introduction from jacobitism, enlightenment and empire, 1680–1820

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INTRODUCTION: IDENTITY, MOBILITY AND COMPETING PATRIOTISMS

Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton

Global adventuring became a way of life for Scots in the seventeenth century. In the wake of the Treaty of Union, which incorporated Scotland and England from 1707, the traditional continental sojourning of Scots as soldiers and scholars was pressed into service of the inchoate yet expanding eighteenth-century British Empire. Scots became prominent in the British Army and Royal Navy. Th ey also served with distinction on religious missions and in academic institutions that brought together enterprise and enlightenment. Enterprise, if not enlightenment, was a key feature of Scottish engagement in the tobacco and sugar trades from the Americas, in the tea, coff ee and silk trades from Asia and in the slave trade from Africa. In the process, the high incidence and extent of Scottish mobility fos-tered identities that can readily be depicted as multi-polar or multi-faceted. To be understood, these identities must be weighted with respect to time and space and by the ways they were given particular focus by competing Scottish and British patriotisms originating in the internecine rivalry of Jacobites and Whigs, which was confessional and territorial as well as factional and political.

Scottish Jacobites sought the restoration of the house of Stuart exiled at the far from ‘glorious’ Revolution, the sundering of the Treaty of Union and the removal of the Presbyterian establishment in the Kirk that had been accomplished in 1689–90 and reaffi rmed in 1707. British Whigs upheld the Revolution, the Union and, from 1714, the succession of the house of Hano-ver as monarchs. Th e public discourse on patriotism shift ed perceptively if not irreversibly from Scottish to British as Jacobitism declined and as enterprising Scots became embedded in Empire. Patriotism as redefi ned by Enlightenment became a means of promoting public virtue that argued for equitable govern-ance throughout British dominions. Civil and religious liberties were to have the same resonance at home and abroad. Th e subsequent rise of Romanticism contributed to the patriotic rehabilitation of Jacobitism in the later eighteenth century. Th is essentially cultural development acquired greater political clout from the American and French Revolutions. Th eir reception in the United

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2 Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820

Kingdom led patriotic discourses to oscillate from radicalism and reform to con-servatism and oppression. Driven by Empire as much as Enlightenment these competing patriotisms, as this collection of essays demonstrates, were infused with a lingering Jacobitism.

Th is book is based on a seminar series on ‘Identity and Mobility from Jaco-bitism to Empire, c. 1680–c. 1820’ and a transnational project on ‘Enterprise, Enlightenment and Empire’, which were both run through the University of Strathclyde from the spring of 2009.1 Th e editors have brought together an international and interdisciplinary cast of contributors who include the long established as well the recently placed within the academy. We have also included independent scholars actively affi liated to seminar, conference and project work in Scottish universities whose contributions to Scottish and imperial studies have hitherto been underappreciated. Four of the essays deal specifi cally with aspects of Jacobitism at home and abroad, fi ve with imperial engagement in the Americas, Asia and Africa, and three with Enlightenment and its contentious application in continental as well as imperial settings. Although the majority of the articles focus on the eighteenth century, to give a fuller contextualization for enterprise and sentimentality one article commences in 1610 and another concludes in the 1860s – a long eighteenth century indeed.

ITh ere was far more to Jacobitism than commitment to divine-right monarchy that exercised prerogative powers to dispense with and suspend laws. Th e per-sonal exercise of these powers, notably in favour of religious toleration, provoked revolution against James VII & II in England in 1688 that was only fi nalized when his armed supporters in Ireland and Scotland sued for peace with William of Orange. Jacobitism was an organic construct rooted in dynastic legitimacy that upheld a just social ordering headed by the Stuart monarchy and incorporating the body politic. If not acting harmoniously in concert with the monarchy, the landed and commercial elites were expected to give their passive acquiescence to it. Th e equitable running of central and local government drew primarily on the strength of custom and tradition in civil and religious aff airs. In turn, the social hierarchy was affi rmed by hierarchical religious polities, notwithstanding con-fessional diff erences between Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians.2

However, there was no uniform prescription for Jacobitism in England, Ire-land and Scotland. Apart from marked confessional diff erences among the three constituent kingdoms, there was limited evidence of transnational cooperation. Diverging relationships in the 1690s were further strained by the detached but incessant intrigues of the Court-in-exile at St Germains outside Paris. Scottish Jacobites were particularly antagonistic to the Treaty of Union, widespread

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Introduction 3

antipathy to which became a major platform for their cause that came to rival dynastic or confessional commitment to the exiled Stuarts. Th e overwhelming desire of Scottish Jacobites to repeal the Union was expediently but not enthu-siastically endorsed by the Court-in-exile even though Scotland came to provide most of the people who fought and died for Jacobitism in the major risings of 1715–16 and 1745–6 (hereaft er the ’15 and the ’45).3

Th e military career of James VIII & III (the Old Pretender, to the Whigs) has never enjoyed the same scrutiny as his father, James VII & II, and his son, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender). While he certainly had less experience than his father, he had considerably more than his charismatic son who rashly mismanaged the ’45. As Daniel Szechi emphasizes in Chapter 1, Jacobitism was fundamentally a military phenomenon. Accordingly, the mili-tary capacity of the monarch for whom Jacobites fought is important, but has been largely unexplored in the historiography relating to him. Th is king in exile hardly covered himself in glory when he returned to Scotland in the minor ris-ing of 1708 and later, in the ’15, he arrived late, when his cause was essentially lost. Th e clans who formed the bedrock of the Jacobite forces were certainly disappointed in their traditional expectations of epic heroism from their mili-tary leaders. His principal role was to manage his force’s retreat and the Jacobite leadership’s withdrawal to France. Th is he did competently. Although he never commanded an army in battle, he had served with distinction in French Service during the War of the Spanish Succession. His dash, daring and some bravado in the fi eld in 1708 and 1709 did attract some favourable comment that was duly transmitted back to inspire his followers in Scotland.

A principal transmitter of news about his military exploits was Margaret, Lady Nairne, who has long been established in the pantheon of Jacobite hero-ines. Yet, as Nicola Cowmeadow argues in Chapter 2, there was much more to Lady Nairne than Jacobitism. Drawing mainly on Lady Nairne’s correspondence between the Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, a picture emerges of an enormously competent woman whose political and estate management was marked by principle, capability and tenacity. Jacobitism certainly shaped her personal beliefs, motivations and responsibilities; but so did her family rela-tionships, kin networks and sociability. Married to a husband whose Jacobitism was marked as much by absenteeism as activism, Lady Nairne was obliged to assume managerial responsibilities, which she did with fl air and no little aplomb. Indeed, Lady Nairne was not just a noted Jacobite, but a woman whose infl uence extended far beyond Perthshire and whose amiable networking also reached out to Whigs. Her sense of independence and her astute ordering of priorities were personal features that emerge as crucial to our understanding of the role elite women played in early modern Scottish society.

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Th e astute ordering of priorities also features signifi cantly in Th omas McInal-ly’s examination of confl icting loyalties for Scottish Catholic clergy in Chapter 3. By the later seventeenth century the three Benedictine monasteries in south-ern Germany, known as the Schottenklöster, had come to constitute a further college to support the missionary work of the Scots Colleges in Douai, Rome, Paris and Madrid. Th is support was welcomed by James VII & II, particularly as the Bavarian College continued to promote the king’s interests at the Imperial Court in Germany both before and aft er the Revolution and throughout the Nine Years War (1688–97). Th is had its complications as the king’s support for the Gallicanism of Louis XIV of France drew the ire of the papacy. However, aft er the death of James VII & II in 1701, the clear priority of all involved on the Scottish mission was to attract sustained funding from the College of Propa-ganda Fide in Rome. Nevertheless, the association of the Scottish mission with Jacobitism brought down the full force of the penal laws against the regular and secular clergy. Th e debilitating impact of these laws was compounded by internal disputes over funding, especially aft er 1731, when clergy ministering to greater numbers of Catholics on the Highland mission were not averse to tainting col-leagues on the better funded Lowland mission with Jansenism. Heretical charges notwithstanding, the marked decline in numbers of missionaries meant that hopes for the conversion of Episcopalians largely fell by the wayside. Instead, there was some movement in the other direction, particularly to the non-jurors, the majority of Episcopalians who steadfastly refused to abandon the house of Stuart on the promise of toleration.

Th e nuanced delivery of toleration by parliamentary enactment in 1712 is explored by Jeff rey Stephen in Chapter 4. Th is legislation, which breached the established status assured to the Kirk in 1707, was engineered by Scottish Jaco-bites and English Tories as much to aggravate Presbyterians as to secure religious freedom for Episcopalians. But toleration was conditional; it only applied to the minority of jurors who were prepared to use the Anglican service book. Use of this liturgy by Episcopalians in post-Revolutionary Scotland had become increasingly contentious. Th eir legal right to do so without interference from the Kirk or the civil courts was upheld by the House of Lords in 1711 in the case of James Greenshields. Ministering in Edinburgh before moving to London as a parliamentary reporter, Greenshields favoured a rapport with Anglican-ism which was anathema to the non-jurors.4 Moreover, the promotion of the Anglican liturgy was potentially explosive not just for Episcopalians but also Presbyterians, some of whom regarded its promotion as a Jacobite attempt to break the Union by creating a national confl agration similar to that which pro-duced the Wars of the Th ree Kingdoms in the 1640s. Indeed, the subsequent publication by non-jurors of the liturgical innovations that had triggered the National Covenant of 1638 was opposed by Greenshields and his supporters who feared renewed rebellion.

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Introduction 5

IIAside from dynastic, confessional and constitutional considerations, Jacobitism also had an imperial dimension. Denied full and complete British union by both the English and Scottish parliaments aft er the Union of the Crowns in 1603, James VI of Scotland and I of England nevertheless pursued Britannic policies in rela-tion to frontier and colonial aff airs that had a military and diplomatic resonance. Frontier policies, promoted as the civilizing of unruly parts in England, Ireland and Scotland, were marked by the removal and relocation of peoples into planta-tions for the commercial pursuit of agriculture, mining and fi sheries. At the same time, colonial policies promoted similar plantations in North America and the Caribbean which were bolstered by the kind of commercial hubs that also came to feature prominently in the East Indies. Like the French and the Dutch, the Britannic monarchy laid claim to dominion over territories historically if notion-ally assigned by the papacy to Spain and Portugal in the late fi ft eenth century. However, the civil wars that saw Charles I progressively lose control of Scotland, Ireland and England in the 1640s also gave the opportunity for the English Par-liament to lay claim to the British colonies of the early Stuarts, a claim reinforced by the republican regime of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. Aft er the Restora-tion, Charles II and, to a greater extent his brother, James, Duke of York (later James VII & II) were prepared to use their prerogative powers to allow Scottish networks of adventurers and entrepreneurs to operate in the Americas. However, English dominance over the colonies was furthered by Navigation Acts which prejudiced Scottish trading in colonial commodities such as tobacco, sugar and rum. Th e Revolution and the accession of William of Orange once again made the American colonies answerable to the English Parliament. By 1696, when the Board of Trade was instituted to oversee colonial aff airs, the Navigation Acts had been revamped and an Alien Act was passed removing Scots from public and military offi ce in the Americas; prohibitions that remained in place until Scot-land was incorporated with England in the Treaty of Union.5

Scottish Jacobitism acquired not only a new domestic impetus but also a new imperial direction from 1707. Popular antipathy to the Union saw in Jacobitism an appropriate vehicle to end Scottish political subjugation. Patriotism became a notable driving force that redefi ned Jacobitism in Scotland, a process that was not always to the taste of the exiled house of Stuart.6 Th e concept of patria was founded on neo-Stoic, humanist teaching. Scottish identity was expressed through the momentous attainments of scholars, soldiers and adventurers no less than monarchs. Essentially this was a diasporic identity that also drew on epic heroism as of William Wallace, the leader of the community of the realm during the Wars of Independence from England in the late thirteenth and early four-teenth century. Patrick Abercromby and George Mackenzie, both with strong family connections to the Jacobite heartlands in the North-East of Scotland, articulated the concept of the patria in the immediate aft ermath of the parlia-

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mentary union to signal that territorial nationhood should take precedence over dynastic statehood. For many Scots thereaft er, the appeal of Jacobitism was pri-marily patriotic not dynastic, and this patriotism was transportable to Empire.7

Clerical issues return in an imperial context in Chapter 5 where Sarah Barber questions the English nature of the Caribbean colonies and challenges a narrative that renders Scottish and Irish participants as victims of, rather than dynamic actors in, state policy. Th e confessional standards of the Anglican Church, an iconic English institution, nominally held sway in the American tropics. Yet a quarter of clerical appointments were exercised by Scottish and Irish Protestants and French Huguenots trained in Ireland. English clergy sought preferment at home rather in the Caribbean where congregations were sparse and the general demeanour of plantation society was considered immoral, amoral and scandal-ous. Th ose who went tended to go with the fl ow of life in the tropics. In marked contrast, the Scots, the Irish and the Huguenots conscientiously devoted themselves to their pastoral duties. Th e Scots in particular earned themselves a reputation for incorruptible rectitude. Although Episcopalians ousted from their livings at the Revolution were willing clerical recruits in the Caribbean, there is little evidence that diff erences between jurors and non-jurors were translated across the Atlantic. Moreover, the Scots, like the Irish, could draw on support networks among fellow countrymen in plantation society that tran-scended denominational diff erences.

Commercial rather than confessional support networks are scrutinized by Esther Mijers in Chapter 6. Collaboration with the Dutch, no less than the Eng-lish, was initially integral to Scottish engagement in transatlantic commerce in the age of Union. Transatlantic connections are viewed through the lens of Scot-land’s longstanding tradition of migration, military service and trade to Zealand, Holland and the southern Netherlands. Th e Dutch Republic was of particular importance not only as a commercial partner but also as a training ground for Scottish merchants. When the English acquired the New Netherlands, the colony was renamed as New York and the Scots adapted more easily than the Dutch. But networks of both nationalities continued to fl ourish as evident from the career and connections of Robert Livingston, as merchant in the city of New York and substantial landowner in Albany. Th is adaptable capacity of Scottish entrepreneurs is compared favourably to that of Jewish and Armenian networks.

Th at Scottish entrepreneurs were increasingly drawn into British commer-cial spheres before the Union is evident from Stuart M. Nisbet’s case study of sugar barons in Chapter 7. William McDowell and his associate James Milliken were Scottish adventurers who worked their way through the sugar trade to become planters in the Caribbean. Th rough their repatriation of capital, they acquired estates in the West of Scotland, where they reinvented themselves as exemplary improvers and pillars of the landed elite. MacDowell and Milliken

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Introduction 7

operated essentially within British West Indian networks before and aft er Union and were well positioned to acquire formerly French plantations on St Christo-pher’s ceded by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Th eir exports of sugar and rum were primarily designed for London, not Scottish ports; a not uncommon fea-ture among Scottish planters which has led to the underestimation of sugar’s contribution to Scottish economic development relative to tobacco directly imported from the Chesapeake to the Clyde.8 However, once they repatriated capital to acquire estates, MacDowell and Milliken also promoted sugar works to give much needed depth to the economy of Edinburgh no less than Glasgow.

For over four decades following the Union in 1707, strife rather than sta-bility permeated public life with recession, riot and rebellion endemic. But, as Allan I. Macinnes argues in Chapter 8, the primary antidote to strife was the active participation of the Scottish landed and commercial elites in the bur-geoning global Empire of the new British state. Scottish adventuring in Empire was mainly sustained through commercial networks that engaged directly with venture companies and occasional freelance trading, and indirectly by the acquisition of stocks and shares through brokerage and banking. A paradoxical situation resulted. Presbyterians remained divided over access to Empire because the confessional tests for civil and military offi ce overseas remained Anglican. Episcopalians had a more favourable perspective. Despite their largely antago-nistic stance towards Union, Empire off ered them global opportunities not just to retrieve but to amplify family fortunes jeopardized by Jacobitism. Although risks were high, so were potential profi ts. Dispensers of imperial patronage gained added value from this embedding. Jacobite adventurers were as expend-able on the Guinea Coast and in Bengal and Buenos Aires as in the Leeward Islands and on the American frontier. Support for Jacobitism, but not necessar-ily Episcopalianism, continued to ebb away from the ranks of the tobacco lords, sugar barons, putative nabobs, China tea traders and African slavers.

Th e importance of political patronage in giving access to Empire is further developed in Chapter 9 by George McGilvary. Th ere remains a debate about the numbers of Scots in positions of infl uence in the East India Company: specifi -cally, were they commanders or merely subalterns?9 But the key issues remain the spikes in recruitment and the capital repatriated from placement in India. Th e spike of the late 1720s, which continued throughout the 1730s, can undoubt-edly be attributed to John Drummond of Quarrel working in close association with the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole and the Scottish political manager, Archibald Campbell, Earl of Islay (later third Duke of Argyll). Aft er Drum-mond’s death in 1742, patronage in India was dispensed directly by Islay and his managerial colleagues until the 1760s, when Scots, regardless of their fam-ily background as Jacobites, were increasingly being drawn into the politics of the East India Company. By the 1780s, Scots had become serious players in the exploitation of the Indian subcontinent and the South China seaways.

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IIISermons, birthday celebrations and battle hymns may say the contrary, but alle-giance to the Hanoverians did not become markedly more pronounced as active commitment to Jacobitism declined.10 Nevertheless, the public discourse on pat-riotism shift ed perceptively, if not irreversibly, from Scottish to British with the embedding of enterprising Scots in Empire. By 1728, David Scot had underlined that Scottish Jacobitism did not have exclusive copyright on the patria. He pro-duced a historical riposte to the works of Abercromby and Mackenzie, which rebranded the patria with a British identity. As evident from the subscription lists to the works of these three authors, the patria appealed across the political divide between Jacobites and Whigs and became integral to a common Scottish culture. Loyalty to the territorial nation became a more pressing concern than allegiance to the exiled house of Stuart or the incumbent house of Hanover.11

Th is Whig version of British patriotism was no less transportable to Empire than the Jacobite version of Scottish patriotism as was evident from the writings of Sir William Keith, erstwhile Governor of Pennsylvania. A prominent colonial polemicist, who retained family ties to Aberdeenshire, Keith stressed the Brit-ish nature of an Empire predicated on equality. He eff ectively promulgated an alternative to the territorial expansion and colonial dependency through mer-cantilist regulation, venture companies and slave plantations that was favoured by Sir Robert Walpole. For Keith supported a revitalized Whig perspective on the development of manufactures and shipping within the American colonies to allow them to trade as equal partners in a commercial Empire. Accordingly he became an American spokesman for the Patriot Party which came to challenge Walpole’s political dominance in the 1730s. On Keith’s relocation to London he continued to argue that Britain was a greater construct than Scotland and England. Ameri-can colonists were British subjects abroad. In turn, the British state was of greater signifi cance than the provincial interests of the American colonies. What bound together British subjects at home and abroad were British rights and liberties applied equitably and without privileging one part of the state over another.12

Th e Patriot Party, enthusiastically promoted by the diplomat and soldier, John Dalrymple, second Earl of Stair, attracted considerable support from Scots not fully engaged in venture companies at home or abroad. Th ey particularly benefi ted from the public breach between Walpole and the veteran commander, John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, in 1740, when the latter criticized the chronic mismanagement of the naval expedition against Spanish strongholds in Central America and the Caribbean. As well as playing a prominent role in the downfall of Walpole two years later, Scottish Patriots in the British Parliament were able to push through a series of bounty acts which transformed the prospects for linen exported directly from Scotland to the American colonies.13Prosperity and integration carried a domestic resonance at the ’45 when Adam Ferguson

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Introduction 9

sidestepped the dynastic issue to extol the virtues of British civil and religious liberties over clannish affi nities to Jacobitism.14 As befi tting the only virtuoso of the Enlightenment in Scotland whose roots were Highland rather than Lowland, Ferguson, by experience as well as intellect, distanced himself from strident British voices calling for the crushing of Jacobitism in the progressive spirit of true patriotism. Like other leading fi gures of the Enlightenment, Fer-guson adhered to a stadial view of social development from hunter-gatherer to a commercial state.15 But, he held back from equating change with progress and remained sceptical about the ‘matchless’ English constitution.16 At the Revolution, James VII had been deposed in Scotland whereas he was deemed, as James II, to have abdicated in England. Th e Revolution in Scotland, unlike that in England, was uncompromised by Whigs having to accommodate Tories. Ferguson and his fellow members of the Poker Club, formed to agitate against Scotland being excluded from the Militia Act of 1757, came to view themselves as the moral guardians of the British constitution established at the Revolution and consolidated by the Union of 1707; an intellectual position that required the Scots to be treated as equal and trusted partners. Despite being repeatedly denied a militia, British national identity was promoted assiduously from Scot-land as a common commitment to liberty and Protestantism.17

Th e virtuosi of the Enlightenment, based predominantly but not exclusively in Edinburgh, have been associated with a progressive Whig infl uence in Scot-land.18 Yet, the promotion of global aspirations for Scots and the recognition of the shift in wealth creation, from land and labour to technology, constitute primarily a Jacobite rather than a Whig legacy. Th is linking of Enlightenment to Empire and enterprise was accomplished respectively by Field-Marshal James Keith and Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees who, by necessity, spent most of their productive lives exiled from Scotland. Having participated in the ’15 and the minor rising of 1719, Keith had become a military commander in Spain, Russia and Prussia. Writing between 1748 and 1756, he off ered a prescient critique not just of British state formation but of the imperial aspirations of the European powers. Keith advocated the destruction of the Turkish Empire in Europe as of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Th e latter was not only advantageous to the leading European powers, but also carried the further prospect of moral reformation without which France, Britain and the Dutch Republic were bound to lose their own empires in the Americas. Keith was unconvinced that Britain practised or encouraged virtuous patriotism. Although patriotism was part of his own Jacobite heritage, the corrupt oligarchy that passed for parliamentary government in Britain made him increasingly sceptical that the replacement of the Hanoverians by the exiled Stuarts would accomplish the moral reformation achieved by the enlightened despotism of Frederick II in Prussia and that initi-ated in Russia by Peter the Great.19

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In terms of global opportunities, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) stressed the importance of labour to wealth creation. Improved divisions of labour were the key to productivity that under-pinned the emerging factory system. In overturning mercantilist restrictions on enterprise, Smith ensured the triumph of labour over land. However, he did not anticipate the further transformative role of technology.20 Th is was the achieve-ment of Steuart of Goodtrees. His Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) has never achieved the same international resonance. Rather than model stadial progress on classical studies, Steuart relied on his practical observations of industry and manufacturing throughout the continent during his protracted exile from Scotland. He agreed with Smith, and David Hume, that capital invest-ment was the motor of economic growth. But where Smith and Hume contended that money followed industry, Steuart was more proactive. Like his fellow Jaco-bite sympathizer, John Law, the international fi nancier, Steuart was adamant that a relaxation of the money supply, through quantitative easing, could stimulate industry. Whereas Smith was an ethical apologist for free trade, Steuart advocated the light touch of government on economic levers. Steuart went far beyond Smith when he associated industrial growth not just with the rational technology that raised living standards as well as productivity but also with the responsible pat-riotism engendered by commerce, a patriotism that constituted a real safeguard against absolutism, even that extolled by Keith.21

Keeping body and soul together (illicitly if necessary) rather than the promotion of these patriotic and progressive principles seems the prevailing pre-occupation of William Playfair. Yet, as Jean-François Dunyach shows in Chapter 10, Playfair’s life and career in Scotland, England and France provides illuminat-ing insights into the lesser fi gures that never attained the status of Enlightenment virtuosi. Playfair, who was one of the main contributors to the invention of sta-tistical representation at the end of the eighteenth century, developed signifi cant support networks and engaged in a remarkable range of intellectual activities as an engineer, industrialist and publisher in and around Edinburgh, Birming-ham, London and Paris. His shuttling between the latter two cities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and his reputation for operating on the margins as a banker and politician who favoured counter-revolutionary activi-ties, made him an intriguing if shadowy fi gure in the British reactionary response to the French Revolution.

Born in the same year as Playfair (in 1759), Robert Burns has attained lasting fame as Scotland’s national bard. However, as Liam McIlvanney demonstrates in Chapter 11, there was far more to the reception of Burns in the Empire than the creation of commemorative clubs that provide a further range of ethnic anchors patronized by Scots overseas. Th e poetry and songs of Burns are imbued with the ideas for reform and radicalism inspired by fi rst the American and then the French

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Introduction 11

Revolution. As such, Burns became the poet laureate of the Scottish Diaspora. His intended voyage to Jamaica in 1786 was pre-empted by the publication of the fi rst volume of his poetry, the Kilmarnock edition. Th is most infl uential volume of poems ever published in Scotland is permeated with visionary voyages which marked the transition in Scottish patriotism from Jacobite to Jacobin. Patriotism was here moved beyond the provenance of the political elite to a shared cultural, literary and territorial heritage of the Scottish people at home and abroad. In the process, Scottish patriotism transcended both cultural Romanticism and con-temporaneous discussion on how Scots should contribute to the British Empire. It wholly rejected an Anglo-British perspective in which Scotland was absorbed into a British identity created from England.22 Th e legacy of Burns ensured that as the global expansion of British interests pushed on into the Antipodes, as into South-East Asia and into Africa in the nineteenth century, Scottish patriotic sen-timents were never entirely suppressed or their radicalism lost.

Th e radical pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity inspired by the French Revolution provoked a repressive reaction from the imperial metropolis in the name of British patriotism; a patriotism that was certainly conservative and even oppressive as explored by Douglas J. Hamilton in Chapter 12. Amidst the del-uge of parliamentary petitions clamouring for abolition of fi rst the slave trade then of slavery, some Scottish voices were not prepared to accept a metropolitan, Anglo-British abolitionist agenda. As later in the American South, opposition to the emancipation of slave labour was justifi ed partly on the intellectual basis of the stadial development propagated at the Enlightenment, albeit the anti-abolitionists were primarily motivated by economic self-interest. Certainly the anti-abolitionists constituted a reactionary interest. But their cause was organ-ized and disseminated through networks of West Indian planters, merchants and fellow travellers. Acting in concert with English counterparts, the Scottish West Indian interest applied their dynamic and hitherto successful imperial net-works to domestic British politics to resolutely resist philanthropic patriotism. Th eir campaigning also had a Jacobite twist. Among the most recalcitrant pur-suers of remuneration for the loss of their property rights in slaves were families with a Jacobite history and bitter memories of forfeiture without compensation for past engagement in the ’15 and the ’45.

By the early nineteenth century, then, the place and role of Jacobitism in Scottish society – and in its diaspora – had changed fundamentally. Jacobit-ism no longer seriously threatened the overthrow of the Hanoverian monarchy, nor endangered the British union. Th e king over the water would not return. Nonetheless, it is clear that Jacobites and Jacobitism remained more durable and more challenging throughout the long eighteenth century than nineteenth-century Romantic visions of plaid and heather would have us believe. Taken together, the essays in this volume show that Jacobites were gradually assimi-

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lated into British society, but not merely because they were rendered toothless by the failures of their risings. Jacobite coalescence with British society was active, and their continued prominence, facilitated by a widening imperial gaze, meant that they profoundly infl uenced Scots and their relationships with civil society; with empire, enlightenment and a set of patriotisms that came to interconnect as much as compete.

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introduction from jacobitism, enlightenment and empire, 1680–1820

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