Pye, Tom;
(2023)
The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History.
Historical Journal
, 66
(4)
pp. 746-772.
10.1017/S0018246X23000225.
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Abstract
This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1017/S0018246X23000225 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000225 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Arts & Humanities, History, FEUDALISM, SCOTLAND, DEBATE |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179718 |
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