and military units among Scotland’s global diaspora. It also serves to highlight the complex interplay between class, ethnic and national identities amongst Scottish settlers and their families in the Dominions. It makes use of art, literature, recruitment posters, uniforms and related material culture to emphasise the importance of martial imagery to Scotland’s sense of self.

From the seventeenth century to the current day, more than 2.5 million Scots have sought new lives elsewhere. This book of essays examines the impact since 1600 of out-migration from Scotland upon the homeland, on the migrants themselves, on the destinations in which they settled, and upon their descendants and ‘affinity’ Scots. It does so through a focus on themes of slavery, cross-cultural encounters, economics, war, tourism, and the modern diaspora since 1945 in diverse destinations encompassing Europe, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Hong Kong, Guyana and the British World more broadly.

This modern history of Scottish woodlands explores the changing relationship between trees and people from the time of Scotland's first settlement, focusing on the period 1500 to 1920. Drawing on work in natural science, geography, and history, as well as on personal research, it presents an account that balances social, economic, and environmental factors. Two opening chapters describe the early history of the woodlands. The book is then divided into chapters that consider traditional uses and management, the impact of outsiders on the pine woods and the oakwoods in the first phase of exploitation, and the effect of industrialisation. Separate chapters are devoted to case studies of management at Strathcarron, Glenorchy, Rothiemurchus, and on Skye.

This book seeks to chart how the Scottish legal system responded to what were deemed ‘illicit and unnatural practices’ after 1900. Using a wide range of prosecution and trial records, along with more recent newspaper coverage of court proceedings, it furnishes a fascinating insight into the relationship between the law, sex, and society in modern Scotland. Case studies of sex-related offences, including abortion, bestiality, brothel-keeping, child sexual assault, and wilful HIV transmission, reveal how far the legal process both reflected and reinforced contemporary moral panics and how far it was shaped by the interplay between law officers and forensic experts, by the prejudices of the local community and civic leaders, and by Scotland’s distinctive legal and moral identity. The law in practice is seen to have sustained important norms of sexual behaviour and masculinity along with an enduring double moral standard with respect to female sexuality. This volume thus affords a remarkable new perspective on the sexual behaviours and ideologies of Scottish society across the twentieth century and into the new millennium.